Unspam 2026 Recap

Unspam 2026 wrapped up just a few days ago, and honestly, we are still in our feelings about it. For the first time ever, the conference landed on the West Coast, in Long Beach, California, and brought together around 200 email geeks for three days of honest, ad-free conversation about the state of email.

No expo hall. No badge-scanning gauntlet. No vendor talking points wrapped in a slide deck. Just practitioners getting real about what is working, what blew up in their faces, and what they are still figuring out.

Here is the short version. And yes, we know, twelve sessions in one post is ambitious. That is why we are publishing a dedicated deep dive for each one, including the full recording. We promise. But if you want the gist before your next campaign meeting, you are in the right place.

The very short version, if you are truly pressed for time

• Before you send, ask: does this add value right now, or just noise? If you cannot answer yes, it can wait. Cher Fuller
• Test your hero section before anything else. Changing the image or headline alone can increase conversion rates by 10-45%. Ethan Alston Norville
• Use AI to find the signal in your data. Do not let it decide what the signal means. Kasey Luck
• Pick your most stable, untouched email and run a structural test on it. That is where the biggest gains are hiding. Kelsey Yen
• Before you open your design tool, write one sentence describing the problem the subscriber is experiencing. If you cannot, you are not ready. Deja Cherese
• Calculate your list growth rate. If it is negative, you are losing more than you are gaining, and no send frequency will fix that. Fernando Rubino Pereira
• Check your DMARC reports. If you have not looked in 30 days, someone may be spoofing your domain right now. Israa Alrawi
• Before your next experiment, write down what would make you pull it regardless of the numbers. Do it before you see the results, not after. Maggie Glascott
• Pick one trend from the 2026 list. Not all six. One. Apply it only if it fits your brand voice and solves a communication problem. Meghan Sokolnicki
• Turn off images in your email client and look at your last send. If it isn’t comprehensible, your accessibility work starts there. Cyrill Gross
• Find one vague claim in your emails and replace it with a specific number, a named outcome, or a source. Do it this week. Hannah Castellanos
• Delete three things from your workflow: the spam word checklist, the assumption that more sends equals more revenue, and the idea that warmup is a one-time task. ESP panel

1. The responsibility of reach: on cultural timing, emotional intelligence, and knowing when your brand doesn't belong in the moment

Cher Fuller, VP of Digital Experience, Vuori

You have 5 billion people reachable through digital channels. Cool. Now what? Fuller opened the conference by making that question uncomfortable. During the LA wildfires of early 2025, her team at Alo, where she worked before joining Vuori, suppressed the entire LA region right before a major campaign launch.

Teammates were displaced. Stores had become disaster relief stations. The team was figuring out how to get clean underwear to neighbors. Sweet Pink was about to launch. They suppressed the region anyway and exceeded revenue benchmarks that week. The takeaway stung: what felt catastrophic internally was a small headline for most of the list. But for the people actually living through it, the silence mattered.

Alarm fatigue is real in the inbox, too

Fuller borrowed a concept from her nurse friend: alarm fatigue. In hospitals, providers hear so many alarms that critical ones start getting ignored. 80-99% of hospital alarms are non-actionable. But you still have to know which 1% matters. In email, every irrelevant message trains your subscribers to tune you out. The numbers back it up: 64% of customers want brands to connect with them emotionally, 72% engage only with personalized messaging, and 44% unsubscribe because content is not relevant.

Her framework for deciding whether to show up: check for reach, relevance, empathy, appropriateness, and timing. In that order. The brands that win the next decade are not the ones with the biggest lists. They are the ones who understand what reach costs when it is misused.

What to take with you

Before your next send, run it through five questions: is this reaching the right person, is it relevant right now, does it show empathy, is it appropriate for the moment, and is the timing right? If you cannot answer yes to all five, it can wait.

2. Mind the messaging gap: what hero section tests taught us about how people read email

Ethan Alston Norville, Lifecycle Marketing Manager, The American Kennel Club

Most subscribers make up their minds about an email before they read it. The hero section is where that decision happens, and most brands are leaving serious money on the table by treating it as a design element instead of a conversion lever.

Across dozens of tests at multiple organizations, Norville has seen 10-40% conversion lifts and up to 45% average click-through rate lifts from hero-section changes alone. The image sets the emotional tone. The headline sets the expectation. Get either wrong, and it does not matter how good the rest of the email is.

