In this exclusive interview with Stripo, Rui Nunes, a renowned expert in email marketing, opens up about his journey into the industry, the trends shaping it, and the methodologies behind his most successful campaigns. Rui also shares valuable insights into the future of email marketing, emphasizing the role of personalization, data optimization, and AI-driven tools in delivering standout campaigns.
Expert
Rui Nunes is a serial entrepreneur whose portfolio includes three digital marketing agencies sendXmail, ZOPPLY, and HOT Leads, as well as many other companies in different fields. He started working with email before the 2000s and never let go, even though people say it's DEAD since then.
Rui loves to pass along his experience and know-how to the younger generation entering the marketing world. He spreads his classes from Lisbon to Barcelona and Bangkok, teaching digital law, performance marketing, email marketing, and marketing automation with AI.
He's also been a board member of the Portuguese Association of Marketing Professionals (APPM), for more than 10 years and empowers local marketers to compete worldwide.
Creative by nature and an artist at heart and soul, learned to love data and numbers by looking at them from another perspective.
The ultimate app: Why email marketing still thrives
Stripo: You’ve had a diverse journey in marketing, from communication design to founding multiple businesses and teaching. What initially drew you to email marketing, and what aspects continue to captivate you?
Rui: My life is a serendipity of events providing multiple doors to open. I choose to open the doors that relate to what challenges me, match my values, and seem right at that moment.
Have I done many things that I regret? For sure, but it’s part of the process. I learned so much from it.
In ’96–97, two Spanish entrepreneurs challenged me to study everything about the best internet opportunities in the United States at the time. After researching a lot using a dial-up internet connection (yes, I’m that old), it was clear that permission email marketing was the way to go.
Even at that time, and before regulation was made to demand it, having the subscriber’s permission was what made the difference between the several companies using email marketing at the time.
It was clear that there was a decline in those using opt-out strategies (adding people without their consent until they would opt out) and in those who collected their consent in the process. That concept was the birth of the largest permission email marketing database in Portuguese and Spanish worldwide. I’m proud of being part of that achievement.
Challenger channels like SMS, social media, direct messaging apps, and even Slack have vitiated the death of email marketing. We are still here and thriving.
At the end of the day, email is what I call the ultimate app. It’s a universal protocol of communication that can be found in any electronic device, even in undeveloped countries. It can be in our latest Tesla model or our smart fridge.
Rui Nunes,
Likewise, it has also become like an internet ID. We use our email addresses to log in, which has become an identification process to work around the web. That’s what I find amazing about it as a channel. It has become pervasive and part of the web as we know it.
Email marketing strategies that deliver: Insights and best practices
S: With your experience leading teams and helping companies maximize their ROI, what do you see as the most overlooked metric in email marketing today, and why do you think more brands should focus on it?
R: The good and bad of email marketing are the same: it’s cheap and works! So, extracting the ROI of email marketing is not that hard.
Having said that, the most overlooked metric I see with email marketing today and from the beginning is their subscribers’ LTV — lifetime value.
To this day, I still remember very closely that when I left the first email marketing company I led, I was checking the analytics, and there were people still opening, clicking, and doing the things that generated money for more than 12 years straight.
I’ll repeat it: 12 years!
Can you imagine how much money those people have generated for us over the years, since we’re paid per email sent or performance-based?
When you have a high number, you can be more aggressive in your investment to get similar people onto your list. Instead of trying to scrape for volume, paying pennies to get unengaged subscribers, you can pay much higher to have top performers every time.
S: Personalization and segmentation have become essential in email marketing. How do you approach creating meaningful, data-driven segments that go beyond the basics, and could you share an example of a successful campaign where advanced segmentation played a key role?
R: Sure. For starters, some segments were not used previously because we didn’t have enough subscribers in those segments to justify developing customized content for them. It wouldn’t make sense because it wasn’t profitable to do it. We would need more critical mass to make it worth it.
With AI, that isn’t a problem anymore. AI can segment two subscribers and personalize emails of one — on the limit — without major human work.
