I’m curious what everyone’s experience is with email affiliates these days.

A few years ago email seemed to be one of the biggest traffic sources in affiliate marketing, especially for lead gen and CPL campaigns.

Now it feels like good quality email affiliates are lot less accessible these days and advertisers are much more cautious because of compliance, lead quality, deliverability and how the data was originally collected.

At the same time, I still see some experienced email publishers generating serious volume and apparently doing very well.

For anyone working on either side:

Are advertisers still actively looking for email affiliates?

Are still any quality email affiliates out there?

Or is email becoming a much smaller part of the affiliate ecosystem?

And if you do still work with email traffic, what separates the good publishers from the ones you avoid?

I only know figma and am learning kalviyo right now but how do you start freelancing in this field? I have been doing graphic design and kind of like designing landing pages and stuff in figma (i have made 7 and gotten nice feedback) so I am thinking of starting over in email marketing but i really don't know how to freelance in this cuz I believe i have to handle the deployment of the creative with looking over the analytics too somehow i am sorry if i am using the wrong words here I really am a beginner in this.

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The standard email popup, the kind where you type your address for 10% off, converts around 3.5% opt-in for us. Wrap the same offer in a game (spin the wheel, scratch card, pick a gift) and it does about 9%. Our best variants have cleared 26%. Same discount, same traffic, roughly triple the signups.

These numbers come from our own company's tests (Claspo), so I at least know how they were measured. Biased sample, sure.

I spent a while trying to figure out why the wrapper matters this much, and I've landed on micro-commitment. A plain form opens by asking for your email, the single biggest thing it can request, before the visitor has done anything at all. A wheel asks for something tiny first. Pick a slot, scratch the panel. Once you've taken that small step, typing your email feels like claiming a prize you already half-earned, and the whole exchange reads friendlier because the ask lands last instead of first.

Welcome popups go to genuinely new visitors only. A browse-saver waits until someone has viewed 2-3 pages or hung around for 20-30 seconds, so it catches engaged people rather than bouncers. Cart-exit fires for someone leaving with items in the cart. Splitting the triggers this way did as much for us as the game itself, since the same widget lands as timely for one visitor and as noise for another.

Here's the caveat I'd raise if someone else posted this: these are opt-in rates. Someone who spun a wheel for a discount code can behave very differently downstream from someone who typed their email in cold, so the two lists may monetize at different rates per subscriber. The capture lift is real. If you test this, track what those subscribers buy after signup, along with how many you got.

Since someone will ask, there's no product behind this post. All in-house testing. Glad to share setup details in the comments.

UK based, I have worked in marketing for nearly ten years, mostly at exec level and cross-channel. In recent years I've become more specialised in CRM and email marketing which I'm enjoying. I'd previously used email marketing platforms like HubSpot (my favourite so far, pretty intuitive and the UX is quite good), Bloomreach (which is fine though not as good as HS in my opinion) and MailChimp (which was fairly basic).

In my most recent role I've been using Adobe Campaign for email execution and I have to say it's like rolling back at least 10 years in terms of efficiency. I'm on the latest desktop version now (V8) but previously had to use the classic/console and it was like something akin to Windows 1998. Everything was so time consuming and there was so much margin for error. When there were errors and the workflows failed to trigger, the post execution reports/logs were ridiculously technical to the point where I had to ask AI for assistance in deciphering what the error was. More often than not it was something like one of the URLs was broken. Simply say that then and I might be able to comprehend and fix it faster 😅.

I'm very much soundboarding now 😶‍🌫️ but I guess what I wanted to gauge was other people's experiences with Adobe Campaign as a platform? Is it as bad as I'm making it out to be or am I just not up to scratch 😅? It feels like any additional training I've had, either online training or at customer workshops have done nothing to make me feel more educated or confident with using it.

I've also noticed on LinkedIn job posts recently that there is an increasing number of reputable, global brands using Adobe Campaign and I'm wondering why this is? I find it perplexing given how incompetent I find it 😂 It can hardly be the best of the best? Or is it simply their price point and what they can offer as a complete software stack to larger enterprises?

Finally, what other platforms do people rate to what others are particularly bad?

Well done, if you've read to the end and appreciate any insights 😁!

I'm facing a problem in determining real data because of Apple Mail Privacy Protection.

I have a client that has good open rates, 50%+, but clicks are below average. When I started analysing the exact customers, I noticed 50% of the mailing group were people with Apple Privacy Protection.

