MaryAnn Pfeiffer on the future of email marketing: Less noise, better signals, real engagement

Email marketing isn’t broken, but many of the methods still used are no longer relevant. As inboxes grow more crowded and algorithms less forgiving, success no longer comes from sending more, testing endlessly, or relying on outdated automation. It comes from stronger foundations, clearer signals, and intentional engagement that both people and mailbox providers can recognize as valuable.

In this interview, MaryAnn Pfeiffer, Founder and Principal of 108 Degrees Digital Marketing, shares what truly separates high-performing email programs from those of the 2023 era.

Key takeaways

1. Email performance starts with strong foundations. Authentication, clean data, accessibility, and responsible use of first-party data are no longer optional; they directly determine deliverability, trust, and long-term results.
2. Meaningful engagement beats surface-level activity. Opens alone aren’t enough; brands must design emails that invite measurable interaction across channels to protect inbox placement and drive real business outcomes.
3. AI works best with a human strategy. Automation and AI can scale email programs, but empathy, brand voice, and intentional testing turn technology into genuine engagement rather than noise.

About the expert

MaryAnn Pfeiffer is the Founder and Principal of 108 Degrees Digital Marketing, a certified Women’s Business Enterprise (WBENC) and Women-Owned Small Business (WOSB) focused on email-led digital strategy. She works primarily with midmarket B2B companies, nonprofits, and higher education organizations that need scalable, results-driven email programs without overextending their teams.

With over 20 years of experience, MaryAnn helps resource-constrained marketing teams leverage email, automation, and AI-enabled tools to drive practical growth. Her work focuses on building efficient MarTech ecosystems that enhance performance, foster long-term engagement, and scale sustainably. Her expertise spans email strategy, deliverability, and engagement, complemented by hands-on experience in web design, user interface, and social media marketing.

MaryAnn is a Certified Mailchimp Pro Partner, a member of the Mailchimp Innovation Council, and an appointee to the Center for Women & Enterprise (CWE) Regional Council. She is also the author of Precision Email: 7 Lessons in Engagement Strategy and a frequent speaker, webinar guest, and podcast contributor, sharing practical insights on email marketing, automation, deliverability, and brand loyalty for growing organizations.

From VAX terminals to DMARC: Why email still earns its place at the center of digital strategy

Stripo: You’ve spent more than two decades in digital marketing and built a women-owned agency long before it was common. What first pulled you toward email marketing, and what keeps you deeply engaged with it today despite how much the landscape has evolved?

MaryAnn: I first encountered email at the University of New Hampshire using VAX computers to send messages across the lab. It was primitive, just basic commands between terminals, but I was fascinated by the idea of near-instant communication through technology.

Fast forward to the late ’90s and early 2000s, when I worked as a marketing manager in the dot-com space. At a startup with former AOL team members, we experimented with AOL Instant Messenger, early email campaigns, and building online tools. I quickly saw the power of email’s immediacy and its ability to spark meaningful responses.

When I started my agency more than 20 years ago, email consistently delivered a measurable ROI. For B2B clients without eCommerce capabilities, email was the most trackable way to tie marketing directly to revenue. We could send a campaign and clearly measure its impact.

Over time, my appreciation for email has continued to grow. I appreciate how it fosters a one-to-one connection between a brand and its audience, providing a direct line that feels personal and respectful. Email continues to evolve, integrating seamlessly with channels like SMS and enabling true cross-channel experiences.

What keeps me engaged is that evolution. I’ve always been a technologist at heart, and email has become a sophisticated, privacy-respecting platform where strategy, storytelling, and technology intersect. The deeper it gets, the more I enjoy it, and the more opportunities it creates for meaningful, measurable work.

Stripo: You often emphasize that domain authentication is no longer optional. From your perspective, what misconceptions do marketers still have about authentication, and where do you see brands underestimating the long-term risks of delaying DMARC enforcement?

