Rethink Your Email Sunset Policy

Experienced marketers know an unengaged email list tanks deliverability and clouds campaign data. But what’s often missing is nuance: how to design a sunset policy that works with the brand’s funnel.

This post isn’t a reminder to clean your list with abandon. It’s a framework for doing it smarter, especially when attribution is messy, inbox competition is fierce, and engagement signals are fuzzier than ever.

The alternative, keeping everyone, results in:

• Declining inbox placement rates,
• Falling open rates (despite Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection inflating them),
• Spam traps and increased bounces from low-quality emails.

Yet experienced marketers still hesitate to sunset aggressively — and for good reason. No one wants to cut customers who intend to reorder, especially for long consideration cycles — big-ticket purchases such as furniture or luxury goods — or inconsistent seasonal spikes. That’s why a nuanced, tailored, data-informed sunset policy is essential.

A nuanced sunset policy recognizes messy attribution and fuzzy engagement signals.

Beyond Open Rates

Post iOS 15, opens are inflated and increasingly unreliable. Relying solely on opens — even on Klaviyo, Iterable, and Braze — means you’re likely retaining ghost contacts, especially if you’re not separating for Apple’s MPP.

Instead, look at subscriber intent across channels, not just inbox activity. Build a sunset policy around blended engagement signals:

• Clicks,
• Site visits (via UTMs or pixel-based tracking),
• Purchase behavior,
• Session time or scroll depth (via Google Analytics 4 or a customer data platform such as Segment or Klaviyo).

Subscribers Not Equal

Not everyone behaves similarly with a brand. A strategic sunsetting policy considers varied users across the marketing lifecycle. To preserve value, tier your list:

• High-value, high-recent buyers. Suppress after longer windows (e.g., 180 days) but retarget through paid media or SMS.

• Repeat but lapsed buyers. Shorter sunset window (90–120 days) with re-engagement flows before suppressing.

• Non-purchasers with high email interaction. Consider retargeting with educational, customer-driven, or product-led content.

• Low-value, low-engagement contacts. Flag for suppression or archival.

Tiered Sunset Flow

Step 1. Identify drop-off points by cohort. Map when different subscriber types stop engaging, not just how long they’ve been inactive.

Step 2. Create re-engagement flows by segment. Instead of one-size-fits-all messaging, design two or three touch sequences per tier. For example:

• A buyer-focused winback campaign with product restock alerts or loyalty perks,
• A lurker-focused re-engagement with social proof or an updated brand story,
• A light-touch “Do you still want to hear from us?” campaign for low-engagement users.

Step 3. Offer a soft exit. Before removing, offer preference management, frequency options, or SMS sign-up. This preserves the relationship on subscribers’ terms.

Strategic Suppression

Most email service providers can suppress contacts from campaigns without fully removing them, retaining purchase history and behavioral insights. Add those contacts to exclusion audiences in Meta or Google Ads. Suppress them from flows but reactivate for seasonal sends, “last chance” campaigns, and high-impact sales.

Non-email touchpoints are valuable, too. Customers who no longer open emails might still follow the brand on Instagram or engage via SMS. A full-funnel approach means meeting them where they show up.

Automate with Context

Most marketers have automated sunset flows, but “setting and forgetting” could reduce revenue. A quarterly review is essential to ensure automations:

• Align with the promo and product calendar,
• Reflect seasonality spikes and new retention goals,
• Use personalized content blocks or product feeds for relevancy.

A well-crafted sunset policy respects customers’ time and the brand’s long-term health. A mindset of curation rather than deletion leaves room for customers to re-engage when the time is right.

Better ‘Welcome’ Emails for Ecommerce

A whopping 60% of subscribers open welcome emails. Yet many merchants give the emails little thought, with rote messages such as “Thanks for signing up! Here’s 10% off” or “Welcome to our newsletter — stay tuned!”

Discounts alone do not build loyalty, and a vague “welcome” doesn’t spur action. Done well, welcome emails drive revenue and long-term customers.