Closing the messaging gap

His second point hit on something most email programs quietly fail at. Most brands are good at one of two things: talking about themselves (brand perspective) or talking to the subscriber's situation (consumer perspective). The best programs do both, often in the same email.

A shipping confirmation can carry a section that shows the work that went into making the product worth buying. You cannot guarantee they will open another email, so use each one to cover both sides. The messaging gap, as Norville called it, is the disconnect between what the brand wants to say and what the subscriber actually needs to hear, and most teams are only solving for one side of it.

What to take with you

Look at your next email and ask: does it prove the brand understands the reader, and does it give the reader a reason to trust the brand? If you can only answer yes to one, you have found your gap.

3. The great AI misuse: why most email marketers have it backwards

Kasey Luck, Founder and CEO, Luck & Co Agency

Luck opened with the most expensive lesson she learned last year. She used AI to prep for a contract renegotiation, went over every possible objection, felt prepared, walked in, and still lost a $150,000 client relationship. Why? Because the client raised something AI had confidently glossed over: Luck had set the highest bonus threshold below what the client had already achieved the previous year.

The client was right. The AI sounded right. Those are not the same thing. After that, she went back and audited every AI task at her agency. What she found: they had quietly promoted AI from intern to decision-maker without anyone noticing.

The pattern recognition vs. judgment line

The framework is deceptively simple. Every task in email requires either pattern recognition (finding signals in data) or judgment (deciding what to do with those signals). AI is extraordinary at pattern recognition. It can analyze 60,000 customer reviews in 20 minutes and surface audience segments more accurately than any kickoff call. It is unreliable in judgment, and the dangerous part is that it sounds equally confident in both cases.

She walked through two real workflows.

First: feeding those 60,000 reviews from a skincare brand into Claude. Twenty minutes. It matched everything the client spent a full kickoff call describing, plus one insight nobody had named: the postpartum buyer, not the pregnant buyer, was where loyalty actually lived.

Second: a strategist who had never fished a day in her life, producing a nine-page brief on slow-pitch jigging culture in thirty minutes, knowing that a "reef donkey" is an amberjack, that a "smoker" is a big kingfish, and that "one last drop" is what these guys say to each other at the end of every trip. That level of fluency came from forums and YouTube comments, not from the client.

What to take with you

Before your next AI task, ask one question: does this require finding the pattern, or deciding what the pattern means? First one goes to AI. Second one stays with you.

4. The A/B test no one asked for: what happened when we changdour top-performing emails

Kelsey Yen, Lifecycle Marketing Manager, RGE + Beefree

Here is a thing that happens in email programs everywhere: the emails that are performing well never get touched. Why fix what is not broken, right? Yen is here to tell you that logic is leaving clicks on the table. The RGE newsletter had not changed visually in eight years. The team made modest updates: slightly larger font, adjusted line spacing, color-blocked sections, and rounded edges. They did not even run it as a formal test. The clicked-to-open rate nearly doubled, from around 10% to 18%. Direct replies went up. People were engaging in ways they had not before.

Then came the second experiment, more deliberate: a brand new newsletter for the developer audience. Two template options. One "normal," built on standard RGE layouts. One "fun," more visually distinct. Yen thought the differences were small. They were not. The fun version produced a 63% lift in click-through rate, 56% click-to-open rate versus standard, 400 site visitors to the GitHub library, and 100 positive reactions on the technical documentation within two hours of sending.

The insight worth stealing: your most stable, consistently performing emails are the best candidates for structural testing, not your worst performers. Small changes to hierarchy, white space, and CTA placement can move the baseline for an entire program. Once the baseline rises, everything else improves on top of it.

What to take with you

Pick one email in your program that has not been touched in over a year because it performs well. That is your next test candidate. Start with layout and hierarchy, not copy.

5. Email design workflow: from design system to sent

Deja Cherese, Senior Email Marketing Specialist, Digital Deja

Cherese opened with a reframe: you are already a designer. Every email professional makes decisions about hierarchy, contrast, layout, and attention. The question is whether you are doing it intentionally or just going with vibes and saved rows.

Designers are problem-solvers. They understand psychology, motivation, and behavior. They ask different questions. Instead of "how do we sell this coat," a design-thinking marketer asks, "what friction does this person experience when the weather changes, and how does our product remove it?" The email that comes out of the second question is different. And usually better.