MaryAnn: One of the biggest misconceptions I see comes from marketing generalists who suddenly become responsible for email campaigns, often because someone says, “Oh, you’ll handle email too.” There’s nothing wrong with being a generalist; most marketers working in the B2B and midmarket today are generalists, and with the ability to leverage AI and advancing MarTech tools, budgets rarely justify hiring niche specialists. However, email marketing today requires a technical understanding that exceeds what many marketers anticipate.

Unlike social media or advertising platforms that handle backend work for you, email depends on your own infrastructure. Many assume that their ESP (e.g., Mailchimp, HubSpot, or Klaviyo) handles everything automatically. The truth is, an ESP can guide you, but only someone with access to your domain can properly configure and monitor authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.

When brands delay or skip DMARC enforcement, they expose themselves to serious issues. Without it, legitimate emails land in spam or never reach inboxes. Your domain’s reputation can deteriorate, locking you out of trusted providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

Beyond the inbox: Building future-ready email programs and smarter automation

Stripo: What does “a better email marketing program” look like to you in 2026? Which elements of strategy, tech stack, and cross-channel alignment will separate high-performing brands from those stuck in 2023-era playbooks?

MaryAnn: A better email marketing program starts with the belief that improvement is possible for everyone through the implementation of best practices. 

These include the following:

• technical foundations, such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC; 
• clean, permission-based lists; 
• accessibility; 
• the responsible use of zero- and first-party data.

The tech stack becomes the backbone of that experience. Successful teams integrate their CRM, customer support tools, and analytics platforms, allowing data to flow freely and creating a cohesive experience where subscribers feel known and valued at every touchpoint.

AI now plays a central role, embedded in segmentation, predictive analytics, subject line testing, and send-time optimization. Used with thoughtful oversight, AI personalizes campaigns and uncovers insights that would be impossible to analyze manually. Its real strength, however, emerges when human marketers apply empathy, creativity, and judgment.

Cross-channel alignment ultimately depends on human collaboration. Brands that stand out operate with teams that communicate regularly and include customer service in strategic conversations. And in 2026, privacy is a privilege, not an obstacle. When ethical foundations meet smart AI use, connected data, and a unified brand voice, meaningful progress follows.

Stripo: As a Mailchimp Pro Partner, you see the strengths and limitations of platform-driven automation daily. What automations do you think marketers are over-relying on, and which advanced workflows or data signals are still underutilized?

MaryAnn: I’ve always called automation “the gift that keeps on giving.” It’s one of the few tools that truly helps marketers work smarter. After 30 years in this field, I can say I’ve never ended a day thinking, “I’m done.” Automation gives marketers a way to scale efforts, free up time, and drive consistent results in the background.

However, automation isn’t something you set once and forget. Regular reviews are required to remain effective. The strength of any workflow is tied to data quality. If your segmentation is outdated or the data is incomplete, automations will only perform as well as that weak foundation allows.

In B2B, advanced workflows are significantly underused. Many organizations run short sequences when their sales journeys require nurturing that spans months or years. Similarly, nonprofits often underutilize automation to share their stories and demonstrate the ongoing impact of their donors’ contributions.

Automation is becoming increasingly powerful with the aid of AI. Today’s systems predict optimal send times, identify at-risk subscribers, and recommend the next best message to send. The most effective marketers utilize these tools to uncover valuable insights, ensuring that empathy and storytelling remain at the forefront.

Ultimately, successful brands treat automation as an evolving system, scheduling time to analyze performance and continually refining strategies.

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From testing with intent to redefining engagement in an AI-driven inbox

Stripo: Testing fatigue is a real issue: marketers test endlessly but learn very little. What does truly meaningful testing of new content look like in 2025–2026, and which testing frameworks help teams avoid “micro-tests” that don’t impact outcomes?

MaryAnn: Testing fatigue usually happens for two reasons: People try to test too many things at once, or they test insignificant factors that won’t create meaningful differences. In both cases, the problem isn’t the testing itself, but how the tests are structured and what is expected of them.

For many of our B2B clients, list size is a significant factor. When you have 5,000 contacts, you don’t have the volume for a classic A/B test to give clear answers. Meaningful testing looks less like “test subject line A vs. B on one email” and more like “run a planned series over time and compare different approaches.” You decide what you want to learn, and then commit to testing that theme over a longer period.