As an email marketer who has worked with consumer, retail, and direct-to-consumer brands, I’ve built campaigns from scratch and understand the importance of welcome emails.

Here’s how to create welcome emails that drive sales and build a brand.

Core Strategy

The first touchpoint with a subscriber should reflect a brand’s core marketing strategy. What do you want new subscribers to do, feel, and think after reading the message?

• If retention is a priority, highlight loyalty programs, subscriptions, or re-orders.
• If high order size is key, use reviews, user-generated content, and endorsements to boost confidence.
• To encourage product education, provide a path to blogs, videos, or a community group.

Cowboy, an e-bike company, uses a welcome email to build credibility and drive sales. It highlights reviews from CNBC, Time, TechCrunch, and GQ to capture interest. The email confirms the brand’s longevity and popularity by showcasing miles ridden and its presence in multiple cities. Plus, it sets expectations — “Over the next few days, we’ll unpack what makes a Cowboy so special” — to engage subscribers from the start.

Cowboy’s welcome email builds credibility and drives sales. Shown here is a partial screen capture.

Long-Term Relationship

A compelling welcome email starts a long-term relationship, much more than a single transaction. Make clear to subscribers why staying engaged is valuable.

• Encourage a low-commitment action such as taking a quiz, following on social, or providing a preference.
• Tease what’s ahead, such as “Stay tuned for exclusive behind-the-scenes content + first dibs on limited drops!”
• Offer multiple engagement paths (“Not ready to shop? Check out our blog for expert tips.”)

Bobbi, an organic infant formula brand, uses storytelling and social proof to build trust with new moms. The email’s opening sentence — “We know firsthand” — signals that Organic’s founders are also mothers. Multiple calls to action provide engagement options for subscribers to interact at their choosing — without purchasing.

Bobbi uses storytelling and social proof to build trust with new moms in this partial example.

Keep the momentum going with an entire welcome flow, typically three to five emails, such as:

• First: Welcome, expectations, and a soft CTA.
• Second: Highlight product benefits, customer favorites, key differentiators.
• Third: Address objections or FAQs to ease decision-making.
• Fourth: Introduce community, content, and additional perks.

Conversion CTAs

The calls to action of many welcome emails default to “Shop now” or “Learn more.” Go beyond cliche to increase engagement and revenue.

• For high-consideration products: “See how it works” (leading to an explainer video) likely converts better than a direct pitch.
• For brands with strong UGC: “See how customers use [product]” can drive engagement with tagged social posts or case studies.
• For loyalty: “Unlock your first perk” can introduce a rewards program.

WeWork, the coworking space provider, gets to the point by addressing new customers’ concerns about finding the right work setting. The email keeps it simple, with a clear layout and CTAs that guide users to the best options for their needs.

WeWork’s welcome email is simple, with a clear layout and CTAs that guide users. Shown here is a partial screen capture.

KPIs

How do you know if your email sequence is working? Open and click rates are common (but unreliable). Other metrics include:

• Sales conversion rate.
• Subscriber retention after 60 days (beyond the welcome sequence).
• Revenue per subscriber.

—

In short, welcome emails that align with core strategies, foster long-term relationships, and encourage conversions become revenue drivers, not formalities.

Honeymoon Is Ending for Email Marketing

Email has long been among the most profitable ecommerce marketing channels, with a relatively high return on investment, an owned audience, and controllable — schedulable — frequency.

Email delivers:

• Transactional messages such as order or shipping notifications.
• Promotions such as discounts and sales.
• Editorial content for brand value and customer loyalty.
• Retargeting offers using the email address or its hash as a first-party identifier for advertising.
• Confirmations to identify and authorize shoppers on a site.

These email use cases assume a recipient will see the message and senders can track her clicks. Unfortunately, neither exists for every message in 2025.

A long series of inbox changes from email clients and app extensions have made it more difficult to reach subscribers.

Here’s a rundown.