From design thinking to design system

Cherese laid out four levels of visual competence worth building toward:

• Level one: basic design principles, the vocabulary that lets you say why something looks off, things like hierarchy, contrast, proximity, and white space
• Level two: email-specific design principles, applying those fundamentals to the constraints of the inbox
• Level three: email templating, which is where most people jump in without the foundation below it
• Level four: design system maintenance, a shared component library that keeps an entire program consistent
  

Her read on the industry: most teams live at level three. The ones doing the most coherent, scalable work have built toward level four, and it is also the level that makes AI-assisted production actually controllable. If your company has a design system for web and app, you do not need to start from scratch. Piggyback off it and build your email layer on top.

What to take with you

Next time you are briefed on an email, write one sentence that describes the problem the subscriber is experiencing before you open your design tool. If you cannot write it, you are not ready to design it.

6. Love, hate & unsubscribe: using feedback (& data) to send better emails

Fernando Rubino Pereira, Business Expert, CRM Marketing, METRO AG

Pereira started with a live poll. How does an unsubscribe make you feel as a marketer? Fifty-three percent of the room said, "Curious, I want to know why." He called that the right starting point.

His case study: a database actively shrinking. High unsubscribe rates, low new acquisitions, blast sends with no segmentation, frequency cranked up from two to four times per week, chasing short-term revenue. They launched a preference center campaign asking subscribers what they wanted to receive. Response rate: less than 10%. Because people do not answer surveys unless they have a reason to.

The soft opt-out that actually worked

What worked instead: a content block with a visible in-email thumbs-up/thumbs-down placed just above the unsubscribe link, one for each content category: sales, events, product launches. Subscribers could opt down from a type they did not want without leaving entirely. A/B testing showed up to a 10% reduction in unsubscribes.

The more interesting result came from the positive signals. Subscribers who thumbed up events received VIP invitations and real-world experiences: meeting sponsored athletes, early product access, and things that turned a data point into a loyalty program. The KPI he recommended tracking, and that most teams ignore: list growth percentage month over month. It was the number that showed the database was shrinking before anything else did.

What to take with you

Calculate your list growth rate for last month: new subscribers minus unsubscribes and bounces, divided by total list size, multiplied by 100. If it is negative, you have a Fernando problem. You know what to do.

7. Earn the inbox: how to win the inbox in a compliance-first world

Israa Alrawi, Founder, The Winbox

Best practices in deliverability used to be nice-to-haves. They are requirements now. Alrawi walked through the full journey of an email before it reaches a human, and the three-layer mailbox providers are actually evaluating while they decide whether to let you in.

• Authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) is your digital identity. Set it correctly, monitor it actively, and read the DMARC reports. Most teams set DMARC and forget it. That report is telling you if someone is spoofing your domain and you are just not looking.
• Segmentation requires more nuance than most online advice suggests. Before cutting inactive subscribers, break performance down by mailbox provider. A list that looks healthy in aggregate may be failing badly with AOL specifically. Narrow that segment, keep broader windows for providers where you are performing well, and rebuild from there rather than slashing everything.
• Content is now being read by AI before humans see it. Write clearly, use live text, keep links minimal and clean. Mailbox providers are reading tone and intent at the level of the whole email, not scanning for individual spam words. The list of "bad words to avoid" is a relic. Throw it away.
  

What to take with you

Check your DMARC reports. If you have not looked at them in the last 30 days, someone may be spoofing your domain and you would not know. Go look. Now.

8. Beyond the dashboard: measuring what metrics miss

Maggie Glascott, Senior Lifecycle Marketing Manager, Buffer

Here is the kind of thing that only happens when you are a team of one with no one to bounce ideas off. Glascott was the first-ever dedicated email hire at Duolingo, flying solo for 4.5 years. She ran an experiment that drove daily active users up, and earned a semi-viral social media post from an angry parent whose 9-year-old had received a subject line calling them a quitter.

The dashboard said win. The internet said otherwise. The problem: she had been targeting at-risk weekly active users and had never stopped to ask who was actually in that segment. Age had not crossed her mind.

The four-lens framework

She now runs every experiment through four lenses before calling it a success or a failure.

• Performance. Did it lift the metric, by how much, and for whom? Monitor by cohort from the start, not after something goes wrong.
• Segment. Who did it help and who did it harm? Aggregate lifts flatten the picture. The passive-aggressive push notification was the highest-performing template overall, but the lowest-performing one for the Vietnamese UI. Segment analysis reveals what aggregate metrics bury.
• Brand. Does this align with how you want to be remembered? Gut check: would you send it if it only moved the metric by half?
• Long-term. Does this build trust, or does it borrow from it? Silent churn, people who quietly stop engaging without ever unsubscribing, will never show up in your dashboard. But the cumulative effect of sending something too aggressive eventually does.
  

