We are all here on Earth to help others, what on earth the others are here for I don’t know.

― W. H. Auden (British-American poet)

The standard advice on lead magnets is simple: offer something free, gate it behind an email address, and watch your list grow.

This used to work. And in some industries it still does.

But the success rate is lower than ever. Answers are at the end of a chatbot. Free, ungated content is abundant.

And even for the lead magnets that bring in signups, they’re often not the ones you want. The new subscribers don't open. They don't reply. They certainly don't buy. You've grown your list and diluted it at the same time.

The problem isn't that lead magnets don't work. It's that too often they’re designed for your business, not for your customer.

And as a result, they often attract everyone, when what you actually want is to attract someone — the specific person who might one day become a customer.

Why free attracts the wrong crowd

Anything free tends to attract two very different groups: people with a genuine problem you can solve, and people who just like free things.

The second group is much larger, and a generic lead magnet is catnip to them. "10 free templates," "the ultimate mega-guide," "500 resources in one download" — these attract collectors, not buyers. They grab the file, never open your emails, and sit on your list as dead weight: dragging your open rates down, costing you money to keep, and — for a brand that believes email isn't free — burning energy on people who were never listening.

A freebie-hunter isn't a lead who hasn't converted yet. They're a lead who was never in the market at all. The goal was never to maximise signups. It was to win customers.

The test: would only your future customer want this?

Here's the single question that fixes most lead magnets. Look at what you're offering and ask: would this be valuable only to someone with the problem my product solves?

A good lead magnet isn’t useful to people outside your market, and at the same time, it’s genuinely valuable to people inside it. It's not trying to appeal to everyone — it's trying to repel the wrong people as efficiently as it attracts the right ones.

"A free guide to productivity" is for everyone, which means it's for no one. "A checklist for switching project management tools without losing data” is only interesting if you're actively thinking about switching — which happens to describe your ideal customer exactly. The narrower magnet will grow your list more slowly but grow your business far faster.

What qualifies a lead?

The best lead magnets do double duty: they deliver value and they signal intent. The act of wanting them tells you something about the person and their stage in the buying journey.

Tools that solve a specific problem

A calculator, a template, an audit, a checklist tied directly to the job your product does. Someone who wants your “digital carbon footprint calculator" is telling you they care about the exact thing you sell.

Content that requires context to want

A guide that assumes the reader already has the problem — "how to improve deliverability when you're sending to 5,000+ subscribers" — self-selects for people at the stage where you're relevant.

Things with a small amount of friction

This is counter-intuitive, but a magnet that asks for a tiny bit of effort — answering one question, picking a use case — filters out pure collectors while barely slowing down genuine prospects. Friction isn't always the enemy. Sometimes it can be a good filter.

The pattern in all three: the magnet is worth less to someone who doesn't have the problem, and precisely useful to someone who does.

Fewer, better subscribers change the maths

It feels like a downgrade to trade a big list for a small one. But as we talk about often around here, it doesn’t have to be. It all depends on your business and your goals.

A list of 500 people who each self-identified as having the exact problem you solve will out-earn a list of 5,000 collected through a generic giveaway, almost every time. They open more, because they wanted to hear from you. They convert more, because they're actually in the market. And they cost less to serve — no dead weight quietly eroding your deliverability, your send costs, and giving you false hope.

This is the same principle behind everything we bang on about: email isn't free, so who you let onto your list matters more than how many. A lead magnet is the front door. It's worth being deliberate about who you invite through it.

The one thing to avoid: over-optimising for volume

“How many people downloaded it" is the easiest metric to celebrate.

But if you focus on this too much it can be easy to slide into making poor decisions. You might start making the magnet broader, easier, and more generic — and you'll fill your list with people who'll never buy.

You want to measure the lead magnet by what happens after the download as well: do these subscribers open, click, reply, and convert at a rate you're happy with? A lead magnet that adds five real prospects a month is worth infinitely more than one that adds 300 ghosts.

Don’t give up, just ask a simple question

If your signups have slowed to a trickle of people who never engage, the fix usually isn't to do bigger giveaways. Go back to the most basic of questions:

• Who is your ideal customer?
• What are they struggling with?
• If they’re in the market, what would they be searching for right now that could really help them?

Let me know if you’re already experimenting here, I’d love to hear about it!

Until next time,

James

This week’s artwork is an illustration of Aeschynanthus speciosus (commonly referred to as the showy lipstick plant because of its bright tubular flowers), by William Jackson Hooker. Originally published in Annales de la Société royale d’agriculture et de botanique de Gand in 1847. Courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Beware the investment activity that produces applause; the great moves are usually greeted by yawns.

― Warren Buffet (American investor and philanthropist)

Every marketer has felt the little rush of their follower count going up. It feels good, and it looks like progress. It’s an audience being built.

But there's an uncomfortable question hiding underneath it: what if that platform changed its rules tomorrow? What if they throttle your reach, change their algorithm, or suspend your account by mistake?

How many of those people could you still reach?

For most social followings, the honest answer is: almost none. And that's the whole difference between an audience you own and one you rent.

The distinction between owned and rented audiences

Of course, you don’t really own your audience… that’s not a world anyone wants to live in.

But you can own the right to have a direct relationshup with each person in your audience.

An owned audience is one you can reach directly, on your terms, whenever you choose. An email list is the clearest example: you have their email address, you decide when to send, and no third party sits between you and the person who chose to hear from you.

A rented audience is one you can only reach with their landlord's permission. Your followers on any social platform belong, functionally, to that platform. You can post — but whether your post is seen is entirely up to an algorithm you don't control and can't appeal to…

The numbers make this stark. Organic reach on most social platforms now sits in the low single digits — a few percent of your followers might see any given post. Email open rates for an engaged list routinely run 30–50%. One of those audiences you built. The other you're merely borrowing, at a rate the lender keeps quietly raising.

Rented reach can vanish overnight

This isn't a hypothetical — every year, businesses that built their entire presence on a single platform learn the hard way what "rented" means.

An account gets suspended by an automated system with no human to appeal to. A platform changes its algorithm and a reliable stream of customers evaporates in a week. A network falls out of fashion, or gets sold, or simply decides your kind of content is no longer what it wants to show. None of these require you to do anything wrong. You're a tenant, and the terms of the lease were never yours to set.

When it happens, the followers don't come with you. You can't export them, you can't email them to say "here's where to find us now”, and the relationship you thought you'd built was always mediated by someone else. When that someone else leaves, so does the audience.

An email list is the opposite. If your provider disappoints you, you export your list and take it elsewhere. The relationship is portable because it was always yours.

Why this matters even more for small teams

It's tempting to think owning an audience is a luxury for later — that first you chase reach wherever it's cheap, and worry about ownership once you're bigger.

For a small team, especially one with a paid service offering, or a charity that relies on donations, I believe it's the reverse. When you have limited time and budget, the last thing you can afford is to pour that effort into an asset you don't keep. Every hour spent growing a following you can't contact directly is an hour rented rather than invested.

A list compounds. The subscriber you earn today is one you can reach next week, next quarter, next year — for the cost of a send. Social reach can reset to zero with every post and any algorithm change. One builds equity while the other rents it, indefinitely.

Social still matters — as a means, not an end

None of this means abandoning social. Social platforms are genuinely good at one thing owned channels can't do: reaching people who've never heard of you. That's incredibly valuable. Earlier this year we posted short-form video every day for a month — so we have the receipts to show for those efforts.

The shift is in what you're using it for. Social is the top of the funnel — the introduction. Its job is not necessarily to accumulate followers; it's to turn strangers into subscribers, moving people from rented reach onto a channel you own.

And this is not easy — almost every social network makes it hard to do this. The infestation of “Link in the comments” across the online world is an ugly result of this desire by platforms to keep you and your audience in their walled gardens.

The practical rule: treat every social platform as a way to earn an email address, not as the destination. A great post that adds 200 followers is nice. A great post that adds 40 subscribers is an asset. Point your best content at the second outcome, and social finally starts working for your business rather than for the platform's.

The one thing to avoid

Don’t build your business on borrowed ground.

Of course, I strongly encourage almost every founder, marketer, and communications person starting out to build an email list from day one.

Don’t tell yourself you'll get to it once the social following is big enough to "convert." That day rarely comes, and if the platform turns on you first, the following you were going to convert leaves with it.

Don’t wait any longer…

Start moving people to owned ground now, while it's small and easy. A list of 200 people who chose to hear from you is often worth more than 20,000 followers you can only reach if an algorithm allows it.

If you've been building an audience on rented land, the fix is simple to start: give people one clear reason to join your list, and one easy place to do it. If you're on EcoSend, we can help you set up a signup form and a welcome email that turns first-time visitors into subscribers you actually own.

Until next time,

James

The beautiful artwork in this edition of EcoSend Weekly is "Weaver Birds” — they are so named because of their elaborately-woven nests. The artwork is a chromolithograph by L. Prang & Co., from Animate Creation (New York: Selmar Hess, c.1898). Contributed by Smithsonian Institution Libraries via the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

As it’s the hottest June day on record in the UK…

Don’t knock the weather. If it didn’t change once in a while, nine out of ten people couldn’t start a conversation.