Segments have been one of the best ways to extract the most out of a list, not only from a performance perspective but also to produce more relevant content for each individual. The more relevant we find the email, the more it will perform and the more we will engage.
Some of our best-performing and overlooked segments are based on past behaviors in our web properties and campaigns. Marketers rely mostly on permanent data like age and sources, while behavioral data is often more accurate and less biased.
We have a client in the B2B industry for whom we have email automation ready for those who trigger a set of rules, like visiting the product and pricing pages more than X times. That automation uses different segments with dynamic content to send a super-customized email to engage and close the deal.
Since we activated it, they have attributed US$1.3M in just 4 weeks running. Of course, all the merit isn’t only for this automation, but we’re capturing the outcome of the entire marketing investment using segment-triggered campaigns like this.
S: You bring a unique combination of creative direction and analytical focus to your email marketing strategies. How does this dual approach influence the way you design and execute email campaigns, especially when balancing creativity with data-driven decisions?
R: Let’s say that my creative and artistic side is what’s native.
It comes naturally, even though I tried to develop it as much as possible while growing up and won a series of prizes and praise . . . but it wasn’t paying the bills yet. So, I had to make a decision and develop a side of me that wasn’t natural: the analytical one, if you want.
At first, it was agonizing to look at numbers, do math, and try to make sense of them. However, over the years, it has become quite different. Now, I love to look at raw data and create a work of art out of it. I chose to see it as an art form.
Now, it’s my superpower, which only a few master: the capacity to have an artistic eye for design and understand what the data tells me to build campaigns that work. I’m humble enough to understand that despite having over 30 years in the field, data and A/B testing can still beat my bets.
So, even though my creative side wants to fly and provide out-of-the-box ideas that work like wonders, I also understand that data-driven decisions are the way to go when the moment comes.
Most of my work today involves overseeing the team’s development and creating frameworks and processes that nurture the designers’ creative side while empowering the data analysts to have a say in the final product.
S: Your background includes founding companies focused on digital marketing in different countries. In what ways have you adapted your email marketing strategies for different cultural or regional audiences within these markets?
R: Actually, most of our market resides in the US, UK, and Northern Europe. Spain, Italy, and Portugal (the last one is my headquarters) have a residual impact on my businesses.
There are very different cultural audiences in all of these markets. I’m not only talking about language. If that were the case, it would be easier. We would just need to translate the content, and that’s that. But no! It’s more complicated than that. It’s a different culture altogether. Even within the same client, if they’re international, they struggle, and we’re now comfortable with this.
Rui Nunes,
Each content localization takes a particular approach to that region, culture, and even the purpose of the campaign or newsletter. We can handle this properly because people work for us in every location we address.
We invest in native professionals who deeply understand what works in that location. Furthermore, we currently have more than 350 contractors working around the globe on many projects. Since our inception, our fully remote stance has been a winning opportunity for us, as it has become an asset instead of a liability.
Navigating trends in automation strategies
S: Having implemented marketing automation for numerous brands, what trends do you see in automation strategies, and are there any emerging automation tools or practices you’re excited about?
R: There’s an interesting mix of trends happening. Even though many big brands opt for the usual suspects in the field, like Salesforce Marketing Cloud with Einstein or Adobe Experience Cloud with GenStudio or Target, there’s also a rising trend of big brands ditching all-in-one solutions for something tailor-made according to their needs.
Klarna is the most publicized brand, but I’ve seen a few other brands dipping their toes into a custom-built solution that conveys different solutions, like AI-coding support and no-code systems, to build something completely designed for their needs.
The reasons for this are mainly three:
- It’s cost-saving since you invest in something that you own afterward. There are no monthly super-costly fees, which is paramount for the big brands.
- Tailor-made design and experience: this means they can design something that responds directly to the experience they want to provide their audience.
- Proprietary IP.
And they can keep evolving the tools to respond to future demands.
This opens a new world, and we’re super excited to contribute to whatever solution the clients need in this department.
