📬 3 Rules for Email Marketing + Newsletters in 2026

Amelia HrubyWelcome to off the grid, a podcast for creative business owners who are sick of social media and big tech.

Hello, and welcome to off the grid, a podcast about leaving social media without losing all your clients or customers or income or community. I'm your host, Amelia Hruby. And here on this show, I share my journey of being off of social media for almost five years now, as well as how I launched and grew my business without social media platforms such that it eventually grew beyond 6 figures of revenue, and now I am totally redesigning it in 2026. More about that in a few weeks. But for now, you're tuning in in the middle of our 2026 creative marketing toolkit.

This week on the podcast, I am sharing five episodes in five days to tell you about the three marketing strategies that I think are going to be most important for artists and business owners who share their work online in 2026. And then I'm gonna have a conversation about the trends and forecast a bit of what I think we will see ahead with my dear friend, Amanda Laird of Slow and Steady Studio. So today, I am here to tell you about my three rules for email in 2026. These are the rules that I have for myself that I'm working on with my clients around all of our email marketing and newsletters that we are sending this year. Before we get to that, I do wanna say that I have made three episodes about email before that are gonna be really, really helpful if you have not thought this through.

So if you are just getting started with email, I want to send you to my conversation with Holly Wilkoszewski of Daypack Digital. We talked about how to select the right email platform for you, how to write a great welcome email, the stats that matter and the ones that don't, and how to get the first people on your list and keep growing the size of your list over time. So that episode is linked in the show notes. It's called email marketing made easier, better, and more fun with Holly Wilkoszewski and that one's really for all my beginners out there. If you've been sending emails for a while, if you've got a newsletter, you think you sort of know what you're doing, or you have your email marketing software set up and you just wanna get better at it, then you're gonna wanna go listen to my episode with Allie Grummert of Duet.

Allie and I talked about why welcome sequences are different than nurture sequences, how to use email segments and tags that help you be your best, most multi passionate self in your marketing, as well as strategies like link triggers, nested sequences, and automated sales funnels. So, again, if you're a more at an intermediate or advanced stage in email marketing, my conversation with Ali is for you. And then if you're thinking about your email deliverability or cleaning your list in 2026, you will want to go listen to my conversation with Dawn Richardson from Flodesk. Dawn joined me on the podcast last fall to talk about how our emails end up in spam, strategies to get better open rates, and ways to clean our list without wrecking our stats. So that episode was titled email mistakes we need to stop making.

And again, it is linked in the show notes, or you can just scroll back a bit and find it in the feed. So if you've arrived at this episode and what you really want is a whole master class in email marketing, what I suggest you do is listen to those three interviews and then this solo episode from me, or just start here and then go back and listen to the other three conversations. All of that in total is truly a masterclass in email marketing for creative business owners. It's totally free. It's all here on the podcast, and I'm so happy to provide it for you because I want us all to send better emails and get better results with our emails in 2026.

Now if you have heard all those episodes already or you listen to them and you're like, this is all great information, but I actually need some help and guidance in a place where I can get some support, then I would love to invite you to join us in the interweb. That is our annual membership for artists, writers, healers, service providers, creators, and small business owners of all kinds who want to share their work perhaps through email and make money online without social media. The interweb has three to four live classes a month as well as an on demand resource library and an active Slack work in place space where we gather to support each other with questions, ideas, promo support, and even easing the existential dread of being a human in the world in these times. I have found in my business that not much gets done when I am trying to muscle through and go it alone, but as soon as I do it together with other people who get it, I travel much farther, much faster. So if that's what you're looking for, the doors to the interweb are open for you this week only, and I hope to have you with us.

I would love to see you at one of our live events this month or in Slack anytime. Alright. Enough about the interweb and what's already in the back catalog. Let's go ahead and dive in to my three rules for email marketing and newsletters in 2026. Okay.

Email rule number one is that in 2026, we welcome people to our mailing list. Gone are the days where you have a sign up box on your website, and then nothing happens when people submit their name there. That used to be pretty normal in email marketing, honestly. I signed up for plenty of email lists where I just kinda put my name and email in on the website and then waited to hear from the person. Maybe they sent me an email the next day, maybe the next week, maybe not for six months.

But when they did, I was like, okay. Cool. Yeah. I remember signing up for their list. I'm happy to hear from them.

I think that at this point in email, we have all signed up for far too many lists to remember what we signed up for when, and so it is very necessary to welcome people to your mailing list. Whether it is a marketing list that you only sell to occasionally, or a newsletter that you write to on the same day every single week, we need to invite people in and set expectations. Tell them a bit about who you are. Tell them a bit about what you share on your list. Tell them how often you plan to write to them or when they can expect to see you.

