Artificial intelligence has not yet fulfilled its email marketing potential, at least not without human help. There is a maturation gap between the AI-powered email that marketers can imagine and the campaigns they can actually create. Filling this gap could be a significant opportunity. Email marketing should seemingly be obsolete. The first “email,” after all, occurred in October 1971, nearly 55 years ago.

Email remains one of the highest ROI drivers for marketers—but only if messages reach the inbox. Privacy rules are changing, AI is moving fast, and mailbox providers keep updating their playbooks—so marketers need to stay on their toes to reach subscribers. Ready to take charge of your email deliverability? Validity’s latest report—backed by trillions of global inbox data points—reveals rising inbox placement rates worldwide in 2025. 

Gathering customer feedback is an essential step in the process of improving your business. To create a positive user experience and improve customer satisfaction, businesses must have an effective means of learning what their customers like and don’t like about their product or service.

In this article, we explore why you should be collecting customer feedback, how to ask for feedback with emails and how to use that feedback to optimize the customer experience.

The holiday season is make-or-break for email marketers. With inboxes bursting from October through New Year’s, even your most dazzling email content could disappear into spam folders if your deliverability isn’t solid.

Mailbox Providers (MBPs), such as Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook, receive an overwhelming volume of emails during peak seasons. Their systems work harder to protect their users and reward senders who follow best practices with more reliable inbox placement.

Validity surveyed 1,000 U.S. consumers, revealing what drives them to open, engage with, or unsubscribe from holiday emails. This holiday season, consumers signal that they want transparency, real discounts and thoughtful timing, not inbox overload or misleading subject lines. Retailers that continue to rely on volume over value risk unsubscribes and missed opportunities.

Here’s what consumers told us about what’s working, what’s not, and what brands can do to improve their holiday email performance.

With Gmail and iOS now using AI to generate email previews before a message is even opened, marketers are facing a new frontier. You can’t avoid or ignore these changes. They’re already here. And they’re reshaping how we think about content, strategy, and measuring success.

AI Previews Are Changing the Inbox Experience

AI-generated summaries are often the first thing users see when they check their inbox. These previews aren’t just pulling the first few lines of your email. They’re interpreting your content, sometimes arbitrarily, and surfacing what they think matters most.

Email and SMS - friends, enemies, or frenemies? The experts at PostScript say, friends, if you do it right. If a customer is already on your email list, they’re only one step away from being a high-intent SMS subscriber. Leveraging this established connection can unlock SMS as a more direct and immediate communication channel. Think of the possibilities: time-sensitive promotions delivered instantly, personalized reminders that cut through inbox clutter, and real-time customer service interactions that foster loyalty.

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first… Consumer expectations have shifted and there’s no single type of funnel that’s going to convert everyone. What really works is creating personalized experiences that focus on the micro-moments within the shopper’s journey and using those to influence and capture the customer––again, and again, and again.

This is what retention marketing focuses on, and some experts have suggested that it be renamed to “ re-acquisition” to highlight just how important it really is in today’s market.