Gmail AI Search

The most recent change applies artificial intelligence to transform how email appears in inboxes, so much so that Adweek likened the AI-powered inbox to a social media feed, noting, “with a few exceptions, an email sent was [once] an email received. Now, that honeymoon period might be coming to an end.”

The Adweek commentary came shortly after Gmail announced this month a new feature, stating that “instead of just showing emails in chronological order based on keywords, Gmail search results now factor in elements like recency, most-clicked emails, and frequent contacts.”

Gmail’s announcement included an example search for the term “reunion,” wherein an ecommerce marketing message containing that term moved from the first position to the lowest in the visible search results despite being the most recent.

The example in Gmail’s announcement shows a marketing message at the bottom of a list despite being the most recent. Click image to enlarge.

Spam Filters

The assumption of guaranteed inbox delivery has been false since at least 1994 when America Online introduced the first automated spam filter.

Unsavory types were bombarding AOL email inboxes with unsolicited, fraudulent, and malevolent messages. Phishing and advance fee scams were common, as were links to malware downloads.

Many more email clients followed AOL’s initiative. Governments enacted laws such as the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, and today, spam scams are significantly less common.

No one wants to return to spam-filled inboxes.

Nonetheless, we’ve all experienced an important transactional message or two-factor authentication code delivered to our spam folder or deleted before it ever arrived.

Promotions Tab

Spam filters are not the only algorithms impacting email visibility.

In May 2013, Gmail began sorting some email messages into a “Promotions” tab, more or less hiding them from view. The company was trying to solve overloaded inboxes and help recipients organize inbound messages.

Within a few months, MailChimp reported that the tab had lowered email engagement by at least a percentage point. That same year, ClickZ reported that Gmail open rates fell more than 12% during the Black Friday promotional season.

Circa 2025, AI-powered priority inboxes take the tabs concept further, removing most email messages from view. For example, when someone opens the new Yahoo Mail, only a handful of messages are visible.

Hence marketers should now assume AI agents filter all promotional messages, relegating them to something other than the priority tab.

Opens

Apple launched Mail Privacy Protection in September 2021. Similar email firewalls and utilities followed.

MPP blocks the disclosure of iOS users’ email opens by reporting all such recipients opened emails. The immediate impact was inflated open rates as reported by email service providers. Twilio SendGrid estimated MPP, in its first month, accounted for 22.9% of Apple Mail opens as well as 9.1% of Yahoo Mail Opens, 4.8% of Microsoft Outlook opens, and 4.6% of Gmail opens.

Many ESPs have since included features to estimate MPP’s effect on opens. Nonetheless, MPP, which now extends to macOS users, obscures precise reporting, including the full impact of AI algorithms such as Gmail search or a priority inbox.

Clicks

The second false assumption of many marketers is email clicks.

Marketers track clicks for sales attribution and to collect first-party behavioral data. But reported clicks in emails are sometimes unreliable.

For example, Apple Mail and Proton now remove URL parameters that identify specific subscribers, stripping the ability to associate a subscriber with a transaction or other behavior. (Campaign-wide IDs and UTMs typically remain, however.)

Moreover, email fraud-protection software often deploys bots to analyze and click links. The bots help protect recipients from phishing and malware attacks but complicate reporting. Leading ESPs now filter such bot clicks from performance reports, although many providers still include them.

—

Despite AI, privacy, and fraud-protection hurdles, email as an ecommerce marketing channel remains top-notch. The honeymoon may be ending, but success is not.

How to Re-engage Email Subscribers Right

Merchants know the value of re-engaging dormant email subscribers. I did that several years ago while working for a leading U.S.-based email service provider. A client, a prominent direct-to-consumer personal-care brand, had roughly 30,000 email subscribers who had not opened an email in 2 to 7 years.

My team developed and implemented a targeted three-month re-engagement strategy that maintained email deliverability and brand reputation. Over 50% of the dormant subscribers ultimately re-engaged.

Here are the steps.

Re-engaging dormant email subscribers drive value.