It's also really helpful to ask them to drag you to their primary inbox. Now I personally am not a Gmail user, but what I learned from Dawn at Flodesk last fall is that this is becoming more and more important. Gmail wants to see that people are engaging with their emails, and they love when somebody pulls you out of the promos tab and puts you in their primary inbox. I think this is gonna become more and more important as we see more and more AI integration and email service providers. Those robots are gonna be sending so many emails to promotions or spam folders.

And so when people join our list, we really wanna make sure they know who we are, what we're gonna send them, and then hopefully also they choose to put us in their primary inbox. So again, rule number one is welcome people to your list. Now as I'm saying this, I also wanna emphasize that welcoming people to your list can be super simple. I'm not saying that you need to have an 11 email welcome sequence that comes out over the course of twenty one days after someone joins your list and tells them every single thing they could ever need to know about you and your business and your offerings, as well as your best ideas you've ever had, plus exciting new things and discount codes for them. Like, we don't have to do it all at once, my friends.

Welcoming people to your list can be one single email where again, you just say hello. You tell them who you are. You tell them what you're gonna share, and you tell them how often they can expect to hear from you. And maybe we ask them to drag you to the primary inbox. I really think that's all we need.

And in fact, I am hearing from folks that they're kinda over the long welcome sequences that they like when it's just like, hello, and then I'm on the list. And so I'm not saying you have to do a lot here, and I'm not even saying you have to, like, set up an entire automated sequence. With almost every email service provider, even the ones that don't have sequence automations, they typically will allow you to send a welcome email. For instance, Substack does not have automations, but they do allow you to send a welcome email. And let me tell you, I would say over 50% of the time that I sign up for a new Substack newsletter, I just get the boring template you signed up for this newsletter email, and I hate it.

They're so boring. I don't wanna see that. What I wanna see is your unique and interesting welcome to your list. That's the first way you signal to me that you have actually thought about the people who you're writing to, and that you want them to have a good experience. Having that welcome email tells your readers that you're thinking about them as much as you are about yourself, and that is how we build trust, which is more important than ever in our marketing.

In this era of slop and scammers, trust is the most important thing we can cultivate. So why not do that as soon as someone gives you their email? That's what a welcome email does. It says, hey. Thanks for being here.

I hope you learn to trust me. No email does nothing for you, and a template email can harm that trust from the get go. So my number one rule for email marketing and newsletters in 2026 is welcome people to your list. Set up the welcome email. Alright.

Rule number two is find your rhythm and don't force it. In 2026, I do not want to get any more emails that say, I didn't know what to write to you this week, or I skipped a week because I didn't have anything to say, or I'm so sorry I haven't been in your inbox for a while. I myself have sent those emails. I am quote unquote guilty of this. I have done it, and sometimes it is called for.

If you have not emailed your list in six months, it might be nice to acknowledge that when you send the first email. But if you are constantly apologizing for not meeting your own made up schedule, your audience will start to wonder why you don't even know what you're doing. And so I want to free you from the fake rules of email consistency, because they are made up. They are not real. Somewhere along the way, many of us came to believe that we had to send one email a week on the same day every week.

We had to send our email newsletter every Monday or every Wednesday or every Friday. And I think part of the reason we came to believe that is because that type of cadence can work to build familiarity and trust through consistency. But consistency is only one way to build trust. I think I've said this on the show before, that one way you can build trust with an audience is to be consistent in your cadence, aka to send an email at the same time every week or every month. That's how I show up on this podcast.

Right? Like, when off the grid is in season, we have a new episode every single Wednesday. I do that so you can count on it, and that shows you you can trust me, which I think is super important for somebody who's out there talking about marketing. Right? Like, I want to earn your trust, and I keep showing up this way even when I'm tired, even when I'm not totally sure about it, because I believe that that consistent cadence is part of our trust that we've built together.

That said, if something really happened in my life and I couldn't post an episode one week, I also trust that that would be okay. I have built years of this weekly cadence, and I know that you listening wouldn't mind if I missed a week because something was going on. And I do take breaks, and I communicate those, and I'm clear about them. So again, consistent cadence is only one way to build trust. And if writing a weekly email newsletter does not work for you, I would much rather you just stop doing that than struggle to find something to say every week or send a sort of subpar email just to quote unquote be consistent, or be always apologizing that things are coming out late or that you missed a week.

We can let go of that. I give you full permission to stop apologizing in your emails. Missing an email, being late, or not showing up is not a great harm that you have done to your readers. You don't need to apologize for that. So here's what we're gonna focus on instead.

Rather than arriving at the same time every week and forcing yourself to do that, I wanna invite you or encourage you to arrive with value every time you show up. Because if you arrive with value, you will always be welcome. Over the past year, I have really been struck by a few creators who show up in my inbox super randomly. Like, I never know when they're gonna be there. I never know how many emails I'm gonna get.