― Kin Hubbard (an American cartoonist)

Few things sting quite like watching someone unsubscribe from your list after you hit send.

You wrote something honest, you cared about it, and someone read the first line and reached for the bin.

It's tempting to treat that as a failure and sob for the rest of the day.

It’s tempting for some to go a step further — and bury the unsubscribe link, add a guilt-laden "are you sure?" step, or just hope nobody finds the 8pt low contrast text that is hiding your unsubscribe link.

Resist all of that. A clean, easy unsubscribe isn't a leak in your list. It's one of the healthiest things you can offer, for them and for you.

What an unsubscribe can tell you

An unsubscribe is information, and it's honest information. Which is more rare than it sounds!

Someone who leaves was never going to buy, donate, or engage. They were a number that made your list look bigger and your open rate look worse. When they go, the people who remain are, by definition, more interested in hearing from you. Your list gets smaller and more accurate at the same time.

Compare that to the alternative. A subscriber who can't easily leave doesn't become engaged — they become a problem. They stop opening. They start deleting on sight. And eventually, a meaningful share of them reach for the other button: "mark as spam." That one costs you far more than a clean exit ever could.

The deliverability case for letting people go

Ultimately, unsubscribes protect the thing your entire email programme depends on: whether you land in the inbox at all.

Mailbox providers like Gmail and Outlook monitor how people react to you. Opens, clicks, deletes, and — most damagingly — spam complaints all feed into whether your future emails are trusted.

A hard-to-find unsubscribe link doesn't keep people on your list; it converts would-be unsubscribers into spam-reporters.

A single spam complaint does more damage to your sender reputation than dozens of clean unsubscribes. Making the exit easy is, quite literally, a deliverability strategy. You're trading a vanity metric (list size) for a survival metric (inbox placement).

It's also the right thing to do — which is rather the point

For a brand built on the idea that email isn't free — that every send costs someone time, energy, and attention — making it hard to leave would be a contradiction.

Respecting attention means respecting the decision to give less of it. Someone who no longer wants your emails shouldn't have to fight to stop receiving them. Letting them go gracefully is the same value that made them trust you in the first place, applied at the least convenient moment. Your true values often only show when you have a difficult decision to make.

There's a small climate benefit too. Every address you keep emailing out of habit is energy spent reaching someone who isn't reading. A leaner, genuinely engaged list sends fewer wasted emails — better for your numbers and for being true to digital sustainability principles.

How to do unsubscribes well

Making it easy doesn't mean making it cold. A few things that help:

Put the link where people expect it

Clear, visible, in the footer, in plain language. No tiny grey 8px text the same colour as the background. If someone is looking for it, let them find it.

Offer a downgrade, not just a door

A preference centre — "fewer emails," "just the monthly roundup," "only product news" — gives people a middle option between all or nothing. Many will happily turn the dial down instead of off, if you let them.

Honour it instantly and confirm warmly

No “please allow ten days for us to process this request.” Confirm it's done, thank them genuinely, and leave the door open. "Sorry to see you go — you're always welcome back" costs nothing and is remembered.

Never make them log in or reply to leave

Friction here doesn't retain people. It just routes them to the spam button.

The one thing to avoid: guilt

The manipulative unsubscribe flow — the frowning cartoon, the "we'll miss you 😢," the pre-ticked box that keeps you subscribed unless you notice.

This is the email equivalent of a gym membership you can only cancel by phone. It might work for one interaction, but it poisons everything after it.

People remember how you treated them on the way out. Treat the exit as the last impression you'll make, because it is — and because the people seeing it include the ones who haven't decided to leave yet.

We believe in doing this right

Of course, if you're on EcoSend, your emails already include a clear one-click unsubscribe — and you can set up a preference centre to give subscribers a softer option than leaving entirely. See how to set yours up.

Or just reply and tell us your current unsubscribe rate — we're happy to tell you whether it's something to worry about (it usually isn’t!)

Thanks for reading this week. If it wasn’t for you, you are welcome to unsubscribe — I promise I won’t take it personally…

Stay hydrated,

James

This week’s beautiful artwork is "Herons" by Roland Green, featured by W. P. Pycraft in “Birds in Flight”, and published in London by Gay & Hancock in 1922. Digitised and published online by the BHL.

If you're talking to everyone, you're talking to no one.

― Howard Gossage (an American advertising executive, know as the “Socrates of San Francisco”)

Almost everything written about email segmentation assumes you have a large list, a dedicated CRM, a data analyst, and the kind of traffic that makes A/B testing meaningful.

If you're a charity, a small B2B, a growing purpose-driven brand, or really anyone with a few hundred to a few thousand subscribers — that advice was not written for you.

This week I'll attempt to write some advice that is for you.

Why segmentation matters (even at a small scale)

The argument for segmentation is simple: different people on your list have different relationships with you. Treating them identically is a missed opportunity, if not a way to mildly irritate a portion of your subscribers.

A donor who has given three times doesn't need to receive your introductory "who we are" email. A prospect who signed up last week hasn't built enough trust with you to be pitched the same way as someone who has been engaged for two years.

Small lists can actually make this easier to get right, not harder.

Chances are, you know your subscribers better. You have context and you don't need machine learning to tell you that your customers and your latest newsletter readers are different audiences.

Start with one question: why are they on your list?

Even thinking about segmentation can be a lot of work, so before you build any segment, you want to ask:

Why is this person on my list?

In practice, most small lists coalesce into two or three meaningful groups based on the answer:

Leads and prospects

People who haven't bought or donated yet but are curious or considering. They need content that builds trust, demonstrates value, and answers objections.

Customers or supporters

People who have already taken the step. They need content that deepens the relationship, surfaces new value, and recognises them as insiders rather than prospects.

Inactive subscribers

People who haven't opened or engaged in 90+ days. They need their own strategy (re-engagement, or a clean unsubscribe — more on that in a future issue).

If you only ever build these three segments, you'll be ahead of the vast majority of senders your size.

How to tag subscribers without a complex setup

Most email platforms — (including EcoSend!) — let you add custom fields (or tags) to each of your subscribers so you can label them and ultimately group them together.

You don't need a fancy integration to get started. Here are three practical ways to build your segments:

At the point of signup

Use separate signup forms for different contexts. Someone who signs up through your "get a demo" page is a lead.

Someone who signs up through your general newsletter footer might be an interested observer.

The form they came through tells you a lot — and most platforms can automatically tag based on which form was used.

Based on behaviour

Did someone click a link in an email about a specific product or cause? Tag them.

Some platforms let you set up simple automations like "if a subscriber clicks a link in our donation campaign, set the property "interested-in-donating" to true."

You don't need to do this manually, and you can get fancier with tools like Zapier to automate even more.

Based on what you already know

If you're migrating from a spreadsheet or a previous platform, you probably have data — purchase history, donation records, which event someone attended.

Import this information as properties or tags. It may seem like a faff, and can take an afternoon of focus, but it's worth every minute and pays back dividends.

What to actually send each segment

Once you have your segments, the question turns to:

What do I do with my segments now?

The answer doesn't have to be complicated.

Leads and prospects

Focus on useful, trust-building content. Case studies, practical guides (possibly like this one 😉), and answers to common questions.

Don't pitch too hard, too fast — your job here is to ensure your reader feels like they made a good decision by subscribing.

Customers and supporters

Go deeper. Perhaps you could share behind-the-scenes updates, early access, and the kind of honest content that says "you're an insider now."

Show gratitude without being cloying. Show recognition that their support matters and is doing something real.

Inactive subscribers

This is delicate, but you could send a dedicated re-engagement sequence (three emails, in an honest tone, with a very easy unsubscribe). We could cover a lot more here, but that's a whole newsletter in itself.

This is all great, but you barely have time to write one email

The key thing on this whole topic: you don't have to write entirely separate campaigns for each segment every week.

Often it could be a single change — a different opening line, a different CTA, a different subject line — that makes the same core email feel relevant to two different audiences.

One thing to avoid: over-engineering it

If it's not not doing segmentation, one of the biggest segmentation mistakes we see smaller senders making is designing a system so complex they never actually send anything and get into a complete mess.

You know what I'm talking about — eight overlapping tags, a 14-step decision tree, a segment for every possible subscriber combination.

Start with one segment (aside from your main list). Run with it for a month, and see what you learn. Then, if all goes well, look at adding more.

This takes restraint, but the best segmentation system is the one you'll actually use!

If you're on EcoSend and want to set up your first segment, just reply to this email — we're always happy to talk through what makes sense for your specific list.

Until next week!

James

P.S. Next week (week beginning Monday 22nd June 2026), here in London we have London Climate Action Week. We're going to be attending a few events, so if you're around please let me know — I'd love to say hi.

The beautiful botanical artwork in this article is from Köhler's Medicinal Plants — a famous Victorian botanical atlas published in 1883 by Fr. Eugen Köhler. Digitised and published online by the BHL.

It takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.

― Warren Buffett (American investor and philanthropist)

Take a look at most "growth marketing" advice and you'll find many ideas from the same playbook.

You know the ones: countdown timers that reset the moment you refresh the page. Pop-ups that won't take no for an answer. Unsubscribe links buried in 8pt grey text. Confirm-shaming copy — "No thanks, I don't want to save money.”

They’re designed to make opting out feel like a moral failure.

These tactics exist because, in the short term, they tend to work.

Fake urgency lifts click-throughs. Confirm-shaming reduces unsubscribes. Pre-ticked boxes inflate your list.

I suspect you’re reading this, though, because you want to do better than that.

As with many solutions in marketing, in business, and in life, what works in the short-term might very well be costly in the long-term.

The real cost of dirty tactics

How bad are these approaches for you and your audience?

Let’s take a look and establish what each of these quick, dirty tactics actually costs.

Fake urgency

A countdown timer that resets every time someone revisits your site is categorically not driving urgency. It is a lie, and most people now recognise it as one.

The first time someone catches it, they don't just distrust that email or page. They distrust everything you send afterwards.

Real urgency — a genuine deadline, real limited capacity — still works.

Manufactured urgency just burns trust for a short-term bump.

Confirm-shaming

No thanks, I'd rather not protect the planet.

It might shave a point off your unsubscribe rate this week.

But the people who stay are not more engaged. In fact, it’s worse. Chances are, they just got the ick. Annoyed, icked-out subscribers don't necessarily unsubscribe, they mark you as spam.

As you know, getting marked as spam does far more damage to your sender reputation.

The honest version — "Unsubscribe" or "No thanks" — may cost you a few people you were going to lose anyway, but it keeps the relationship clean.

Pre-ticked consent boxes

Adding people to your list via a pre-ticked box at checkout inflates your numbers immediately.

But those subscribers never actively chose you. They're the least engaged people on your list, the most likely to complain, and they’re a compliance risk depending on where they're based. This is what regulations like the GDPR were brought in to eradicate.

A genuinely opted-in list of 2,000 contacts will outperform a pre-ticked list of 10,000 on every metric that matters.

Hidden unsubscribe links

Making it hard to leave doesn't stop people leaving — it just changes how.

Instead of clicking "unsubscribe," they click "spam." One spam complaint does more damage to your deliverability than a dozen clean unsubscribes.

By hiding the unsubscribe link, you’re effectively trapping the recipient. And when they want to escape, they will take the path of least resistance. Make it easy for them, don’t trap them.

What should you do instead?

The pattern across all four of these: dark patterns trade a small, visible, short-term metric — one more click, one fewer unsubscribe, one more "subscriber" — for a larger, less visible, long-term cost.

Sender reputation. Inbox placement. The trust that makes someone open your next email at all.

The alternative doesn’t have to mean passively letting go of growth.

You can still create urgency. Real urgency! But you need to make a genuine case for staying subscribed, and ask for consent clearly and confidently. You have to deliver real value, and know who you’re serving better than anyone else.

The difference is that none of it depends on the reader not noticing what you're doing.

Growth built this way is slower. It may not show up in a weekly report. But it compounds — because every subscriber on your list actually wants to be there.

And that, surely, is better for everyone.

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

― Voltaire (French writer and philosopher)

Most emails arrive in an inbox with three pieces of visible information:

• The subject line.
• The sender name.
• And a short line of text after it — usually around 90 characters — that appears before anyone opens anything.

That third thing is preview text. Also called preheader text.

And in most campaigns, it's either random code-like nonsense, accidentally filled with "[View in browser]", or a pale repetition of the subject line.

Which is a huge waste. Because preview text is valuable real estate — a second chance to give someone a reason to open.

This seems small, why are we discussing it?

We spend a lot of time exploring how to craft great emails.

But last time I checked, most organisations don't have a 100% open rate. If you do, let me know — I'll temporarily remove my hat of skepticism — I'd love to hear what you're doing 😁.

So whether your open rate is 5% or 95%... chances are, many people are never seeing your actual emails.

Most, though, assuming your deliverability is good, are likely to see the three key details we mentioned at the start: the subject line, the sender, and the preview text.

How preview text works

When you send an HTML email, you can include a hidden snippet of text near the top of the email's code that email clients pull out and display in the inbox view.

If you don't set it, most email clients (Gmail, Outlook, etc) will grab the first visible text in your email instead — often something like "Having trouble viewing this email? Click here."

That's not a great first impression.

Done well, preview text does a specific job: it completes the thought the subject line started, or adds a second layer of intrigue, information, or humanity that tips a recipient from "maybe" to "yes, I'll open this".

Example

Subject line: Your best customers might not be receiving your emails Preview text: It won't show up in your reports. Your open rate might hint at it.

Those two lines work together. The subject line creates concern; the preview text deepens it. Neither would be as effective alone.

Four ideas to make your preview text work harder

Here are a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing. In each example, the subject line is first and bold, and the preview text is the secondary line, so you can see them more like they'd appear to a recipient.

1. Finish the subject line's sentence

If your subject line is a question or an incomplete thought, preview text can land the answer — or tease it enough to earn the open.

Example

We've been thinking about sending less Turns out, it's better for everyone. Including you.

2. Add a second hook

If your subject line covers the what, preview text can cover the why — or the who, or the stakes.

Example

17 ways to grow your list ethically Most list-building advice is written for ecommerce brands flogging trainers.

3. Humanise the send

Preview text doesn't have to be a sales line. It can be a voice — warm, direct, personal. Especially for organisations where relationship is the whole point.

Example

A quick note before we go quiet for August James here. Just wanted to give you an important update before the summer break.

4. Set the right expectation

If the email is a specific type — a survey, a story, a resource — tell people. Readers who know what they're getting are more likely to open and less likely to be disappointed.

Example

We'd love your opinion on one thing Two questions. Takes about 90 seconds. Your answers actually shape what we build next.

What to avoid

👎 Repeating the subject line

You've already said that. Use the space to add something.

👎 Generic filler

"Welcome to our July newsletter" is not a reason to open.

👎 Accidentally leaving it blank

Set it intentionally. Every time.

👎 Going too long

Most email clients truncate at around 90 characters. Write short and punchy — the important bit should land in the first 60.

Preview text in a world of AI summaries

Yes we've got to cover the topic of AI briefly...

Gmail and Apple Mail are now using AI to generate short summaries of your emails — sometimes replacing or supplementing the preview text that appears in the inbox. Apple Intelligence (available on most recent Apple devices, like the iPhone 15 and newer), in particular, rewrites what subscribers see before they open based on the actual content of the email, not the preheader snippet you carefully crafted.

This is genuinely new, and it may change the calculus a little for some.

My honest take here is: preview text still matters, for several reasons:

• Most email clients — especially on Android, Outlook, and older platforms — still show your preview text directly.
• And for clients that do generate AI summaries, the summary is often built from your email's actual opening lines.

Which means the best response to AI inbox summaries is the same as the best response to good writing generally: make the first sentence of your email genuinely compelling.

The practical takeaway in an AI world

Don't write preview text as a substitute for a strong opening. Write both.

A great preheader and a strong email intro are complementary — and together, they give you the best chance of landing well whether a human or an algorithm is generating what the subscriber sees.

The inbox is getting smarter. And your copy needs to keep up.

One more thing

I wouldn't normally give such a shout out in the newsletter, but this week it feels relevant...

We've been working on a completely new EcoSend email builder, and we've been working on this exact challenge.

In most email tools, preview text is buried in settings — easy to miss, easy to forget. We've moved it front and centre in the new builder. You'll see it right alongside the subject line when you're setting up a campaign, which means it's almost impossible to skip or forget.

This is a small but mighty change. And we believe it’ll help our users send campaigns with properly considered preheader text. And ultimately get more of their emails opened — a big win!

Learn more about the new email builder

Don't build links. Build relationships.

― Rand Fishkin (CEO and co-founder of Moz)

It's easy to feel like list growth is something that just… happens slowly, to other people, with big marketing budgets.

It doesn't have to be!

Many organisations with large audiences of engaged email subscribers didn't get there through ad spend — they got there by being genuinely useful, specific, and a little creative.

Here are some ideas — some obvious, some not — to get your list growing with people who might actually care about what you have to say.

One thing to not do

Before we get into the good stuff, I wouldn’t be doing my job right if I didn’t explicitly call out this anti-tip first.

I know you know this already, but I still occasionally get asked questions like this:

What’s the best way to warm up a list I’ve just purchased?

🏃‍♀️💨

Do not buy your list. Please! Do. Not. Do. This.

What might seem like a shortcut is anything but: you will have a list of email addresses on your hands... Those (might) belong to people. And those people likely never wanted to be sold to, and never expected to be emailed by you.

You will almost certainly tank your sender reputation by emailing them, and the ethical and compliance grounds are hazy at best.

Oh, and it's often actually illegal if you're in most countries with modern data protection laws.