Re-engage Subscribers

Create a segment for unengaged subscribers

Including unengaged subscribers in a regular sending cadence will confuse them and likely land your campaigns in the spam folder, hurting your email deliverability. Instead, place them in a separate segment.

When sending re-engagement emails, prioritize the most recently engaged subscribers. As you work from newest to oldest, note metrics such as open and click rates. If they start to decline, you’ve likely hit your limit. For the DTC brand, we re-engaged subscribers who hadn’t interacted with the brand for up to five years.

Take it slow and steady

It’s tempting to send an email blast immediately, but strategy comes first. Flooding your sending-server IPs with new traffic can set off deliverability alarms and harm other campaigns. Do not increase overall deployments by more than 10% of your normal volume. This preserves deliverability while including dormant recipients.

Copy is king

Email copy should be compelling and engaging and create a sense of urgency. Start by acknowledging the subscriber’s absence in the subject line or preheader with a simple “We’ve missed you” or similar. Include an exclusive promotion or incentive — ideally contained in the subject line or preheader to capture attention immediately. Personal touches, such as recipients’ first names, can improve responses.

If you can’t offer promotions, inform subscribers of changes, such as new products or services, since they last engaged. The DTC brand had launched a celebrity campaign for Pride Month. We highlighted the partnership and offered limited-edition items from the campaign.

We also A/B tested subject lines across various micro-segments and sent the winning version to the larger population.

It might seem counterintuitive, but ensure the opt-out button is easy to find. The goal is to engage folks who want to hear from you. Facilitating unsubscribes from uninterested recipients reduces spam complaints for a healthier list in the long run.

Have patience

We emailed the dormant DTC subscribers every 2 to 3 weeks for three months before gradually integrating re-engagers into a regular rhythm. Once or twice per month may seem infrequent, but it allows for time to evaluate performance and craft compelling copy for real value.

Ongoing Re-engagement

Dormant subscribers are an unfortunate reality for every email marketing list I’ve encountered, but an active re-engagement strategy can minimize the loss. Don’t wait years to act. A twice-yearly re-engagement campaign can keep subscribers active and revenue flowing.

How to Monitor Competitors’ Email Marketing

Ecommerce marketers eager for a competitive advantage can monitor competitors’ email campaigns for insights and opportunities.

Most new businesses focus initially on advertising and search engine optimization. Eventually competitive monitoring often emerges, becoming part of a standard marketing toolbox.

Email-tracking providers include Hoppy Copy, SendView, Owletter, and MailCharts. These and others parse, analyze, and store competitive email data.

But thanks to artificial intelligence, businesses can track competitors’ email marketing with little more than the Zapier email parser and ChatGPT, in five steps:

1. Use a Gmail address to sign up for competitors’ emails.
2. Automatically forward the ensuing Gmail messages to the Zapier email parser.
3. Use ChatGPT to pull relevant data from the parsed email message.
4. Load the data into a Google Doc, Airtable, or similar.
5. View the data in a business intelligence dashboard such as Looker.

Sign up several times for each competitor’s mailing list to receive segmented messages.

AI makes tracking competitors’ email marketing relatively inexpensive.

What to Track

Competitive tracking is often two-pronged: current activity (insights) and omissions (opportunities). For insights, look for marketing and operational behavior, such as:

• Audience segments and personalization. This is why you subscribed several times. Does the competitor send different messages to segments?

• Email timing and frequency. Discover the time or day a competitor broadcasts a message. Do content emails have a cadence? What about promotional offers?

• Email sequences and behavioral triggers. Analyze email sequences, such as a welcome series, cart abandonment, or post-purchase. What are the triggers? How long is the series? What is the content?

• Subject lines and preview text. Review email subject lines and preview text. Do competitors A/B test subject lines (another reason to sign up more than once)? Is there a pattern to subject lines?

• Content marketing. Do competitors use email to promote content? Is there an editorial newsletter? Or do promotional messages have a content section?

• Deliverability. Do competitors’ messages arrive in the inbox or the promotional tab? What content impacts deliverability?