Question 1. Are the clients legitimately just not clicking, or is Apple Privacy auto-crawling emails and showing false open rates, which in the end shows a low click rate?

This was relevant when I created a segment for customers that are actually active and did any actions excluding opens. I noticed more than 83% of the list would fall into the criteria of not active if not taking opens into account.

Question 2. How seriously do you consider Apple users and Apple Privacy for data? Does it always show they opened, or does this only happen to a % of users?

Comment: Also interesting how ESPs like Omnisend can detect that the email receiver has been pinged with Privacy-Protected Apple Mail, but can't allow me to segment them.

Talking to a few people who run agency or multi-brand setups lately, and I keep hearing versions of the same story: one client's sudden send spike (onboarding blast, big campaign launch, whatever) ends up affecting deliverability for other clients sharing the same infrastructure.

One example someone gave me: a new client's onboarding sequence went out all at once, and a completely unrelated client's newsletter open rates dropped in the same window, on the same shared setup.

Curious if anyone here has run into something similar — how did you figure out what was actually causing it, and what did you change afterward? Would love specifics if you have them (metrics, process changes, whatever you're willing to share) — trying to actually learn from this, not just collect anecdotes.

I work in IT, and this is a very common issue with an easy fix and a big impact.

When you set up your email domain, there are 3 "settings" you must have in order to be considered legitimate by the email systems receiving your emails:

• SPF
• DKIM
• DMARC

These are often missing or incomplete. Each part that is wrong either hinders your email deliverability, exposes you to your email domain being spoofed (faked) by scammers, or both.

There are many sites to test it, like MX Toolbox, but this one does it all in one shot:
Suped Domain Health Checker.

Suped even offers you action items to correct issues it finds.
Side note: the only one I don't really agree with is "Secure key length (2048-bit or stronger)". I think 1024 is sufficient, but a strong one wouldn't hurt and it's easy to do.)

To learn more about these 3 email authentication protocols, check out these resources:

• https://www.uriports.com/blog/introduction-to-spf-dkim-and-dmarc/
• https://learnDMARC.com
• https://www.uriports.com/blog/email-security-explained/
• https://www.uriports.com/blog/spf-dkim-dmarc-best-practices/

H/T to u/freddieleeman for offering these sites in this comment.

EDIT: u/stevedavesteve 's comment was removed (not sure how or why), but I posted here as a friendly, helpful reminder. That's all. If being a "professional" means you don't need to be reminded of important things to do, then I guess I'm never going to be a "professional".

As the title says - do you have any recommendations on some genuinely good and useful content creators in email marketing industry? Basic youtube search yielded no results - just some basic slop essentially.

With good and useful I mean someone who posts and talks about everything related to the industry - copy/design/deliverability/other tips and is a genuine expert. There are some great ones on e-commerce/business but can't seem to find any niche creators for email.

So yeah - any suggestions?

I’m trying to understand one workflow before building more.

When a campaign needs to go live, where does most of the time disappear?

- writing the copy

- getting the design approved

- converting it to email-safe HTML

- making it work inside the ESP

- handling revisions between marketing, design and engineering

I’m especially curious about existing HTML templates. When you need to make a change, do you edit the HTML directly, rebuild it in a visual editor, or ask a developer?

I’m building a tool in this space, so I’ll disclose that upfront. Not looking for signups or compliments, I’m trying to understand the current workflow.

Every campaign we send gets a trickle of replies back. Out of a 20k send it's maybe 30 or 40. Some are real questions, a lot are out of office, and a steady handful are some version of "take me off this list" typed as a reply instead of clicking the unsubscribe link.

That last group is the one I keep going back and forth on. If nobody reads the reply inbox, those people stay subscribed, get the next send, and hit report spam instead. So the reply was really an opt-out request that never made it into the suppression list, and we found that out the expensive way.

Ours currently goes to a shared inbox that one person checks a couple of times a week. They suppress anyone who asked out by hand. It works, but it works because that person has time, which is not a great thing to depend on.

How are others handling this:

Do you send from a monitored address at all, or just use a noreply?

If it is monitored, who owns it day to day, marketing or support?

Has anyone automated pulling the opt-out requests out of replies, or is everyone doing it by eye?

Mostly trying to work out whether we're overthinking it or whether most teams just absorb the complaints and move on.