Just steer clear of buying lists.

OK, now, let’s get onto the real tips… the ones you’re here for!

Start with what you already have

1. Ask your existing subscribers directly. Send a short personal email to your current subscribers asking them to forward it to one person who'd find it valuable. A warm referral is worth twenty cold signups.

2. Audit your confirmation emails. Every order confirmation, donation receipt, event booking, and membership renewal you send is a missed opportunity if it doesn't include a clear, low-pressure invite to join your newsletter.

3. Add a signup CTA to your email signature. Every email you and your team send is a touchpoint. Link to your signup page with a single compelling line — "Get our weekly ideas on [topic]."

Btw 🤫 I have only just started putting a signup CTA in my signature — so far, it’s been really positive. Sending a little “👋 hi!” to anyone who has joined in the last week after seeing the newsletter link in my email signature!

Make the value obvious

4. Name your newsletter. "Sign up for our newsletter" is forgettable. "Join 3,000 people reading The Roots Report — weekly ideas for regenerative food systems" is something people want. Give it an identity.

5. Publish your archive publicly. Let prospective subscribers read your recent issues before signing up. Seeing the real thing converts far better than a generic "we promise to be useful" landing page.

6. Create a lead magnet worth having. A practical guide, a template, a checklist — something genuinely useful your audience would pay for. Give it away in exchange for an email address. The key words here are genuinely useful(!) A PDF repurposing your About page won't cut it. Don’t create a lead magnet for the wrong reasons — you’ll just waste everyone’s time.

Go where your people already are

7. Speak at events (even small ones). A 20-minute talk to 40 engaged people in your niche will often produce more quality subscribers than months of social posting. End with a clear, simple signup CTA. A good tip here is to generate a QR code for your newsletter signup page so people can quickly sign up from your slides.

8. Collaborate with adjacent newsletters. Find organisations or individuals who share your values but don't overlap directly. Offer a swap — you mention them, they mention you. One honest recommendation from a trusted voice beats an ad any day!

9. Show up in communities. Whether that's a Slack group, a Discord, a LinkedIn community, or a local WhatsApp — be a genuinely useful participant first. Add a link to your newsletter in your bio or profile. Never spam — don’t be “that guy” asking for signups before you’ve even said hi.

10. Be quotable on social. Turn your best newsletter lines into standalone posts. Not previews, not teasers — actually valuable content that stands alone. This is quite “top of funnel” but the people who engage will likely want more — and as long as you follow the other steps here, it’ll be easy for them to become a subscriber.

Lean into your mission

11. Partner with aligned brands. If you're a sustainability organisation, find a certified B Corp, an ethical retailer, or a purpose-led brand whose audience overlaps with yours. Co-create something — a guide, an event, a campaign — and both promote the signup page. As long as you are crisp and clear at the point of signup, you can both benefit from more subscribers.

12. Run a small pledge or challenge. "7 days of [thing your audience cares about]" delivered by email is a remarkably effective signup hook. It sets clear expectations, delivers real value, and creates a habit of opening your emails. It also gives an answer to the “Why now?” question for anyone on the fence about signing up.

13. Create a free tool or resource hub. A calculator, a directory, a curated link library relevant to your niche — things people bookmark and share. You could gate it lightly (name + email) or keep it free and include a newsletter CTA prominently.

The obvious stuff (that many people still skip)

Btw 🤫 One thing I always feel nervous about when writing these newsletters is reflecting on how many of my recommendations I’m not following. Why is it always so much easier to give advice to other people than to yourself?! Anyway…

14. Put your signup form everywhere. Homepage hero. Blog sidebar. Footer. Pop-up (yes, tasteful pop-up forms can work — especially exit-intent ones). After every blog post. Don't make people hunt for it, and don’t expect people to sign up the first time they see a signup form. It might be that they need to see it five times before they commit.

15. Run a giveaway or prize draw. This works especially well if the prize is mission-aligned — an experience, a product from a partner, a consultation with you. Low cost, high reach if promoted well. Again, just make sure it’s genuinely valuable, not made-up and a decoy — people see through this.

16. Use your events. In-person or online, events are list-building gold. Collect emails at registration, and follow up afterwards with an explicit invite to join your newsletter. These are people that already showed up for you, so it feels criminal to not make it easy for them to keep up to date for the future.

17. Just ask more often. Seriously — most organisations err on the side of asking far too rarely. No one wants to come across too pushy, and given you’re reading this, I suspect you’re not on that end of the scale. At the end of a blog post, at the bottom of a press release, in the bio of a guest article, in an Instagram story. You have permission to ask. Use it!

The thing that ties all of this together

Every signup method above works better when people trust you — and people trust you when your emails are consistently worth reading.

List growth and list quality are not separate problems. Fix the content and be clear on your audience, and growth follows naturally.

Unlike what many marketing “experts” may tell you, the goal isn't a big list. It's a list full of people who open your emails because they're glad they signed up.

Until next week,

James

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

― George Bernard Shaw (Irish playwright)

Here's a scenario that should unsettle you.

Your best members and donors — the ones who've opened your emails for years, clicked through, and support you repeatedly — are no longer receiving your messages.

Not because they unsubscribed. Not because they complained. They just… stopped arriving.

Arghhh!

Gmail quietly decided you weren't trustworthy enough, and your newsletter now sits in a spam folder that nobody checks.

You wouldn't know. Your ESP still shows the send as delivered. Your open rate has dipped a little, but open rates always fluctuate, right?

This is happening to more charity email programmes than one might think. And now might actually be a good moment to check — before you're deep in a campaign and discover the damage.

Here are five things worth looking at now.

1. Your sender reputation score

Most marketers have never looked at this, and it’s as much an art as it is a science. But you can get a good idea by checking a few tools.

Google Postmaster Tools is a free tool for people who send email at scale. It takes ten minutes to set up, and will show you exactly how Gmail classifies your sending domain — i.e. whether your emails are landing in Gmail’s junk folder.

Google classifies your domain from High to Low reputation, with a spam rate indicator alongside it.

If you're sending from a custom domain (you should be — never send from a personal Gmail address!), go set this up today. A Low or Medium rating means a significant portion of your emails are already being filtered.

The benchmark to know: Google starts filtering aggressively at spam complaint rates above 0.1%. That's one complaint per 1,000 emails. Easier to hit than you'd think if you're mailing to old, unengaged lists.

2. List age and engagement decay

When did you last remove someone from your list?

And when did you last check if anyone has dropped off?

Do you know if there’s anyone who hasn't opened an email in 12 months?

Most charity email lists are carrying a significant amount of dead weight — contacts who joined years ago for a specific campaign, have never engaged since, and whose inbox providers have noticed. Sending to unengaged addresses consistently signals to Gmail and others that your messages aren't wanted.

A practical rule of thumb: anyone who hasn't opened in 12 months should go through a re-engagement campaign, and if that doesn't work, be suppressed. It feels counterintuitive to make your list smaller — we all like the numbers to get bigger.

But a smaller, engaged list will ultimately reach and impact more people than a large, stale one.

3. Your consent records

GDPR turned ten this year. Happy birthday to everyone’s favourite four letter privacy law.

A lot of charity email lists still contain contacts whose consent was recorded on a spreadsheet in 2017, or who ticked a box that said something legally vague like "keep me updated."

Beyond the compliance risk, this is a deliverability issue too. Contacts who don't remember signing up are more likely to hit the spam button or simply never open — both of which damage your reputation.

It's worth doing a cohort review. This may sound sophisticated, but it’s not that hard to actually do.

Segment your list by signup date, and source if you can. Look at engagement rates by cohort. For example, if everyone who joined before 2020 has an open rate below 5%, that cohort might be hurting you more than it’s helping.

4. Your suppression list hygiene

This one is easy to overlook. Unsubscribes, hard bounces, and spam complaints should all be flowing into your suppression list automatically — but gaps creep in, especially in organisations that have switched ESPs, run events and campaigns using separate tools, or collect contacts across multiple systems.

A simple check: take your last 50 unsubscribes and manually verify they're suppressed across every system you use to send email. You'd be surprised how often they're not.

Another way to think about this: imagine you unsubscribed from an organisation’s latest email campaign. And then they email you next week… You’d probably be frustrated!

It doesn’t matter to the contact that you’ve got a messy, chaotic setup across 6 different tools — all that matters is that you stop sending them email.

5. Your authentication setup

SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are quite scary sounding, but they are the technical foundations of email trust. Without them, inbox providers have no reliable way to verify that your emails are actually coming from you — and will treat them with suspicion accordingly.

If you don't know whether these are set up correctly, ask whoever manages your DNS records. If you don’t know who that is… go ask the most technical person on your team — likely the person who originally set up your website.

There are also free tools like MXToolbox that can check your setup for you in seconds. The thing to look for with DMARC specifically: a policy of p=none means it's set up but not actually doing anything protective. You want p=quarantine or p=reject to get the full benefit.

The uncomfortable truth

Email isn't free. Every message you send costs energy, lands in someone's inbox (or doesn't), and either builds or erodes the relationship you have with your supporters.