• Email technology. What email service providers do competitors use? Are they employing other third-party tools? Can you detect AI-generated content?

• Promotional structure and reuse. Do competitors have standard email offers, such as buy-one-get-one or percentage off? Are discounts product-specific or storewide? Are offers repeated?

In each case, monitor aspects of messages that could improve your own email program. Look also for opportunities, such as:

• Promotional propositions and placement. Analyze strengths and weaknesses of competitors’ promotional messages. Could you deploy better versions or similar?

• Customer experience. Do competitors engage shoppers? What tactics can you replicate or initiate?

• Content strategy and gaps. Identify competitors’ content gaps that could help your business.

• Product gaps. Look for missing upsells or resales in transactional messages or post-purchase sequences.

Successful Strategies

Ecommerce can be fiercely competitive. AI has made email monitoring easy and relatively inexpensive — even small businesses can benefit.

AMP for Email Converts Inboxes to Ecommerce Stores

Ecommerce marketers eager to increase revenue from email campaigns may have a stellar opportunity in a seemingly forgotten technology.

Zaymo, an interactive email builder, deploys the technology for its clients, as does Mailmodo, a similar provider, which claims a 71% revenue increase in clients’ emails.

AMP for Email

The secret to Zaymo’s and Mailmodo’s email performance is Accelerated Mobile Pages, an open-source framework launched by Google in 2015 to encourage faster web pages on smartphones. A subset, Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) for Email, enables marketers to create dynamic and interactive emails that respond like a website.

“Interactive emails bring your ecommerce store right inside the email. Rather than redirect customers and make them hop through multiple web pages and forms, interactive emails enable marketers to add items to a cart inside email for quick checkout,” wrote Mailmodo’s head of marketing, Zeeshan Akhtar, in an email message to Practical Ecommerce.

Permitting shoppers to swipe through product carousels, interact with product variants, and ultimately make a buying decision — in the inbox — removes most of the friction and may significantly increase revenue.

Moreover, AMP for Email could also improve open rates. Jaina Mistry, director of brand and content marketing at Litmus, explained, “Interactive emails using AMP for Email create more opportunities for the recipient to engage with your email. So yes, it can have a positive impact on your deliverability by improving engagement.”

AMP email example from Zaymo. Click image to view the GIF.

Problems

AMP for Email looks an awful lot like HTML. The differences are in the tags, not the structure. Nearly any web developer could construct an AMP email, although tools such as Zaymo and Mailmodo make it relatively easy, depending on the ecommerce platform.

But before ecommerce marketers race to implement this email conversion panacea, there are at least two problems.

First, AMP for Email won’t work for every email. According to Brice Douglas, CEO and co-founder of Zaymo, the technology works in only a third of inboxes.

Litmus’s Mistry agrees, noting, “AMP for Email is currently supported by Gmail, Yahoo Mail, FairEmail, and Mail.ru. While Gmail does account for 30% of email opens, according to Litmus, AMP for Email is not supported in Apple Mail — the most popular email client.”

And that’s only half of the problem. Mistry continued, “For marketers to take advantage of AMP for Email, their email service provider needs to support the ability to build and send AMP-powered emails. There are hundreds of providers, but only about 30 actually support the creation of emails using AMP for Email.”

Second, AMP for Email seems nearly forgotten.

For example, at the time of writing, the AMP’s Slack community has not posted an update since February 2022, and the community’s #using-app channel had just 53 posts in the past five months.

One might argue the inactivity means that AMP for Email works well, but lack of interest is more plausible.

“The community has been quiet for a host of reasons. AMP itself is an open-source framework, so it is unlikely to be dismantled. However, there is always a possibility that Gmail could cut its support of AMP. It is very unlikely but possible,” wrote Zaymo’s Douglas in response to my questions.

Hence a more active community and broader AMP demand could spur Apple and other email providers to get on board.

How AMP Works

Most AMP for Email tools create a series of inbox fallbacks. They first deliver an interactive and dynamic experience with AMP. If it doesn’t work, they use CSS, HTML, or proprietary techniques to approximate AMP’s performance.