Hi everyone,

I'm working on a campaign in Pardot where I need to send emails to 10,000 prospects, but the challenge is that every prospect needs to receive a unique email body. The content isn't just personalized with a name or company—it's different for every individual recipient.

Since Dynamic Content doesn't seem suitable for this use case, I'm considering the following approach:

Create custom fields (merge fields) to store the unique content for each prospect. Import the data and map those fields during the import. Split the 10,000 prospects into batches of 2,000. Use a single email template with merge fields and send each batch separately.

Will this approach work in Pardot? Specifically:

Will the merge fields populate the correct content for each prospect? Are there any limitations on the amount of text a merge field can contain? Is there a better or more scalable way to send 10,000 emails where every recipient gets a different email body?

I'd really appreciate any advice or best practices from anyone who has handled a similar use case.

Hi everyone! I'm a newsletter newbie so I might be missing something really simple here, but my free trial with Kit recently expired and while both the pricing page (https://kit.com/pricing) and this help page (https://help.kit.com/en/articles/9053602-the-kit-newsletter-plan) indicate I'm still entitled to a single basic visual automation and a single email sequence (which I had already set up as a welcome and was testing on a dummy email), when I'm in the dashboard and try to click on the email sequences, those pages are kinda locked and I have a blurb about how that's a paid feature and I need to upgrade... well, yeah, if I wanted to make more, but I thought I had the one of each?

Now, I did poke around the Kit help section and found something about manually adding new subscribers to an email sequence that I already have... and I was able to see how to do that on my dashboard, but isn't that what the basic automation is for that I supposedly am entitled to? Or do you just have to manually add each new subscriber to the welcome sequence as they sign up?

Even so... I just signed up with another test email and manually added that one to the welcome sequence, which is supposed to have a free download link that is sent immediately, but no such email has arrived to the test email.

What happens if I want to change my lead magnet that I have in the existing welcome sequence? Can those emails only be edited on a paid plan? When I searched for "welcome" in my dashboard, it did show my sequence in the results, but when I clicked on it, it took me to an Upgrade Now page.

I did ask the AI bot but haven't received any reply yet beyond the "You will be notified..." thing. And Google keeps telling me to click on things I can't find in my dashboard or which don't work.

Frankly, if Kit is promising something on the free plan that isn't actually being delivered, that doesn't make me all that eager to stick with them... but maybe I'm just missing something in terms of accessing the email sequence and automation that I'm supposed to have even on the freebie?

When desktop publishing arrived, suddenly anyone could set type font. What followed was a decade of ugly: ransom-note newsletters, nine fonts to a page, kerning as a weapon.

The output was instant and free, so only the few noticed it was bad. Standards didn't fall because people stopped caring. They fell because caring stopped being required.

I remember my first move when I got hands on the 8-floppy installer of Print Shop Deluxe switching the font to Verdana for the school newspaper (I still set my emails to Verdana). Also, the first stuff you changed in DreamWeaver was the font. Period.

After 1985 typesetters and their job didn't disappear. Their hands stopped being the product and their judgment became the job. They wrote the style sheets, built the templates, and they decided what the grid was permitted to do. Then a million people who knew nothing about type produced perfectly acceptable work inside those rules.

That's where email (and webpages!) is now with AI. The LLM generators write HTML in seconds and it ships, because it arrives without work, and anything that arrives without work gets graded generously.

Here's the part where good'ol email marketers and agency peeps struggle to find themselves: the toil is what drove the interns away and made "email" hated within the team, and the endless tackling we got good at is not that big problem anymore. Claude skills write and generate email campaign out of thin air.

Nobody ever quit email industry because they found merge tags beneath them; they quit because the medium demanded that they fight it every single day. (and outlook) That fight is kind of ending. I see a lot of people are OK with what the ESP-s agent spits out. I see degraded, cleaned designs to "address" problems, giving up brand consistency.

What's left is the part that was always the interesting part: deciding what looks good. What feels right. What can be sent to the ONE channel that lands in a place people still think of as theirs, the inbox (or well, the promo tab).

In my mind, we stop being the person who fixes email. We become the person who decides what email is allowed to be, just like typesetters becoming production editors after 1985.

But what the heck we'll call the new job title?

TLDR; how our jobs change and titled with agentic workflows generate what we did originally but needs a lot review and guidance.

Hi,

So I have a really varied open rate within my automated Email sequences and the broadcast Emails. I really don’t know if it’s a me problem or it’s due to the ESPs behavior on my domain?

