Q: What is best practice now?
A: For many years, email played a supporting role in the publishing ecosystem – capturing subscriber data from organic and paid search and sending traffic back to a website where most of the commercial activity took place. But that’s changed – dramatically.
With declining web referral traffic and increasingly noisy engagement data – driven by bots and privacy changes – email newsletters and marketing campaigns are now sitting front and centre of your strategy.
Today, successful publishers treat email as a strategic product. It’s where audiences are built, brands are shaped, and opportunities are created far beyond the click. The best performers have redefined success, shifting focus from opens and clicks to revenue, retention, and audience value.
Best practice now maximises the owned relationship that channels like email and SMS provide, while reducing reliance on rented reach from platforms that can – and do – change the rules overnight. That shift has been accelerated by AI-driven search experiences, which are already significantly impacting referral traffic.
We’ve long moved beyond batch-and-blast. Today’s approach is rooted in segmentation and behavioural targeting – but more importantly, in creating content people genuinely want to read. It’s about building habits, deepening engagement, and developing communities that unlock multiple revenue streams across subscriptions, advertising, ecommerce, and events.
Q: How do you see it changing in the future?
A: Change has already arrived – and too few organisations are ready.
AI is now prioritising and summarising email content. Machine learning influences what lands in secondary tabs, while inbox providers assess message content to decide what gets seen. This isn’t about undermining email; it’s about improving the user experience by reducing noise and promoting relevance.
As a result, engagement data is evolving. Open rates are already unreliable, and I expect alternative metrics – such as impression-based measures like dwell time – to become more widely adopted.
The upside is clear: this shift rewards quality. If content isn’t actively and willingly consumed, it won’t perform. The best emails will still rise to the top – but the bar is higher.
This environment forces better discipline. It pushes us to prioritise the fundamentals we’ve often underinvested in: sharper segmentation, stronger list hygiene, and better creative. Get any of these wrong, and you risk losing visibility at the exact moment attention is hardest to earn.
Q: What are your three top tips?
1. Treat email as a product, not a campaign channel: If email sits at the centre of your strategy, it needs to be approached systematically. That starts with understanding where your customer data lives and bringing it together to form a clear view of the individual.
This requires a shift in mindset – away from lists, and towards people. The strongest publishers use data-driven workflows to turn insight into action, delivering the right content in the moments that matter. With AI, these capabilities are now more accessible than ever.
Think beyond transmission. Focus on building curated, personalised experiences that people choose to engage with repeatedly.
Get this right, and you build more than recognition – you build affinity. That turns direct channels into a durable commercial asset, supporting subscriptions, advertising, and long-term audience growth.
2. Make deliverability a business priority, not a technical one: Deliverability has always mattered, but it’s now business critical. Inbox providers make increasingly sophisticated decisions based on engagement signals – shaped by your data quality, targeting, and content.
At the same time, traditional metrics like opens and clicks are becoming less reliable. That makes it essential to focus on real engagement and the full journey beyond the click.
Strong deliverability is the outcome of good practice: clean data, active audiences, and meaningful interactions. It’s also a moving target, as inbox rules continue to evolve.
For most organisations, the most effective approach is to work with technology partners who actively manage deliverability. This helps maintain reach, consistency, and performance – without requiring constant internal oversight.
3. Compete on relevance and consistency: Tolerance for generic messaging is disappearing. Segmentation and behavioural targeting are now expected – not differentiators.
Yet genuinely connected experiences remain rare. That’s where the best performers stand apart.
Organisations with strong data strategies and robust deliverability practices are achieving greater reach and deeper loyalty. They deliver consistent, repeatable experiences that earn attention over time – and continuously adapt based on audience behaviour.
The reward is clear: sustained visibility and engagement. The risk of getting it wrong is just as clear – being quietly deprioritised.
About Adestra
Adestra is an audience engagement platform built for publishers. Designed for high‑volume, multi‑title environments, Adestra brings audience insight and activation directly into your workflow to empower editorial and commercial teams to understand reader behaviour and act on it in real time.
Web: www.uplandsoftware.com/adestra
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/adestra
This article was first published in Issue # 1 of Best Practice in Publishing, a new publication from InPublishing. Click here for links to the other ‘best practice’ articles from the publication.
