Quick one this week.
Next Thursday I'm featured as a guest writer in Des Brown's newsletter, Email Advice in Your Inbox. If you don't know Des, he runs one of the better email newsletters going. Each issue he brings in someone from the email world to write about one thing that actually helps senders, and it spans content, strategy, platform choice, ads, audience building, the lot. It's a longer read and it's worth your inbox space.
My piece is about something I got wrong for years.
For most of my career I treated deliverability as the finish line. Get the email to the inbox, screenshot the 99%, call it a win. Then it hits you that perfect placement on an email nobody opens is a perfect score on a test that didn't matter. The message arrived and nothing happened.
The inbox was never the goal. It's the door. Reaching the door doesn't mean they let you in.
In the article I get into why reputation is a behavioural score and not a technical one, why deliverability and content are a loop rather than a pipeline, and where the fight is actually moving now that Apple broke opens, Gmail and Yahoo forced real authentication, and AI started reading your email before your reader does.
If you want to read it when it lands, go subscribe to Des's newsletter now so it shows up next Thursday:
I'll see you back here next week with the usual.
Pavel