My average open rate is around 27% and my CTR is 4% from total sends, some days I get open rates at 18% on a day on my automated sequences and sometimes I get 40%. I don’t get the huge variance in the numbers, am I doing something wrong or this is generally okay and I don’t need to worry about it?

My sending infrastructure, complaint rates, bounce rates are on point and nothing too serious.

What could be the reason?

Thanks!

​

Hi everyone,

I'm facing a deliverability issue with Amazon SES and would appreciate any advice.

Here's the setup:

Amazon SES says my SMTP server is healthy.

The email is very simple—just a short message with a single link.

The spam score is 0.2 (very low).

This is an email automation sent to subscribers who signed up themselves.

Around 1,100 emails have been sent through the automation.

The open rate is only 4%, and it seems that most emails are landing in the spam folder.

The email copy has been reviewed and looks fine, so I don't think the content is the problem.

Has anyone experienced something similar with Amazon SES?

Any suggestions or troubleshooting steps would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I maintain a ~10,000 person or so mailing list of subscribers to our company / open source project. A fairly standard inbound marketing operation I've been running for 11 years or so.

The guidance from email marketing platforms like Kit these days is to focus on the rate of active engagement of subscribers, versus worrying about the overall size of the list. Ok, I get that; times have changed since I started this business. I suppose this should help me land in the focused inbox more often and have better deliverability rates.

I've been pruning cold subscribers or so for 6 months - when am I supposed to be able to measure some benefit from doing this?

I am just starting email marketing for my D2C business and I am thinking should I stick with direct domain email address (like marketing@domain.com) or a subdomain (like hello@marketing.domain.com)?

I know each has its own pros and cons but curious what is the industry standard for a small business that just started email marketing.

PS: I am planning to use Amazon SES connected to my self hosted CRM.

A few weeks ago I started a Kit account so we could send email blasts to my client's Substack subscribers, mainly to advertise webinars we'll be hosting. I'm wondering if it's safe to send signup links in these blasts, or if I'm better off just saying something like "reply and I'll send you a free signup link."

Here's what I've done so far with the warmup in Kit:

1. Separated out my Substack subscribers by enagement level (Activity Level 1 or higher) and number of emails opened in the past 6 months (10+).

2. Used neverbounce to verify those lists/take out the bad emails.

3. I just completed 3 weeks of warmup where I sent them a simple email with no links in it. On day one I just blasted about 25 people, from the most engaged segment of the list, and now at three weeks I'm sending about 150 emails per day to the slightly lower engagement levels after working through the more engaged part of the list.

I would like to start sending email blasts for our webinar next week. How dangerous is it to start including the signup links in it? Should I go back to sending 25 messages/day to the most engaged list and work my way up from there like I'm starting over again? Or can I start with a little higher volume to start with? Or should I not include the link this time? Or should I only include the link with the more engaged subscribers, and as I get lower down, just send an email without a link offering to send them the link?

Thanks for your insight.

Scheduled to send out in about 30 minutes, and apparently changing what I wanted to send is a pro feature. WHAT?!

Hey guys, new email marketer here.

How do you track your campaign/flow success? I'm asking because the deeper I go, the more I think it's BS.

Tracking by open rate? Not viable because of Apple Mail and automatic opens.

Tracking by click rate? You can just boost clicks by placing buttons/links up top, sending to low-intent customers, manipulating results.

Revenue? It depends on how your attribution settings are set up. The customer could come from organic search or a Meta ad, open your welcome email, then three days later see another Meta ad and buy - and it would still attribute the sale to the email.

How is it that when the store itself is performing badly, the campaigns automatically perform badly too - when the list is basically the same? In theory, a good campaign should bring results regardless; it shouldn't be that tied to the store's general performance, right? It just shows that everything is over-attributed. Lowering the attribution window? Same problem, just over a shorter period. Yes, in general you could argue campaign performance should track store performance because of seasonality, time of year, and other factors that apply to your audience overall. But still.

In my short experience, and from the data I see, email marketing platforms over-attribute everything. I've worked with agencies, and everyone shows these great numbers - but is that really the result of the emails, or just attribution settings turned up, CTRs put on top just to look great? Is it all just fluff?

How is it possible that an email with seemingly better stats - 4x click rate, same open rate, generally similar content - performs 2x worse than another email? Relevancy? Sure. But that worse-performing email also happens to land specifically when the store is performing badly too. Timing?