The organisations that treat email carefully — that keep their lists clean, their consent records honest, and their sending reputation healthy — consistently outperform those that don't.

None of this is glamorous work. But spending a few hours on it now is worth considerably more than discovering a deliverability problem mid-campaign.

If you want a hand running through any of this, we're happy to take a look and chat. Just get in touch with us.

James

P.S. One more handy thing to share this week — our good friends at Wholegrain Digital (pioneers in digital sustainability) just released their new Digital Declutter checklist. You’ll find that most of the recommendations for improving list health also make for sustainability improvements too. Everyone wins!

People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

― Maya Angelou (American writer, poet, and civil rights activist)

A quick hello if you signed up in the last week — particularly to the handful of comms folks from charities and non-profits. Welcome!

You picked a good week to arrive, because today's issue is about something you just received: the welcome email.

Here's the strange thing about welcome emails. They're the single most-opened, most-read, most-clicked email most organisations send.

The reader has just signed up! Their interest is at the highest point it will ever be. They're paying attention in a way they almost never will again.

And yet most organisations — charities especially — answer that moment with an auto-reply that reads like a receipt.

Surely the humble welcome email deserves better treatment than that?!

Why are welcome emails so important?

It's the one email they might actually read

Open rates on welcome emails are routinely 3–4× higher than the rest of your programme. If you have one shot to make a first impression, this is it. And as with all first impressions, you only get one.

They're often looking for clarity and confirmation that what they've just signed up for is indeed what they think they've just signed up for.

Treat it like the most important email of the year, because for that subscriber, it is.

It sets the cadence for everything after

Whatever your welcome email feels like, that's what the reader now expects every subsequent email to feel like.

A rough, rushed, templated message trains the recipient to ignore the next one. A warm, personal one trains them to open it.

It's where trust starts (or doesn't)

The first email is probably not the moment to ask for anything. It's a moment to give.

A welcome email that immediately asks for a donation, a share, or an upgrade reads exactly like the bad first date who talks about themselves the whole time.

The senders who win the long game use this moment to show, not sell.

Five things you can do this week

Take your welcome email from good to great by trying a few of these steps out.

1. Send it within the hour, not the day

Momentum matters.

If someone signs up at 11am on Monday and they next hear from you on Thursday, the spark is gone.

People are busy, and your emails are likely not the only thing going on in their day. Aim to send your welcome email within minutes of signup.

2. Sound like a person, not a system

Send it from a real name and a real email address.

Open with "Hi [first name]" not "Dear Valued Subscriber." If you don't have reliable data for this, then don't even try — nothing screams "robotic" like a poorly automated and badly personalised template.

Sign it as yourself (yes, you, a real human). And if recipients can't reply to the address, that's not a great sign. A welcome email that can't be replied to isn't really a welcome.

3. Tell them what to expect

How often will you send future emails?

What will they be about? When does the next one land?

A two-sentence "here's what you've signed up for" removes the small anxiety every new subscriber feels and dramatically reduces early unsubscribes.

4. Don't ask for anything

Don’t squander this moment by asking for a donation.

Or a share. Or a survey. Or a follow on LinkedIn.

The first email is for them, not for you.

There will be plenty of time to ask later — and this is an opportunity to build trust and mutual respect. Don’t be a nuisance by over-asking at every single opportunity.

5. Give them your best thing

Surface one piece of work you're proud of — a story, an essay, a campaign, or a customer's words about what you do.

Something that says "this is what we're really about." A welcome email that delivers something the reader wants to forward is a welcome email that did its job.

A small challenge

Sign up to your email list as a new subscriber this week.

Read your welcome email in your own inbox.

This alone could give a lot of insight. Did you receive it? Did it arrive quickly? Did it land in spam?

If you only ask one more question, try this:

Would I want to read the next email from these people?

If the answer is "not sure," you have your work for the week!

The best welcome emails don't try to do everything. Keep it simple. Instead, just try to make the reader glad they signed up. Everything downstream — opens, clicks, donations, retention — starts there.

Until next week,

James

P.S. Over the last few weeks we've discussed accessibility, CTAs, email weight, design, donations, and now welcomes. Same thread running through all of them: respect the reader, especially when they're paying the most attention. If you have made some changes, hit reply and let me know what you've found so far.

People do not give to causes. They give to people with causes.

― Jerold Panas (fundraising and philanthropy expert)

A few weeks ago we had the London Marathon.

For those of you in the UK, whether you ran it, sponsored a friend who did, or just received a donation request or two — you've had a front-row seat to fundraising at full intensity.

Even if you’re not in London, you've likely received a donation request. Some can motivate you to give, but most don’t.

Today we're going to talk about why — what makes someone take action? And why do most requests just get ignored?

This edition of EcoSend Weekly is primarily for anyone running email for a charity or non-profit — but it's just as useful if you've ever:

• asked friends to chip in for your kid's school
• asked around for a donation for your mate's bike ride
• tried to raise awareness for a cause you care about
• or asked just about anyone for anything.

They share the same principles, we're just operating in different contexts.

Asking is hard

Donation emails are some of the hardest emails to write.

You're asking someone for money — often someone you've never met, often with no incentive directly for you or the recipient.

Many fundraising emails fall into the same traps, like leading with statistics, and speaking in the third person — "the charity," "our beneficiaries," "we."

They bury the ask in paragraph four, and offer the reader minimal guidance on what to donate, with five different links to take action on.

From speaking with countless charities and non-profits, we know that the emails that work do the opposite.

What makes a good donation email?

Good donation emails tend to have a few things things in common:

They lead with a personal story

The brain struggles to process "12 million people in need" — but it does process "Amina, who walks four miles each morning before school to fetch water."

The story and the specificity can be felt, while statistics often just get nodded at.

They use 'you' more than 'we'

Read your last appeal and count the pronouns. If "we" outnumbers "you," you're talking about yourself when you should be talking to the reader.

The donation isn't about your organisation — it's about what the reader makes possible.

They make the ask concrete

"£15 funds a week of school meals" beats "donate what you can" every time.

A specific amount tied to a specific outcome turns a fuzzy request into a clear transaction.

Five things to try in your next email

The great thing about these tips is they don't require a new budget, a new channel, or even more time. You can try these out for your next send.

1. Open with a story, not a statement

Name a person. Set the scene. Give a sensory detail the reader can picture.

If your first sentence could appear word-for-word on your "About Us" page, rewrite it.

2. Ask in the first 100 words

Don't bury the donate link in paragraph six. While it’s a good idea to always finish the email with an ask, make it easy for the reader to give early.

Don’t hide the ask — if the reader opened the email, they’re already interested enough to learn more, so capture that intent.

3. Tie the amount to the impact

"£25 = one month of clean water for a family" does so much more work for the reader than a blank donation field. You might want to pick three amounts, label what each one does, and let the reader self-select.

By placing this in the email itself, you can remove a huge amount of uncertainty for the recipient, and significantly increase click-throughs to your donation page.

4. Close the loop before the next ask

Before your next appeal, send a "here's what your last gift did" email. Donors who see impact are far more likely to give again.

Again, the story element can build here too — finding a way to thread together different emails with a great narrative can really build trust.

5. Simplify the template, and send it from a real person

Take off your “marketer hat”. Strip the template. Strip the banner. Send it as if you'd written it yourself, to one person, on a Tuesday morning.

Your recipients are busy and chaotic — giving them clarity in the form of a clear, well-written, easy-to-read email is a brilliant chance to actually get their attention.

One small challenge

Take your next fundraising email and rewrite just the first sentence. Replace the statistic with a name. Then watch what happens to clicks, replies, and donations.

The hardest emails to write can also be the most honest. The reader likely knows what you're asking for, so it’s your job to earn it.

Until next week,

James

P.S. If you run email for a charity or non-profit and want a fresh pair of eyes on your next donation appeal, send us a draft. I’d love to see what you’ve done and I'll send notes back personally on any ideas / suggestions.

Good design is as little design as possible.

― Dieter Rams (German industrial designer)

Open your last campaign. Now open a more from your favourite brands and writers. Look at them side by side for ten seconds.

What are the differences?

Colour? Fonts? Fancy graphics? Maybe.

Or is it something harder to pin down? A sense of restraint, hierarchy, and care.

Good email design is often hard to explicitly describe. As the kids might say… it’s sometimes just a vibe.

But how do you give your email a vibe? And a good one at that?

Many marketers treat design as decoration: some polish you add at the end. But design is often what determines whether someone reads your email at all. It can be the difference between an email that gets binned and one that sells.

Now, there are many ugly emails that do well too, thanks to their exceptionally good content.

But even if your content is Godin-level, it won’t hurt to package it up in an email that enticed the recipient to actually read it.

If ugly emails do well, does design really matter?

Three reasons it matters more than people think:

Design is the first read. Before anyone parses a sentence, they often scan the shape of the email. Headers, spacing, image placement — these tell the reader “this is worth my time” or “this is junk.” That judgement can happens in less than a second.

