The Future of Email

I had the pleasure of hanging out in NYC this week for The Newsletter Conference, and wow—it delivered.

Between rubbing shoulders with media giants and seeing old friends from the creator space, I walked away with a ton of notes, some new friends, and a full plate ahead of me.

Here’s a short review I wrote about my experience:

Then I posted a brain dump on X — raw, fast, and unfiltered.

A lot of you asked me to go deeper on point 9 and point 10.

So let’s do it.

The truth nobody wants to say out loud is that just because email still works, doesn’t mean it will work the same way next year. Email from the 90s evolved in the 2000s, and email from the 2010s has evolved in the 2020s.

The old-school playbook of “curate content, blast it to your list, grow slowly and steadily” is being replaced, not because it’s broken, but because the environment is changing.

Deliverability rules are tightening.

Gmail’s sorting rules are evolving.

Engagement metrics are king, and if your emails don’t get opened or clicked, your emails are invisible.

But this isn’t doom-and-gloom. It’s a call to adapt. Critique your own process and workflow and force yourself to learn new tricks.

The most successful newsletter operators I know are doing three things right now:

1. Segmenting like crazy. They’re not sending the same message to 100k people—they’re sending hypertargeted messages and cleaning their list aggressively so people who don’t open and click are removed. They aren’t obsessing over vanity metrics but are emphasizing active engagement within the inbox.

2. Creating value beyond the inbox. They’re turning newsletters into ecosystems: with communities, podcasts, courses, YouTube, events, and more. Don’t be mistaken, the emails in the inbox are vital to your overall system, but they work most effectively when used as part of an overall process and not an end all, be all.

3. Focusing on actual relationships, not vanity metrics. If your open rate is 60% but no one’s replying, what are you really building? Talk to your subscribers. Thank your most engaged people and ask them why they keep reading. Optimize for that super fan and continue building for the few that are obsessed and not the bunch who need continuous persuasion to click.

Email isn’t dying.

But email as we know it is maturing, and you either evolve with it, or you get left behind with the rest of the cold, stale copy that never even makes it out of promotions.

AI doesn’t just lower the barrier to entry, it vaporizes it.

Tools that used to take entire marketing teams now live in your Chrome tab. You don’t need a designer, a writer, a video editor, or a strategist. You just need a problem to solve, a compelling way to say it, and the humility to hit publish before you feel ready.

That means the volume of creators is going to 100x.

And when that happens, it’s not just a battle for attention anymore, it’s a war for trust.

Scarcity shifts from “Can I make a dollar?” to “Can I build something that people care about enough to come back for and continue paying me for?”

If you’re already making money online, congrats, you’re early. But that doesn’t mean you’re safe.

What works today (sponsorships, info products, affiliates, community, SaaS, coaching) might look wildly different by the end of 2026.

My take is to get obsessed with why people buy from you. Not just what you sell. Because AI can clone the what. But it can’t fake the why,

Not yet, anyway.

More to come. I’ll keep sharing what I’m learning as we all try to build through this weird, beautiful, chaotic moment.

Love you all.

Don’t be a stranger.

—Daniel

My new course, Newsletter Founder, is officially LIVE.

This course and community is created for people who know they want to start a newsletter and just need that extra nudge of support and accountability.

We want to help take you from 0 to 1 and beyond with a newsletter.

Not only are we sharing our insights from operating newsletters with tens of thousands of subscribers...

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Super excited to see where this goes!

Let me know if you have any questions 😊 

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