Practical digital marketing insights, tested in the real world.
Google Postmaster Tools is a free dashboard reporting how Gmail treats mail from your domain, and since 2025 it no longer reports a reputation grade — it reports compliance, spam rate, and a plain-language verdict on whether Gmail's users want your email. No third-party checker carries the same authority, because no third party is making […]
Generating subject lines was never the hard part. Choosing between them was, and it got harder. A model will produce twenty options in seconds, and twenty options is genuinely better than three. But the mechanism most people use to pick a winner — testing on open rate — stopped being a reliable measurement when privacy […]
The Gmail Promotions tab is a sorting category, not a spam folder — mail placed there was delivered to the inbox and remains fully accessible. Gmail classifies each message into Primary, Promotions, Social, or Updates using the message's structure, its content, and the recipient's own behaviour. Landing in Promotions costs visibility, not deliverability. The distinction […]
A re-engagement email campaign is a short sequence sent to subscribers who have not opened or clicked in roughly 90 days, designed to force a decision rather than to win everyone back. Subscribers who respond return to the regular list. Subscribers who do not get removed. The removal is the point. And the campaign itself […]
Email bounce rate is the percentage of sent messages a receiving server refused, and the line that matters is 2% — above it, providers treat your sending as evidence that you do not know who is on your list. Under 1% is healthy. Between 1% and 2% something has changed and is worth finding. The […]
"How many plugins is too many?" is the wrong question, and it is the only one most people ask. Twenty lightweight plugins that load nothing on the front end cost less than one page builder. The right question is what each plugin costs on each request, and there are four numbers that answer it — […]
Email preview text is the snippet of message content the inbox displays beside or beneath the subject line, and it is written in a hidden field rather than pulled from the visible email body. It is also called preheader text. Left unset, the inbox takes whatever text appears first in the message — frequently "View […]
An entity is a specific thing a search system can identify and hold facts about — a person, a company, a product, a place — as opposed to a string of characters that happens to appear on a page. Search engines have resolved queries to entities for over a decade. What changed is that generative […]
Editing a generated draft is a different job from editing a human first draft, because the flaws are the opposite ones. A human first draft is usually messy, uneven, and specific — the ideas are there and the prose is rough. A generated draft is the reverse: smooth prose, even rhythm, and nothing in it […]
A recipient does not detect automation from the writing. They detect it from the timing and from what the message fails to acknowledge. That is worth establishing first, because the effort usually goes into making the prose sound human — which is the wrong half of the problem. A well-written message that arrives three days […]
Klaviyo is built for ecommerce, ConvertKit — now Kit — is built for creators, and Mailchimp is built for general small business. Each is excellent at the job it was designed for and mediocre outside it, which makes "which is best" the wrong question and "which is this business" the right one. Pricing at scale, […]
Email marketing benchmarks are median performance figures by industry, most usefully read as orientation rather than as grades. Across 3.6 million campaigns sent from 181,000 accounts between December 2024 and November 2025, the median open rate was 43.5%, the median click rate 2.1%, the median click-to-open rate 6.8%, and the median unsubscribe rate 0.22%. That […]