Design carries your brand. Your visual choices say as much about who you are as your copy does. A cluttered email signals a cluttered company. A calm one can signal confidence.

Design drives clicks. Hierarchy is the difference between one obvious next step and a wall of links the reader gives up on.

Five things you can do next week

1. Establish a hierarchy

Most emails should have one thing that’s biggest. And if there is more, ensure you make the second thing the second-biggest, and so on. If everything is the same size and prominence, it’s hard for the reader to know where to land.

2. Use white space generously

Cramming more in doesn’t get usually more across — it gets skipped. Give each section room to breathe.

3. Limit yourself to two fonts (maximum!)

A heading font and a body font is plenty. Three or more starts to look like a ransom note.

4. Pick 2-3 colours, not seven

A primary, an accent, and a neutral. Anything beyond that and you’re competing with yourself, and rainbows.

5. Squint at it

Pull up a test email in your actual inbox. Lean back, and squint until the text blurs. The shapes and contrast that remain are what your reader sees first. If those shapes don’t help to guide the reader, the design isn’t doing its job.

A small challenge

Take your next email and remove one thing. A divider, a button, a section, a colour. See if it actually gets worse. Most of the time, it doesn’t.

Sometimes in life, the solution to a problem is to take something away, rather than to add.

Until next week,

James

P.S. Accessibility, CTAs, email weight, and design. Our most recent issues are all on the theme of creating better emails, something we’re rather obsessed with. We’re working on a completely new way to craft emails in EcoSend that enables you to master all of these areas effortlessly. If you’d like to try it out, let us know.

The EcoSend team are no strangers to The Paddock, a wetlands conservation site near Tottenham Hale.

We first visited back in 2023, when we’d just launched EcoSend(!). Then again in 2024, when the team planted exactly 106 trees (JT counted).

And so we were delighted to return this year. But this time, armed to the teeth with shears, pitchforks, and rakes.

Why?

Our brute force and violence was needed to save our still-budding tree babies from an invasive overgrowth of nettles and other pesky weeds.

Avengers assemble!

(plus Amira 😹)

Back to Izzy

We were re-united with Izzy, the wonderful site manager who has been our patient and welcoming guide ever since we first visited The Paddock.

We were also joined by a team of dedicated (and diligent!) local volunteers.

After a quick intro and Health & Safety speech, we were shown to the armoury and picked out our weapons for the day.

Chris and spear(!)

Weapon selection

Moving a hedge

Before we were allowed to save our tree babies however, we had to move a dead hedge, to widen the verge and create a new boundary.

This involved a lot of heavy lifting and wheelbarrow moving, and after just an hour our 30-something (apart from Amira) bodies were already starting to complain!

Alongside our fellow volunteers, we made short work of the hedge. And soon enough, it was comfortably settled into its new position.

JT inspects a log

The battle begins

After finishing off the hedge and a few other odd-jobs, we broke for a quick lunch then regathered for the main task of the day. Defending our trees!

Izzy guided us to the plot where we had planted the tree babies back in 2024. But due to the massive weed overgrowth, it was clear to see they were struggling.

Weeds, nettles, all growing at turbo-speed and competing with our poor little ones for sunlight and nutrients.

After a quick talk by Izzy on best practice for felling the weeds, we eagerly got to work!

Izzy vs. weeds

JT hauls weed carcasses

And so for the next few hours the battle raged…

We hacked, sheared, and uprooted all the weeds we could lay our hands on.

Leaving a battlefield strewn with dead weeds, and our baby trees finally standing proudly; able to breathe and access the sunlight and soil once again.

Victory is ours!

Our baby-trees stand tall once again!

Weary but victorious warriors

And so the day drew to an end. Our little trees now rescued from the scourge of weeds, and standing proud. Ready once again to grow and prosper.

We had a lot of fun with Izzy and the team, and it was wonderful as always to have a brief break from the laptop screen and get out & about in our local community.

TCV, who run The Paddock, are a lovely organisation who do great work across many conservation sites in the UK.

You can get involved with volunteering at a site near you from the link here.

Stay tuned for our next volunteer day in Q3!

Chris

✌️

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (French writer, poet, journalist, and aviator)

Most email advice focuses on what to put in your emails.

Today, let’s talk about what to take out.

The average marketing email is often over 100KB. Add a hero image, a few product shots, embedded fonts and tracking pixels, and it’s easy to hit 500KB. Send that to 10,000 subscribers and you’ve just moved 5GB of data through the internet — for a single campaign.

That has multiple costs:

• Deliverability cost. Gmail clips anything over 102KB, cutting your footer, your unsubscribe link, and sometimes your main CTA. Heavy emails also load slowly on mobile — and slow-loading emails get deleted faster.
• Attention cost. An inbox is a fragile place. The reader who waits three seconds for your header image to load is the reader who closes the email before reading it.
• Energy cost. As we often, say — email isn’t free. Every byte × every recipient = real energy, real emissions. Trimming 200KB off a campaign to 50,000 subscribers saves 10GB of transfer. With millions of campaigns sent every day, it adds up.

The good news is that the fix for all three is the same.

Five things you can do this week

1. Audit your last send

Take a look at your last email and check the file size. Anything over 100KB is worth a second look. You can paste in the HTML to our CSS Inliner to see its file size.

2. Compress your images

Most images in emails are uploaded at 2–3× the resolution they actually need to display at. Ensure they’re the right size, and then run them through an optimiser like Squoosh, TinyPNG, or ImageOptim (if you’re on a Mac) before uploading. You’ll often drop 70% of the file size with no visible difference.

3. Question every image

Does that hero banner earn its place, or is it decoration? Some of the best indie operators and brands are dropping them altogether.

4. Drop embedded fonts

They bloat the email and fall back to system fonts on many clients anyway. Use a system font stack.

5. Try a plain-text send

Just one. A quick update, a Friday note, a personal question to your list. You’ll might be surprised how well it performs. Plain text feels personal, stands a higher chance of landing in the primary tab, and gets read.

A small challenge

Send one email next week without a header image. See what happens to your open, click, and reply rates. We’ve been doing this more at EcoSend — we’ve seen more clicks, more replies, and no one has complained that they’re missing an image!

Lighter emails aren’t worse emails. They’re often better — for your reader, your deliverability, and everything downstream.

Heck, they’re often faster to create too…

P.S. The last three weeks — accessibility, CTAs, and now email weight — all point to the same thing: you will make an impact by respecting your reader’s time and attention. That’s the whole job, and it’s what we’re obsessed about with EcoSend.

Your offer might be strong. Your template might be beautiful. But somewhere along the way, your call to action has become a pressure point.

You see it all the time: urgency timers, buttons screaming “CLAIM YOUR SPOT NOW!”, and three competing links jostling for attention in the same email.

The result of these efforts is that the reader feels pushed. And when people feel pushed, they tend to push back (or most likely: archive and delete your message).

A way to frame it is to think of a CTA less like a sell, and instead as a door.

Don’t try to shove someone through it. Instead, make it obvious it’s there and worth walking through.

Five ways to write CTAs that invite rather than pressurise

1. One door (CTA) per email

Multiple buttons create decision paralysis.

“Read the post,” “Book a demo,” and “Follow us on Instagram” are a jumble of options for the reader to decide between.

The issue with multiple options like this is that the effort of picking one is too much, so it’s easier to pick none. Not what we want!

Pick one thing you want the reader to do next and make that the only option. If everything is a priority, nothing is.

2. Lead with the outcome, not the action

“Click here” tells the reader what to do. “See how it works” tells them what they’ll get. Readers don’t want to click — they want what’s on the other side of the click.

Write your CTA from their perspective, not yours.

3. Match the temperature of the relationship

If someone signed up three days ago, asking them to book a call might be moving too fast. If they’ve been with you for a year, a quiet nudge could be all it takes. The ask should feel proportional to how well you know each other.

And this also begs the question: how well do you know your reader? One for another day…

4. Read it out loud

Would you say your CTA to someone face-to-face?

“ACT NOW — LIMITED AVAILABILITY” is what a market stall vendor shouts. While appropriate for some, it’s not what a thoughtful, respectful, ethical brand says.

If it sounds aggressive spoken aloud, it’ll feel aggressive in an inbox.

5. Reduce friction after the click

This is such an easy one, but I am shocked at how rarely it’s done.

Click your own button and count the steps between the CTA and the promised outcome. Go on, do it!

Every unnecessary hop loses people. Where you can, send readers somewhere that delivers on the promise immediately.

Good (and bad) CTAs are everywhere

Whether it’s in your emails, on your website, or even in your physical store, CTAs are everywhere.

An effective CTA often feels more like a friend saying: “you’d probably find this useful.” That’s a standard worth aiming for.

If you try any of these tips, let us know how it goes.

It’s often overlooked as a “nice to have” — in website design, application building, and in email.

It’s usually the first thing to go when a deadline looms, and it’s rarely considered a requirement when budgets are cut.