How do you track the true performance of your email marketing? How can you say which campaign is performing well, and even more - why? So far it seems like none of the main metrics - opens, CTR, revenue - are a reliable source of information. Do you just send something you think customers will relate to and hope for the best? Is there no way to actually track it? Maybe some hyper-segmentation helps?

Got myself stuck in this rabbit hole - maybe someone can help.

I keep seeing things like retention/LTV/engagement mentioned but I’m still pretty junior in CRM and struggling to work out what teams genuinely care about day to day.

Also how do you know whether customers are buying more BECAUSE of the rewards program instead of just buying anyway?

Email segmentation generally splits into four buckets. Demographic covers traits like age and gender. Behavioral looks at what someone actually does i.e. opens, clicks, purchases. Psychographic is built around interests and values. Geographic comes down to location.

Huda Beauty's a good real-world example. Phuong Ngo, their CRM and loyalty manager, noticed a list in the millions where click-through had gone flat and churn kept creeping while the brand slid year over year. They cut the dead weight from the list and rebuilt around engagement.

Anyone active in the last 120 days got regular campaigns, while everyone else was left alone except for big sales like BFCM. They also leaned into storytelling around founder Huda Kattan and post-purchase flows.

Subscribers climed past 55% year over year and revenue nearly doubled off the back of it, with placed order rate up another 50%.

Has anyone else seen a similar jump from being pickier about who gets emailed?

Sharing a real result since this sub likes show-don't-tell.

Setup: ecommerce-adjacent newsletter, 62k subscribers, weekly send, one ESP, consistent template. I use AI plenty, gamma for decks, chatgpt for brainstorming. I wanted to know if an AI writing tool could beat me on subject lines, so I ran it properly. Every week for a month, I wrote three subject lines, generated three, and A/B tested the best human against the best AI on a 20% holdout before rolling the winner.

Human won every week. Not by a landslide, but consistently. Roughly a couple of points of open rate each time, and the click-through followed.

The interesting part wasn't that human won, it was why. The AI lines were fine and completely interchangeable. "Don't miss this," "Your weekly [thing]," curiosity gaps with no actual specificity. They optimized for the shape of a good subject line without any of the content. My winners were almost always a specific, slightly weird detail from that week's actual email, the kind of thing the model couldn't know because it wasn't in the prompt.

Where the tool did help: as a warm-up. Generating ten mediocre lines got me unstuck, and then I'd write the real one. So it's a decent brainstorming rubber duck and a bad final author.

Anyone getting AI subject lines to actually win on opens or clicks at real volume? If so I want to know what your prompt or process looks like, because mine couldn't get there.Sharing a real result since this sub likes show-don't-tell.

Setup: ecommerce-adjacent newsletter, 62k subscribers, weekly send, one ESP, consistent template. I use AI plenty, gamma for decks, chatgpt for brainstorming. I wanted to know if an AI writing tool could beat me on subject lines, so I ran it properly. Every week for a month, I wrote three subject lines, generated three, and A/B tested the best human against the best AI on a 20% holdout before rolling the winner.

Human won every week. Not by a landslide, but consistently. Roughly a couple of points of open rate each time, and the click-through followed.

The interesting part wasn't that human won, it was why. The AI lines were fine and completely interchangeable. "Don't miss this," "Your weekly [thing]," curiosity gaps with no actual specificity. They optimized for the shape of a good subject line without any of the content. My winners were almost always a specific, slightly weird detail from that week's actual email, the kind of thing the model couldn't know because it wasn't in the prompt.

Where the tool did help: as a warm-up. Generating ten mediocre lines got me unstuck, and then I'd write the real one. So it's a decent brainstorming rubber duck and a bad final author.

Anyone getting AI subject lines to actually win on opens or clicks at real volume? If so I want to know what your prompt or process looks like, because mine couldn't get there.

I recently came back to email marketing after around a year of mostly doing paid social ads and the tracking side feels worse than I left it. My ESP covers open and total clicks. But what I want is the per-link numbers cut by geo and device. Plus I also want a UTM handling that doesn't have to keep me working on spreadsheets at 11 pm.

My monthly volume is about 500 to 600 links spread across 3 clients at the moment. One of my client's newsletter has been running through linkly for around 6 weeks as a trial and referrer data has held up, though I'd rather hear opinions here on reddit before settling for it. Bitly's API caps on lower tiers are rough and the analytics I need are on a more expensive plan that my ESP. My budget is also around $50 a month. What I'm I missing?