Thus shoppers using Gmail and Yahoo (which support AMP) get a compelling ecommerce experience in their inboxes. Folks using Apple Mail and others benefit too, with a fallback experience at least as good, if not better, than the ecommerce messages they receive now.

Using this approach, Zaymo claims to provide some interactivity in about 80% of email inboxes.

Ecommerce marketers interested in trying AMP for Email will need to research.

• Check out interactive email tools such as Zaymo and Mailmodo that integrate with the ecommerce platform.
• Ensure the store’s current ESP supports sending AMP messages.
• Register with AMP to send the messages.
• Test to learn what works best.

In short, AMP for Email can help merchants stand out in crowded inboxes while streamlining the path to purchase. The technology’s ability to create app-like experiences within email transforms static messages into revenue generators.

Gen AI Nears Hyper-Personalization at Scale

Ecommerce marketers have long dreamed of delivering the perfect marketing message to a specific shopper at the ideal time to close a sale.

Even 20 years ago, marketers could set up “business rules” — if this, then that — or divide shoppers into segments to deliver custom messages or recommendations.

What’s changed is the emergence of generative artificial intelligence, which has dramatically expanded personalization by automating and scaling labor-intensive or impractical tasks.

Hyper-Personalization

Combine generative AI with heaps of real-time data and a delivery mechanism — email, text, chat — and you get hyper-personalization.

A marketing team can now develop an outline detailing the company’s key selling points, brand differentiators, and tone of voice. AI can then produce unique and optimized messages per shopper.

What’s more, the software to hyper-personalize those messages is becoming affordable for even small and mid-sized merchants.

Mix shopper data with generative AI, and marketers may be on the verge of hyper-personalized messages.

3 Problems Solved

Consider the example that sparked this article.

Backstroke, a generative AI email platform, has announced a tool that produces complete ecommerce marketing emails, including layout, images, copy, subject lines, and preheaders.

Although it doesn’t achieve real-time individualization, the new tool addresses three of the top problems associated with hyper-personalization.

Data capture

Hyper-personalization requires lots of data.

Ecommerce marketing teams typically have access to first- or even third-party shopper demographics and behavioral information but lack the technical skills, time, or money to use it in a meaningful way.

Backstroke, for example, has a deep integration with Klaviyo, one of the best email service providers for ecommerce data collection. Blueshift provides similar services and similarly integrates with Shopify and Magento.

Both Backstroke and Blueshift recognize that ecommerce marketers need help gathering the shopper data that hyper-personalization requires. Before it can generate personalized emails, AI must know what’s important to shoppers.

Data comprehension and use

Another common problem with hyper-personalization is understanding and employing the shopper data once collected. Backstroke, Blueshift, and other generative AI companies organize shoppers into groups or develop individual shopper profiles.

Think of it this way. Marketers can manually create many email segments — by gender, repeat customers, lapsed buyers, and more. An industrious lifecycle marketer might manually maintain 20 such segments. Yet AI can generate 10 times as many.

Thus Backstroke, Blueshift, and the like can constantly refine change segments as the AI learns more about shoppers and their buying intent.

Content creation

Finally, the words and images needed for hyper-personalization are a hurdle.

Imagine an ecommerce lifecycle marketer composing, testing, and optimizing email sequences of three messages each for 10 shopper segments. That’s 30 messages to compose. Testing subject lines could require three variations per message — 90 emails all told.

Before long, maintaining and optimizing the messages becomes unmanageable. And it’s one of the hyper-personalization problems generative AI platforms are addressing. Instead of maintaining 90 or 900 message versions, marketers might instead provide a framework for AI, which then produces and optimizes the entire campaign.

AI for SMBs

As of October 2024, sending unique messages at scale to each customer or prospect is not possible. But the rapid growth of generative AI means such hyper-personalization is on the verge. Innovations in machine learning and data processing are steadily enhancing AI’s ability to tailor messages to individuals, promising more precise and effective marketing.