Define your guardrails before you launch, not after the numbers come in green and someone asks you why you would ever pull it.

What to take with you

Before your next experiment, write down one sentence: "We will pull this if ___." Fill in the blank with something that is not a metric. Brand trust, segment harm, a gut feeling. Whatever it is, write it down before you see the results.

9. Email design trends 2026

Meghan Sokolnicki, Principal Email Designer/Developer, Marigold

A trend is not a checklist. It is a signal. It tells you what people are collectively responding to right now and, if you look closely, why. The mistake is treating these as boxes to tick rather than tools to use thoughtfully.

Sokolnicki reviewed six directions dominating the inbox this year. Her standing note across all of them: adding a trend without strong hierarchy, negative space, and clear contrast will not make an email more effective. It will just make it trendier.

The six trends

• Cartoons and illustrations as hero imagery. Taking the full hero space, not just decorative squiggles in the corner. Stands out from flat minimalism and communicates brand personality in ways that photography often cannot. Versatile across brand voices when used with intention.
• Grid and card-based layouts. Leaning into the structural nature of email instead of fighting it. The key is grouping related content so elements feel unified rather than eight things all screaming at once. Creates visual rhythm. Scales well for newsletters and multi-product emails.
• Bold editorial typography. Moving the headline into the hero position and letting it carry the weight. Reduces dependence on photography. Works with live text, which means better accessibility and dark mode rendering. Main character energy for your copy.
• Earth tones and muted palettes. Warm neutrals are replacing white as the default. Signals intentionality, quality, and a certain kind of restraint. Pairs beautifully with negative space and storytelling copy. Sokolnicki has a whole theory about the Kardashians being responsible for this one. Ask her.
• Rounded corners. Everywhere, on everything. Buttons, images, section backgrounds, blobs. Creates a soft, tactile feel we are used to from apps and UI. Possibly approaching saturation. Worth watching.
• Gradients. Visual depth and personality without needing photography. Purple and blue are dominating in SaaS. Keep an eye on how AI-generated design starts overusing this one, because it already is.
  

What to take with you

Pick one trend from this list. Not all six. One. Ask whether it fits your brand voice and whether it solves a communication problem. If yes to both, try it on your next send. If not, leave it for someone else's inbox.

10. Why accessibility matters even more in the AI world

Cyrill Gross, Founder, CEO, and CPO, mailix

If you have ever had to fight for accessibility budget by arguing that it is "the right thing to do," Gross came to Unspam with better ammunition.

The case is no longer moral. It is technical, strategic, and increasingly legal. The European Accessibility Act comes into force within a year. Lawsuits under the Americans with Disabilities Act are already happening. And accessibility is now also the foundation for something that affects every sender: being understood by AI.

Build for humans and machines

Gross drew a sharp line between screen readers, which read emails as-is to help users with disabilities, and AI assistants and agents, which parse, summarize, filter, and can act on email content before any human ever opens it. The Gemini assistant managing someone's Gmail inbox cares about your code structure. A badly built email that a human might navigate just fine may be completely invisible to it.

The practical checklist:

• Use semantic HTML instead of table-based layouts
• Write descriptive alt text
• Add language attributes so screen readers interpret content in the correct language
• Keep links minimal and clean
• Write self-explanatory calls to action ("Read more" tells a machine nothing useful)
  

He closed by asking the room: who here is sending AMP emails? Nobody raised a hand. His point: Google tried to impose a new standard on email and failed completely. That is what makes the channel resilient. No single entity owns it.

What to take with you

Turn off images in your email client and look at your last send. If it collapses, your accessibility work starts there.

11. Writing an email for people smarter than you

Hannah Castellanos, Marketing Automation Campaign Manager, TA Instruments

Castellanos writes emails for scientists and engineers. People who know what a cathode is, who have spent twenty years in their field, and who have watched every "game-changing" product disappear two years after launch. Her opener: this situation is less unique than it sounds. If you write for any expert audience, including other marketers, the same rules apply.

The tactics that work for a general audience, such as urgency, vague superlatives, and mystery CTAs, often actively damage credibility with experts. They are not skeptical for no reason. They have seen too much.