I never know if this is just a one off or a sequence that they're starting, but every time they're there, they provide so much value. They're saying interesting and unique and important things, and I am truly grateful that they took the time to write to me. So I'm always gonna read those emails, and I don't care that they don't come at the same time every week. In fact, the way that they sort of, like, punctuate my normal email inbox rhythms feels delightful to me. I mean, maybe I even like that more than if I heard from them every single week consistently.

Because instead of being consistent in cadence, they are being consistent in super high quality. They are being consistent in value. And I think that that is just as much, if not more valuable than being consistent in cadence in these days. Because with generative AI tools, the reality is that at this point, anybody can press a button and write an okay email. So why force yourself to write an okay email at the same time every week if a robot could also do that?

What a robot can't do is send an amazing email at just the right moment. So that's where I think our focus needs to be in 2026. My email rule here is to find your rhythm and don't force it. Now, I obviously just gave us all permission to not write weekly newsletters, but I also wanna say that if your weekly newsletter works for you, I'm not telling you to stop. I'm just saying that we don't all have to use that model.

And if you're not using that model, then you just need to find your own unique rhythm. What I often tell my podcast clients is that you can post at the same time every week or whenever you want, Because either you are building a loyal audience that trusts you to show up consistently in cadence, or your job is to surprise and delight your audience with high quality and value every time you arrive in their pod feed or their inbox. And I share this to say that you get to choose. I don't think one way is better than the other, and I empower and perhaps even implore you to check-in with yourself and see what feels right for you. If weekly feels good to you, do that.

And if it doesn't, do something else. But in 2026, we are not following arbitrary rules anymore. The only way it's gonna work is if it works for you. So your job is to find a few different things that work for you, and then try those out until you find the one of those that works for your community and your audience. And that goes back to my point about welcoming people, because how you create is all about you.

But what you create also has to be about your readers, your audience, your community. If you want to make money from your work, it can't be just about you anymore. So you have to find a way to create in the ways that work for you and also make work that works for other people. That's why in 2026, we are rule number one, welcoming people to our lists, and rule number two, finding our publishing rhythms without force. Those are our first two rules.

Now let's move on to rule number three. Our third email rule of the year is to scaffold consent and success. Now what does that mean? Even reading my notes on this, I'm like, what does that mean, Amelia? But let me tell you.

Here's what that means. If you are anywhere beyond the beginner level of email marketing, I think that segments really matter. I think we could all be using opt ins and opt outs as on ramps and off ramps to our email marketing. Now this is a little different if you just send a newsletter and you're not really selling things on your newsletter, but if you are ever doing email marketing campaigns, at this stage, I think we need to be inviting people to opt out of them if we're gonna send, you know, multiple emails in a week about something, or to opt into them if we want to know who's really interested in what we're selling. I think that the days of selling everything you sell to your whole list every time are kind of over.

What we wanna do instead is when we start selling a new offering, if we're gonna sell it to our whole list, we wanna invite people who aren't interested in it to opt out. In most email service providers, you can do that through a link trigger or through having a link in your email that either adds someone to a segment or removes them from a segment so that they stop receiving the emails you send to that segment. That's a great way to let people say no to being sold to during a specific campaign. I also think it's gonna mean having more opt ins to sales campaigns. So for instance, throughout last year, I primarily sold the interweb to the waitlist, and so people had to join the waitlist to be invited into the interweb, and I did an entire Clubhouse episode about how well that worked for me and how it meant that I never had to publicly launch.

I never had I didn't have these big boom and bust cycles in my business, And instead, I invited people in off the wait list every six to eight weeks and had this really beautiful sort of rolling admission, which was great for me, but it was also great for my audience or community because they only heard about the interweb if they had asked to hear about it. And even when I wrote to that list, I offered opportunities to opt out and to leave the waitlist every time I started selling. And so I think that this is just the new normal of email marketing. Even a year ago, I wasn't so sure that we were all gonna keep doing this. I was like, can't we just keep it simple and sell to our whole list?

Can't it be that easy? And in some instances, it can. If you have a micro list of under a thousand people, and you feel like you really know a lot of the people on your list, and you know why they're there, and they've opted in to hear from you because they want to buy from you, that was clear when they signed up, then I don't know that you need to build in these layers of complexity. There are moments where you can truly just keep it simple. But for those of us who are trying to grow a larger list, and for those of us who are doing a lot of audience building work, I think, as I said, this is just the new normal.

We are going to want to ask people to opt in to our wait lists and sales campaigns, as well as to allow people to opt out if they don't wanna hear about specific sales anymore. And that's why I called this scaffolding consent because at all these different moments in our email journey, we can let people say yes or no. And when we allow them to do that, that helps us succeed because buying something over email is just a series of yeses. Right? You have to say yes to being on the email list.