Another driver of fatigue is playing it too safely. Teams stick to tiny “micro-tests” like small tweaks in the text and then feel discouraged when nothing moves. Sometimes, you need to test something big enough to actually change how you communicate. That might mean experimenting with humor in a traditionally serious B2B space or contrasting FOMO-style messaging with straightforward brand messages. Those kinds of tests feel riskier, but they’re much more likely to produce insights you can use across email, social media, your website, and beyond.

My advice for smaller lists in 2026 is to:

• plan tests over 60–90 days instead of one-off experiments;
• define a clear hypothesis upfront;
• choose variables that are substantial enough to affect behavior.

AI can help generate structured test concepts tailored to your audience, tone, and goals, dramatically speeding up the ideation process.

The framework itself doesn’t need to be complicated. What matters is having a plan that involves departments that hear directly from customers, and choosing tests that can influence how you communicate more broadly. When testing is tied to clear questions and bigger strategic decisions, it becomes energizing instead of exhausting.

Stripo: You wrote the book “Precision Email: 7 Lessons in Engagement Strategy.” In your view, what is fundamentally broken in how brands approach engagement today, and how has the definition of engagement shifted in the last few years?

MaryAnn: I wrote that book in 2020, and in “email years,” that feels like a lifetime ago. I’m actively working on an update, as our world has changed significantly in 5 years.

In the past, a common B2B strategy was simply to keep showing up in the inbox. If your buyer had a long purchase cycle, the goal was to stay visible with steady, useful content so that, when they were ready to evaluate options, your brand would be familiar and easy to find.

What has fundamentally changed is that “showing up” is no longer enough. Today, if people aren’t opening and clicking on your emails, you’re not just failing to engage them; you’re actively harming your ability to reach them at all. Consistently low engagement signals to mailbox providers that your messages aren’t relevant, putting emails at a higher risk of filtering and spam. The strategy that once worked well can now quietly erode your deliverability.

Thus, engagement has expanded beyond “Did they see us?” to “Did they interact in a way systems can measure?” That doesn’t mean every email needs a hard sell. It means thinking intentionally about inviting interaction: links to deeper resources, options to self-segment, ways to express preferences, and cross-channel experiences.

The opportunity now is to rethink engagement as something that happens across channels, where email is just one powerful part of a broader experience.

Stripo: We’re entering an era where AI writes, segments, and personalizes at scale. Where do you think human strategy still outperforms AI in email, and where are marketers resisting automation simply because it feels uncomfortable?

MaryAnn: AI is incredibly efficient, and with the right inputs, it can produce strong email content, smart segments, and scalable personalization. However, the real difference between great AI-powered email and “AI slop” isn’t the tool itself, but rather the human strategy behind it. The quality of the prompts, the clarity of the brand voice, and the intention behind the message all come from humans, not machines.

Human strategy still outperforms AI in terms of nuance, empathy, and brand feel. A well-built brand has a distinct personality and a clear mission. AI can mimic style, but it doesn’t truly understand the emotional context of your audience or the subtleties of your relationships with them. That’s why anything AI creates for email still needs human review and editing. Email lands in a deeply personal space, and people expect a human conversation there, not something generic or mechanical.

Where many marketers struggle is not with the concept of AI, but with the discomfort of knowing how to use it effectively. If you’re not trained in how to structure prompts, define agents, or guide AI with a solid strategy, what comes out often feels wrong or off-brand. This reinforces the fear that “AI doesn’t work for us,” when in reality, the issue is the inputs, not the technology.

Doing more with less and why a human, transparent email is the future

Stripo: 108 Degrees serves nonprofits, small businesses, and educational institutions, sectors often limited by resources or legacy systems. What have these organizations taught you about building highly effective email programs with fewer tools or assumptions?

MaryAnn: I started my agency over 20 years ago after working in the tech sector, and my earliest consulting work was with small businesses. One of the first things I learned was how often nonprofits, small businesses, and educational institutions feel that technology is out of reach because of cost, complexity, or legacy systems. That perception can really hold them back.