She broke expert audiences into two types:

• Vanilla sprinkles (knowledgeable B2C subscriber): the coffee enthusiast on a specialty roaster's list, the CFO reading a finance newsletter. What kills trust: oversimplification, unsupported claims, talking down to someone who came to you for depth. What builds it: specificity, peer-to-peer tone, content that gives them something new.
• Adult mint chocolate chip (technical B2B buyer): senior engineers, lab managers, research directors. What kills trust: urgency that ignores their procurement cycle, vague language with no evidence behind it, anything that signals you do not understand how their world works. What builds it: data, precision, and content that earns the next email.
  

Evidence over excitement

Her evidence hierarchy runs from anecdotal ("our customers love us") up through social proof, aggregate data, specific data with context, and methodology-backed studies. The homework she left the room: find one sentence in your next email and move it one level up. Replace a claim with a number. Replace a number with a source.

For sustained trust, she made the case for behavior-based nurture tracks, sequences that adapt based on what subscribers actually open, click, and download, rather than time-based programs that send the same emails to everyone regardless of what they have done. Every email with an expert audience is an audition. They are quietly asking one question: is this worth my time?

What to take with you

Look at your last nurture sequence. Is it time-based (everyone gets email 3 on day 14) or behavior-based (email 3 only goes to people who clicked email 2)? If it is time-based, you are sending the same email to people who are ready to buy and people who are not, and wondering why conversions are low.

12. ESP panel: Cordial, Braze, Customer.io, OneSignal

Moderated by Justine Jordan, RGE + Beefree

Justine Jordan moderated a panel with Bailey Busch(Cordial, Chief of Staff for Client Experience), Cody Stover (Customer.io, Director of B2B Marketing), Kelly Hogan (Braze, Global Email Deliverability Manager), and Mindy Tom (OneSignal, Product Designer).

What they would delete from the internet forever

• Kelly (Braze): there is no such thing as a list of spammy words. Mailbox providers read tone and intent at the level of the whole email. Throw away the word list.
• Cody (Customer.io): sending more emails does not equal more revenue. Full stop.
• Mindy (OneSignal): treating warmup as a one-time box to check rather than an ongoing practice you actually maintain. Deliverability is not a setup step. It is a system.
  

On AI and brand judgment

Cody opened his response to an AI question with three questions to the audience. How many of you have 100% clean data? One hand. How many times do requests from leadership get made that are not actually possible? Most hands. How many think lifecycle marketers should be paid more? Every hand. His argument: AI is not coming for the job. It should be coming for the blockers, the messy data, the technical tickets, the two-month dev backlog that stops you from doing what you already know how to do. "Marketers are at their best when they have all the data they need, the moment they need it, and the ability to act on it."

Bailey had the sharpest story of the session. A brand launched a fully AI-personalized onboarding campaign on January 1st: every piece of copy, every content decision, was generated and personalized by AI. After a quarter, it was performing worse than the non-AI version. Her team's internal analogy for why: imagine a friend whose sports team just lost, whose grandmother died a year ago, and who just became single. You have all that data. Does that mean you should use all of it at once? "What you really need to send is: I'm here if you need me."

On whether AI will take email jobs, the panel had one shared answer. AI is an amplification tool. If your subscribers are getting content they want, AI-assisted filtering will reward you more. If they are not, it will punish you faster. The tool does not change the work. It raises the stakes for doing the work right.

What to take with you

• Delete the spam word checklist (it is not how filtering works anymore)
• Delete the assumption that more sends equals more revenue
• Delete the idea that warm-up is a one-time task
  

This is why we do this

Every year, Unspam reminds us why email is worth caring about this much.

Not the dashboards. Not the benchmarks. Not the AI workflows. What happens in a room of 200 people who have spent years thinking about how to reach someone in a way that actually means something. There is something rare about that, and a little bit weird in the best possible way.

If the conference had one organizing idea this year, it was this: the gap between what you can do and what you should do is exactly where email marketing is being won and lost right now. You can reach 5 billion people. You can send every day. You can use AI to generate copy at scale and call it personalization. You can show green on every metric and tell yourself it is working.

But the talks that landed hardest were the ones that treated the subscriber as a human with a full life, limited attention, and a very good memory for brands that wasted their time. That is not a new idea. It is the oldest one in the room. In a year when AI makes it easier than ever to automate the wrong things faster, it felt more alive than it has in a while.

See you next year.

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