A big misconception is that accessibility is just for a few people’s benefit. When done right, it benefits everyone.

To us, accessibility means everyone can read, understand, and act on what you send.

You might work with councils, in the public sector, in a government department, or in the charity sector. In these roles especially, sending accessible emails is not just good practice — it’s essential.

What is accessibility (in email)?

At its simplest:

Can everyone — including people with disabilities — use the emails you send?

That includes people who:

• Use screen readers
• Have visual impairments
• Have cognitive or learning differences
• Rely on keyboard navigation

Accessible emails are:

• Easy to read
• Easy to navigate
• Clear in meaning

That’s it — we’re not talking about doing anything super special or clever. We’re just talking about making your emails usable.

Accessibility is more important than ever

Accessibility expectations have been rising for years, but 2026 marks a shift.

The European Accessibility Act is now coming into force across the EU.

While it doesn’t explicitly call out “email newsletters”, it does cover digital services and communications.

The implication is clear:

If your emails are part of delivering a service, they need to be accessible.

For those in other parts of the world, this builds on existing obligations around WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines).

In short, accessibility is moving from being a recommended best practice to being an expected standard.

What does this mean for your emails?

We think about this less as a compliance checklist and more about removing friction for your readers.

If someone:

• Can’t read your text
• Can’t understand your structure
• Can’t click your buttons

Then the email has failed — regardless of how snazzy it looks.

5 simple things you can improve today

Chances are you’re doing some of these already, but it’s surprising how often these core principles are overlooked or unknown.

1. Use real text (not images of text)

Screen readers often struggle to interpret images properly. It may seem tempting to put a title in a custom typeface or to embed text into an enticing visual, but doing so in email means putting your text in an image.

Put visuals in as images and put copy in as real text. Avoid combining the two in images if you want to make your emails accessible.

2. Add alt text to images

Describe what the image is for, not just what it is.

• Bad: No alt text
• Better: “An image of the park”
• Best: “A photo of the local park reopening on Saturday”

Without alt text, screen readers will either skip the image entirely or try to interpret the image as best they can — potentially misleading the reader.

3. Check your colour contrast

Light grey text on white might look nice, but it’s unreadable for many.

Aim for strong contrast. When in doubt: make the text darker and the background lighter.

This is a good example where accessibility benefits everyone — not everyone’s devices and screens are the same. What may look good on your brand-new MacBook’s retina display may not show up as you expect on a second-hand, dim, low resolution monitor in the local library.

4. Use clear, descriptive links

Avoid:

• “Click here”
• “Read more”

Instead:

• “Donate to the initiative today”
• “View bin collection dates”

Links should make sense out of context.

And yet again, this is a change that benefits everyone — it makes the email easier to scan, saves every reader time, and even helps search engines understand your content if you also share your email on the web.

5. Keep structure simple

Use:

• Short paragraphs
• Clear headings
• Logical flow

This helps both humans and assistive technologies navigate your email.

When you structure your emails with clarity, it’s like giving the reader a good map to navigate. When planning a journey you don’t want to see every single road and turn before you start, you just need the key direction and main roads — the subject line and second level headings.

Then the reader can jump in to specifics based on what they need to see more of.

Accessibility is for everyone

Accessibility isn’t about improving your emails for a few — it helps everyone with clearer writing, better structure, and stronger outcomes.

For you and your team, accessibility means making your email communications work for all.

I hope you found this helpful, and if you are doing anything more to improve the accessibility of your emails, we’d love to hear about it!

The world will ask you who you are, and if you don’t know, the world will tell you.

— Carl Jung (Swiss psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and psychologist)

It’s never been easier to produce content that looks good.

A few prompts, a few clicks, and you have something that (on the surface) is publishable.

But most of it has the same problem.

It’s ultraprocessed.

Ultraprocessed content: a definition

Content that is engineered to be consumed quickly. Designed to tick the right boxes. Built from combing through millions of articles, boiling them down, crushing them into infinitesimally small tokenised bits, mashing them together, then squirting them out into new words and sentences for your mild, fleeting dopamine spike.

It might look good on the surface, but it doesn’t nourish anyone. It doesn’t stay with your readers and customers. It doesn’t mean much of anything to anyone.

And that’s why, despite producing more than ever, it’s getting harder to be remembered.

We’re not running out of content ideas. We’re not even struggling to execute on ideas so much any more. We’re drowning in what’s been produced — and most of it leaves absolutely no mark.

Provide nutrition in a world of ultraprocessed content

Average thoughts, average practices, and formulaic structures.

Scroll through any feed. Open your inbox. Most of what you see isn’t bad. In fact, it’s often technically excellent, but it rarely leaves a mark.

It has similar impact for me as eating an ultraprocessed nutrition bar. A quick hit that immediately wears off. Unsustaining. Forgettable.

No wonder it’s getting harder to be noticed and remembered.

As the volume of content has exploded, attention has done the opposite. It’s more fragmented, more fleeting, more selective than ever.

You can (ultra) produce all the content you want, but if you don’t share and articulate an opinion, the chances are it’s going to get lost.

We’re in a world where “good enough” is abundant. Where competent, acceptably-written, inoffensively-designed content is the baseline, not the differentiator.

And when everything looks OK, the bar to stand out gets a lot higher.

Understand the appetite of your audience

I believe there are essentially three paths available right now for producing good content:

• You have a genuinely interesting opinion on something.
• You have a unique, owned dataset that you can pull insights and news from.
• You can create work that is truly, noticeably, of a higher quality bar than what is possible with AI.
• It’s great if you can have all three, but let’s assume you have just one: an opinion.

Your opinion is one of the few things that will make your content stick.

Your job is to take your opinion and translate it into something people care about. To distill it down and make it clear — to you first, and then your audience.

This is the hard work now.

Some questions that might be worth asking:

• In your space, do you actually have an opinion?
• What do you believe that most people are overlooking?
• Does your team or organisation align with that opinion?
• Is that opinion really an opinion or is it just common sense?
• Do your customers and prospects know what your opinion is?

You have the kitchen, now work on the recipe

AI has accelerated the production of content into the stratosphere.

But it isn’t accelerating taste, judgment, or the ability to decide what’s worth saying in the first place. Those things still take time and come from people. That’s on you.

The natural temptation is to keep up, publish more, faster, across more channels. That may not be completely wrong, but it’s worthless unless you also take a moment to slow down enough to find something interesting to say.

Because in a world where the default is ultraprocessed content, your opinion might be the only nutrition your audience gets.

James

Co-founder, EcoSend

P.S. We are just reaching the end of B Corp Month — if you’re a B Corp, use BCORP26 to get 15% off any paid plan. Just make sure you sign up before the end of March!

And check out our social channels to see all the amazing B Corps we’ve featured so far — there are some absolute gems here.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (French writer, poet, and aviator)

It’s starting to feel like spring… at least here in London.

The days are a little longer. The sun has made an appearance. And it’s a good moment to reset a few things — including your email marketing.

If you’re like almost any marketer I speak to, your setup has probably become a bit… messy.

• Perhaps you have more templates than you need (with some really stuffy old ones still lingering around).
• Maybe you have some automations running that you forgot about… that are still sending… to… some people.
• Or it could be that you’ve just been trying to do too much in your newsletter template — too many sections, buttons, stories, images, and all else.

I have good news for you: you’re already making progress. Yes, right now. Because (in the words of our good friend Frances Fogel) you are now problem aware. Which means you’re on a path to being able to solve it.

My job today is to make you solution aware.

So here’s a handful of simple ways to spring clean your email marketing in 30 minutes.

1. Delete one thing

Start with subtraction.

An old template, an unused segment, an automation you’re not confident in.

You don’t need to optimise everything — just remove one thing that’s adding complexity.

Complexity has a habit of creeping up on you until it paralyses you. Prevent it at all costs!

2. Simplify your next email

Before you send your next campaign, ask: “Can this say one thing instead of three?”

One idea. One message. One clear outcome.

Clarity tends to outperform complexity.

This isn’t always the case, but it tends to be increasingly true for automated messages. Even a long form newsletter can be improved with restraint and reduction.

3. Check your CTA

Look at your last email.

Was it obvious what the reader should do next?

If there are multiple buttons or competing links, there might be a chance to simplify your next email.

One clear next step is usually enough. Five is probably too many.

4. Skim your last email like a reader

Open your most recent campaign. Go to your inbox, find it in the list, see it how the recipient sees it — the subject line, the preview text. Open it and scroll it quickly.

• Was the subject line tempting?
• Was the preview text compelling, or even set?
• Does it feel easy to read?
• Are the paragraphs too long? Too short?
• Does anything feel sloppy, robotic, or unnecessary?

I find so many improvements (in so many areas of business!) come from experiencing your offering in the shoes of the customer.

5. Give yourself permission to send sooner

A lot of emails get delayed in the name of perfection.

This might seem contrary to what I’ve said so far, but please hear me out!

Instead, aim for:

• Be clear rather than clever.
• An imperfect email sent today rather than a “perfect” email sent in the future.