Over the years, I’ve seen those gaps narrow, as technology has become more usable. Platforms such as Mailchimp and Salesforce have made the same technology used by midmarket organizations accessible to smaller organizations, and the platforms themselves have become far more user-focused. What our clients often need from my agency is not someone to “do everything” but a specialist partner who can establish a strong foundation and ensure things are configured correctly from the start.

Once that foundation is in place and teams are trained, many organizations run their programs very effectively. I’ve seen very small teams produce marketing that looks and performs on par with much larger midmarket teams. Modern, user-friendly tools and the right expert support enable their budgets to go much farther, allowing them to build highly effective email programs without a massive tech stack.

Stripo: With inboxes more competitive than paid social in some industries, how should teams rethink content development? Are you seeing any formats, such as long-form storytelling, UGC-style design, or modular layouts, starting to outperform standard modular templates?

MaryAnn: First, I think it’s important to clear up a misconception: email and paid social aren’t really in competition. They’re different channels with different purposes and shouldn’t be treated as an “either/or” choice. Each one reaches people at different stages of their journey, so the real question is how they work together, not which one “wins.”

From a content development standpoint, repurposing is a smart approach. If something performs well on social media, it makes sense to test that idea in email. But don’t assume success will translate directly. Your email audience may be at a different stage of familiarity with your brand than your social audience, so some messages will land better in one channel than in another.

In terms of format, it really depends on the individual brand and its goals. I work with organizations that still use long-form content very effectively as well as others that have successfully shifted away from it. One pattern that has changed is the old “send the full blog post in an email” approach that was common before 2018. That was once highly effective, but today, it often works less well.

What has become increasingly important is scannability. People receive more email than ever and scan quickly, so emails that are easy to skim, visually clear, and well-structured have a real advantage. Accessibility and dark-mode compatibility also matter for all emails.

Stripo: As an agency leader and creative director, you’ve overseen many award-winning campaigns. What’s one controversial belief you hold about email marketing that the industry still pushes back on but that you’re convinced is the future?

MaryAnn: I don’t know that my belief is truly controversial, but many B2B brands still push back on the idea of communicating in a more personal and casual way and losing some of our corporate stiffness. Since 2020, when so many people started working from home, we’ve all become more human at work. Even in business buying environments, subscribers want to hear from brands that remember that they’re talking to people, not just companies. I like seeing B2B brands show personality and even appropriate humor.

The other key aspect is transparency regarding data. Subscribers today know that we have their zero- and first-party information. They’re generally okay with it when it’s information they’ve volunteered. We need to let subscribers know we’re using their data to create a better experience for them, and actually do that so they see it in use appropriately. That transparency, combined with more human, frank conversations in email, is what builds real trust.

Stripo: What’s the main long-term trend in email marketing that will gain strength in 2026 that you’d like to highlight, and what factors do you think are driving it?

MaryAnn: I’ve been hearing for 25 years that email is dead, and here we are in 2026 still sending it. Email isn’t dying; it’s becoming deeper and more technologically advanced. The main trend is the adoption of better AI tools that will deliver stronger results for everyone, from small businesses to midmarket teams, and a more personalized, relevant experience for subscribers.

Before we get there, we’ll see challenges, from poor UI experiences to bad actors weeded out. Eventually, however, smarter AI adoption will become the norm. The factors driving this are simple: cost and efficiency. Anything that increases productivity, reduces costs, and lets teams do more will win. Email will only get deeper and more powerful.

Wrapping up

We’d like to thank MaryAnn Pfeiffer for sharing her experience and thoughtful perspective on where email marketing is headed. Her insights reinforce a clear message: The future of email belongs to brands that invest in strong foundations, respect their subscribers, and focus on meaningful, measurable engagement rather than volume or vanity metrics. 

As email becomes more technically sophisticated and AI-driven, MaryAnn reminds us that human strategy, transparency, and intentional communication are what turn complexity into real value for both businesses and the people behind every inbox.