You have to say yes to clicking on the sales page. You have to say yes to putting in your payment info. You have to say yes to pressing purchase. And so when you have someone in that process say yes to joining a wait list, that's one more yes they've already said to you. The more yeses they say, the more likely they are to buy.

And so I think that when we scaffold consent for our audience, we scaffold success for ourselves. That's why this is so important to me. Alright. Those are our three rules for email marketing and newsletters in 2026. Let me recap them for you real quick, and then I'm gonna add a sort of fourth secret rule at the end, only for the people who are really listening like you.

So to recap first, our first rule was in 2026, we welcome people to our email list. Again, gone are the days where people put their name and email in the sign up box and then just hear crickets for days or weeks or months. Please set up a welcome email and customize any templates with your email software. That's rule number one. Email rule number two is to find your publishing rhythm and don't force it.

As I said many times earlier, weekly emails don't win some mythical email race. It is important to be consistent, but I think that consistency in value is more important than consistency in cadence. And so if you show up with value every time you arrive in someone's inbox, you will be welcome there. And I'd love to see more people focusing on that in 2026 than focusing on getting an email out the door every week. That's rule number two.

And then email rule number three is to scaffold consent and success. If you are sending sales campaigns to your email list, I want you to be using opt ins and opt outs. Let people opt out of a sales campaign or opt in to a wait list. You will build trust every time they say no, and you will be closer to a sale every time they say yes. Isn't that what we all want?

It's what I want from my email list in 2026. So hopefully that makes sense and feels like something you can implement. Alright. Now that we arrived at the very, very end of the episode, I want to give you my secret fourth rule. And this secret fourth rule is not so much a rule as it's just something that comes up over and over and over again, and I feel like it's worth saying at the end of this episode.

So our fourth email rule is don't stress over your platform. I think that I get more emails about what platform is right for the right person than perhaps anything else that I get emails about. And this decision does matter. I get that. But at the end of the day, I kinda think the only thing that matters is that you find an email service provider that you like using.

You need to like how it looks. You need to feel okay in the process of writing, scheduling, and sending an email there. You need to be able to wrap your head around working with an automation in that system. And of course, there's some functionality that we might be looking for, and we need to take price into account. Those things also matter, But with a lot of the people I work with, if they spent half the time they used stressing over if they had the right provider just sending more emails or better emails, I think that they would get to their goal a lot faster.

And again, this is not a critique of anyone. I hosted an email service provider conversation inside the Interweb last fall, and it was great. And we answered a lot of big questions, and it was important because a lot of email service providers last fall changed all their pricing. And so it was this kind of big moment where we all looked around and were like, okay, am I in the right place? It's good to do that from time to time.

But once you pick your place, once you decide, okay, this is the place for me for now, stop second guessing, and just send the emails. I guess that's really the fourth secret rule. Don't stress over your provider, and then stop second guessing and send the emails. Because at the end of the day, we gotta send them so we can get the feedback and iterate and improve. That's all we can do.

Business is an experiment. There's no such thing as a perfect email or a perfect marketing campaign or a perfect sales cycle. Because even if you make it perfect, it's landing in inboxes that are imperfect. Right? So we're not striving for perfection.

We're striving for consent, value, and trust. Those are really the things that came through from the first three rules. So I hope that this episode has helped you clarify your email marketing or newsletter strategy for 2026. As I said at the top, there are three more episodes full of email advice here on the podcast. So if you want to learn more, you can get that totally for free on the pod feed.

But if you'd like more support with your email strategy or feedback on actual emails you're sending, then you're gonna wanna join the interweb. We have a class that I taught inside of our resource portal called email is magic, where I actually break down the difference between email, newsletters, and email marketing, and I get really specific and simple about it. And then I talk through how to do each one the best to make more money in your business. So that is one of the most popular classes inside the membership. It's one of my favorite things I've ever taught.

Honestly, it's probably worth the entire cost of your membership just to take that class, and then hop into Slack and ask me questions about it. Like, that is 100% worth the current membership cost of $199 per year. So if you want to improve your email game in 2026, implement the things from this episode, go back and listen to the other ones, and join me in the interweb. Again, doors are open this week, and I'd love to see you in there. For now, I am going to go rest my voice because five episodes of one week is a lot.

But until next time, you will see me off the grid and on the interweb.

That was an abridged version of social media by Surfer Boy and Rectangle. To hear the entire song, find Surfer Boy on Spotify or head to the link in the show notes. Thanks so much to them for sharing the song with us, as well as to Melissa Caitlin Carter who sings our theme song that you hear at the start of every show. I'm your host, Amelia Ruby. And if you enjoyed this episode, I hope you will download the free leading social media toolkit at offthegrid.fun/toolkit.

Until next time, I will see you off the grid.