It’s so easy to delay. But delays are contagious, and can be unpredictable. Don’t be too hard on yourself — consistency over perfection wins my vote.

That’s it (but don’t stop there…)

You don’t always need to do a big overhaul. Just a few small changes can make your email marketing feel simpler, easier to maintain, and potentially more impactful.

And consistency is where the real results come from — if you want one extra tip for free: pop a recurring event in your calendar to go through these steps once a month.

Go on, do it now — I’ll wait…

Done? Nice one.

Enjoy the sunshine ☀️

James

Co-founder, EcoSend

P.S. It’s B Corp Month — if you’re a B Corp, use BCORP26 to get 15% off any paid plan. Just make sure you sign up before the end of March.

And check out our social channels to see the amazing B Corps we’ve featured so far!

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

— James Clear (American writer, author of Atomic Habits)

One of the most common things I hear from marketers is this:

“I know email marketing works. I just don’t have time for writing.”

Writing good emails can feel like a time sink. You stare at a blank page. You overthink the opening line. You tweak sentences. Hours can go by and you’re still not happy with the result.

Over time, it’s easy to make the connection “email = time drain = don’t bother.”

I see this a lot, and it breaks my heart! Email is by far one of the most impactful channels for growing your business, and it’s one of the best ways to truly connect with your audience and customers. AND it’s incredibly cost effective compared to almost any other marketing channel out there.

I have good news for you: sending great emails regularly is possible.

But only with a solid process — one that works for you.

Here’s a simple workflow that helps me write emails much faster, without lowering quality.

I hope you find it helpful, and if you have any tips of your own you’d like to share then please let know so I can feature them in a future issue!

1. Capture ideas before you sit down to write

The hardest part of writing is starting with nothing.

Instead, keep a simple list of email ideas as they occur to you: questions customers ask, mistakes you’ve seen, small insights, stories from the week.

When it’s time to write, you’re choosing from a list — not staring at a blank screen.

I don’t have a fancy 10-step system, I have a note file in Notes on my iPhone.

2. Start with the core idea, not the introduction

Many people try to write emails from the top down.

Instead, write the point of the email first.

What’s the one thing you want the reader to learn, understand, or do? What is the purpose?

Once you’ve written that, the rest of the email often becomes much easier to structure around it.

3. Write the first draft quickly

There’s an old saying: “write drunk, edit sober”…

I’m not proposing you crack out a bottle of wine before every newsletter, but give yourself permission to write a rough (and potentially rubbish) first version.

Don’t worry about polish. Don’t worry about perfect wording. Just get the ideas out of your head and onto a page — physical or digital.

The goal of the first draft is simply to exist.

You can’t improve something that hasn’t been written yet!

4. Edit for clarity, not cleverness

Once the draft exists, the job becomes much simpler: make it easier and more enticing to read.

Shorten sentences. Remove unnecessary words. Break long paragraphs. Make the structure clearer.

Good emails, especially in the marketing world, rarely come from long prose, and definitely don’t tend to pop out of one’s brain on a first draft.

They come from editing well, and breaking things down into bitesized chunks.

5. Write the subject line last

Many people start with the subject line and get stuck immediately.

The subject line is critical — as we’ve discussed previously, it’s even more important than the content of the email itself.

But the subject line’s job is to represent the email honestly — to entice the reader into opening to learn more.

Once the email exists, writing the subject line often becomes a lot easier. I tend to write 4-5 subject lines down as I’m editing my draft.

You can also use the EcoSend Subject Line Generator (for free, no sign up needed) to help you craft a great subject line in a pinch!

Simple steps, no heroics

A good email doesn’t always need hours of effort or a groundbreaking, profound idea.

It needs a clear idea, a simple structure, and a short editing pass.

Done well, an marketing email can be written in an hour.

And as I have found, when writing feels lighter and less time consuming, you’re much more likely to hit send on a consistent schedule.

P.S. It’s B Corp Month — be sure to check out our social channels to see the amazing B Corps we’ve featured so far!

The details are not the details. They make the design.

— Charles Eames (American designer, architect and filmmaker)

As we explored last week: ethical marketing doesn’t mean ineffective marketing.

A great email gets opened, read, and acted on. The difference is how you achieve that.

No messing about this week — we’ve covered a lot on values and philosophy, so I felt it was time for a practical issue.

Here are five principles we’ve seen consistently work, with examples for each.

Reply to let me know what you think!

1. Write for one person, not a list

The fastest way to make an email feel generic is to imagine thousands of readers. Instead, picture one real person — someone you know. Someone like your ideal customer.

Write the email to them.

Your tone becomes clearer, warmer, and far more human.

2. Make the first line earn the second

Getting an open is only half the job.

The first sentence decides whether someone keeps reading or closes the email. Avoid long intros and corporate language.

Start with something concrete, surprising, or relatable.

And then watch as people read on, driven by curiosity.

3. Say one thing well

Many marketing emails try to do too much.

One announcement. Three updates. A product launch. A webinar. A blog post.

The result is usually that nothing lands. Or if the email is received positively, it’s hard to know why. We tend to find the best emails focus on a single idea and make it easy to act on.

One idea. One outcome. One CTA.

4. Respect your reader’s time

People don’t resent marketing emails. They resent wasted time.

Edit ruthlessly.

Shorter sentences. Fewer paragraphs. Make the most of headings to signpost the reader. Remove anything that doesn’t help the reader understand or act.

Good emails are scannable and feel light to read.

5. Make the next step obvious

If someone achieves the mighty task of reading your email, they shouldn’t have to think about what to do next.

One clear call to action is usually enough. Whether it’s reading more, trying a product, or replying — make the next step simple and visible.

The reader should never have to think about the next step.

Bonus tip: Write the email like you’d send it to a colleague

OK the bonus tip is to underpromise and overdeliver, so here’s another one for you… 😉

One of the easiest ways to improve your emails is this:

Write the first draft as if you’re sending it to a colleague.

Not to “your list”.

Not to “your customers”.

Just to someone you know.

You can tidy the language afterwards if you want.

But starting in human mode almost always produces better emails than starting in marketing mode.

None of these techniques rely on manipulation — they rely on clarity, empathy, and respect for the reader.

I wouldn’t be following my own advice if I didn’t give you a clear call-to-action: hit reply and let me know if you’ve got a principle you stick to that we haven’t covered here. I’m always fascinated to hear about the weird and wonderful ways people create great work.

Enjoy B Corp Month!

It’s a rather uncomfortable question to be asking, as someone who places ethics and values at the heart of everything they do.

In marketing, performance and principles frequently feel like they’re pulling in opposite directions, fighting against each other.

Any experienced marketer will tell you:

• Urgency drives clicks.
• Scarcity drives action.
• Emotional triggers drive conversions.

We all know the levers, and we all know they can work.

But just because something works, it doesn’t make it right.

And if something seems well principled, it doesn’t necessarily guarantee the desired outcome.

The lines are blurry

Given you’re reading this, I’m going to make an informed guess: you want to send great emails, you want to grow your audience, and you want to do those things without compromising on your values and ethics. If that’s not you, you have subscribed to the wrong newsletter. Please unsubscribe below.

For me, an ethical campaign starts before any copy is written.

It starts with the purpose and the intent*.

• Why are we running this?
• Who is it genuinely for? (all too often that is not answered with ”the reader”)
• Would we be comfortable explaining our mechanics and thinking publicly?

Ethical marketing isn’t about being perfect. It’s about alignment between what you say and what you do. It’s about balancing short-term results and long-term trust.

Trust compounds over time, while manipulation can erase it in an instant.

We all want the instant hit: you get a spike from urgency, or you can squeeze a few extra clicks from some artificial pressure.

But audiences are sharper than ever — they can sense when something feels engineered purely for extraction. You can sense when you’re reading something with dishonest intentions.

Last time I checked, extraction does not build loyalty.

The search for long-term trust and tangible impact

The brands that stand out aren’t just high-performing, they’re consistent and coherent.

Their campaigns make sense in the context of the company. The messaging matches the behaviour. The incentives don’t contradict the story being told.

That coherence isn’t just ethical, it’s profitable — just on a slightly longer timeline.

Learning from the best

March is B Corp Month, and we’re going to explore this properly.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be speaking to marketers inside certified B Corps — businesses legally committed to balancing profit and purpose — and asking them what makes a campaign genuinely great. What are the best performing campaigns that truly live up to B Corp values?

In the meantime, here’s something to sit with before your next campaign:

If it performs “brilliantly” but erodes trust, is it really a success?

And if it builds trust but doesn’t deliver results today, is it a failure?

More on this in March. Stay tuned to our newsletter, and our social channels.

* In EcoSend we have a field on every campaign: “Purpose”. We hate asking people to fill in extra information, but we kept this field in — it’s there to push you to think about the goal of each campaign. It’s amazing how hard that is to figure out sometimes, but the best performing campaigns always seem to have it filled in. If you haven’t tried EcoSend yet, there’s never been a better time — you can now sign up for free, and there’s no need to enter your billing details.