What’s more, the cost of using AI is declining. Likely, SMB ecommerce merchants can soon access personalization tools once accessible only to enterprise sellers.

Google Ad Manager Launches Programmatic Email Ads

Google Ad Manager has quietly published documentation for a beta version of an advertising tag for email newsletters.

Email ads are cookie-proof. They do not depend on third-party tracking cookies for targeting. The end of tracking cookies in web browsers (as soon as 2025) has publishers and advertisers searching for new channels.

Email’s targeting capability could be the primary reason GAM is adding support.

Email Ads

Email ads typically fall into three categories:

• Sponsorships: flat rate.
• Context-based: priced per action.
• Subscriber-targeted programmatic: priced per action.

In a technical sense, GAM is adding support for all of these. But functionally, the beta will best support programmatic ad slots. Let’s consider each type and then look at ad formats.

Sponsorships

Newsletter sponsorships are often personal endorsements of the sender. In the example below, the photograph may be the newsletter author using the product on a fishing trip. The ad is the author’s recommendation.

A newsletter sponsorship is often a personal endorsement from the sender.

In this case, the fishing gear promotion resembles an old-style print or television ad. It’s mass media on a small scale. A newsletter publisher with an audience of fly fishermen sells a sponsorship to a fishing gear company that goes to everyone on the list.

Sponsorships can transfer trust from the newsletter to the advertiser and produce strong sales.

Pricing for sponsorships is typically a flat rate.

Context-based

Context-based ads focus on the email’s subject matter and are similar to sponsorships with one advertiser per deployment (sometimes in multiple locations), sent to all subscribers.

Context-based performance advertisers compose the ads and target an email’s context.

Context-based performance ads most often feature advertiser-written copy. There is no personal endorsement.

The pricing is usually action-based, such as cost-per-impression, cost-per-click, or cost-per-sale.

Programmatic

Subscriber-targeted programmatic ads are the email equivalent of pay-per-click ads on Google search or social media. This ad unit is a linked image.

This ad unit is essentially a digital display advertisement.

Importantly, the ad is based on the recipient, not solely on the content. So, someone reading about rods and reels might see a retargeting ad for laundry detergent.

In theory, a fly fishing newsletter with 100,000 subscribers might show 100,000 different ads.

Pricing for programmatic ads is performance-based.

Ad Formats

Inserting sponsorship or context-based ads requires little setup since every subscriber sees the same headline, ad copy, and call-to-action. Publishers can use HTML or drag-and-drop tools for those items, depending on the email platform. It is a native ad, meaning its format is identical to the newsletter’s format, i.e., native HTML.

Programmatic ads from Google Ad Manager and all other providers use a linked HTML image tag that includes a unique identifier for each subscriber, but not ad components such as a headline.

When a subscriber opens the newsletter, the email client — Gmail or Apple Mail, for example — requests the image from the ad’s server. The server reads the subscriber’s unique ID and returns an ad image targeted at that person.

The image will include all ad components: headline, copy, CTA.

GAM Email Ad Tag

Google Ad Manager requires two email anchor tags and an image tag . Let’s focus on the image tag to demonstrate how parameters are passed to the ad server.

First, the src image-tag property will start with a path to the ad server.

https://securepubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/ad

The newsletter publisher will then append parameters to this base URL.

The most critical parameter is the clkk. It combines a unique subscriber identifier, a campaign identifier, and the date in a day-month-year format.

*|UNIQID|*_*|CAMPAIGN_UID|*_*|DATE:d/m/y|*

GAM prohibits publishers from passing personally identifiable information in the unique subscriber identifier. So send a hashed email address, not the plain text version.

Unit Performance

The GAM tag functions for sponsorships, context-based, or programmatic ads, but it delivers image ads only. Subscribers with images turned off won’t see the message. Moreover, GAM’s image tags link to Doubleclick.net, a prominent ad server. Every ad blocker will remove it.

Thus GAM email tags are best suited for programmatic, as publishers can insert sponsorships and context-based ads without an ad management platform.