For medium–smaller companies, we’re seeing massive adoption of API connector tools, like Zapier and Make, to produce complex marketing automation that the regular platforms can’t provide in one solution.
These tools allow us to do amazing things, and they rival the big brands, which usually cost 50 times more.
S: Automation and AI are growing rapidly in email marketing. What role do you see AI playing in personalization and segmentation, and are there any potential pitfalls brands should watch for when integrating AI into their email strategies?
R: We’re at the tipping point of asserting that multiplying the human approach is actually a reality. Up until very recently, only with tools like Salesforce Marketing Cloud and similar could AI be used to create content slots within a newsletter designed for each subscriber — what we like to call hyper-personalization.
With the advent of more democratic access to AI, even for those with smaller budgets, we can now see the rise of hyper-personalization for anyone in the field.
However, email marketing and automation platforms are not developing these features fast enough, as AI is evolving rapidly. To realize the full potential of these technologies, we need to resort to third-party systems that do the heavy work for us.
I see many people fall into the main pitfalls of relying too much on AI and not having a set of boundaries and rules of use. They let AI hallucinate, as we usually call it when it goes freestyle and produces content against brand rules and guidelines.
It’s crucial to provide solid constraints and have multiple testing grounds to ensure that the content generated doesn’t go rogue and provide content that does not work as intended.
S: Do you think the use and training of AI analytics and automation are a trend in email marketing that will gain momentum in 2025?
R: I would say so in our case and the clients we work with. However, this won’t be the case for the majority of the email marketing and automation market. I’m so pessimistic about it because of the lag between innovations and the adoption rate in previous situations.
Even though AMP for email was introduced years ago, only a fraction of email marketers use it regularly. The same is true for DMARC and BIMI on the sender authentication side or for dark mode when the device turns on at night.
I think there’s an urge and a demand to apply it, but most email marketers will only use the ad hoc and manual approach, building content separately on ChatGPT and Claude and then pasting it into the newsletter.
In my understanding, that is more of what we used to do, but instead of a professional copywriter, it will be a machine producing bland content against the competition doing the same thing.
The great potential of AI in email marketing and automation is the ability to produce one-to-one content, both copy and images, according to each subscriber. For example, if the system knows that I’m a rally-racing enthusiast from Lisbon, Portugal, it will produce copies and images according to those data signals.
Sharing knowledge: Lessons from a thought leader
S: Your email newsletter shares regular tips and insights on brand marketing, including case studies. What makes a particular case study or insight stand out, and how do you choose which examples to include to provide the most value for your subscribers?
R: The process is pretty straightforward. A few sources do most of the curation for me, and I also have notification alerts around specific keywords that do most of the work.
My job, then, is to identify what is good enough to be a part of the newsletter.
What makes it good enough?
- Is it from a reliable source?
- Have we seen similar results using the same tactics?
- Does our experience in the market sustain what they claim?
- Is there enough information about what they did to extract value?
- Are the results good enough to inspire others to follow their approach?
- Can our audience learn from that experience with practical examples and tactics?
- Is it different enough from the previous shared cases to constantly learn new things?
It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about a single-creator newsletter or a big corporation with a more complex strategy and tactics. What matters is whether we can learn from it and apply it to our particular case.
That’s why I think everyone, from seasoned email and automation marketers to solopreneurs who have to juggle all the functions, can learn from these experiences.
S: As an educator, you help guide the next generation of marketers. What skills do you consider critical for someone entering the email marketing field today, and how has this changed over recent years?
R: As always, since the beginning of this profession, what’s needed is the high capacity to adapt to the context, the status quo, and how our audience prefers to engage.
Our focus as marketers is to understand our products or services and our audience deeply so that we can communicate relevantly to both parties.
A great email marketer must always be up-to-date with the newest trends and fully understand the basics and best practices.
A critical mind that isn’t starstruck by the new shiny objects is also essential.
It needs to make sense. We shouldn’t jump into every new trend just because it’s . . . new — only when it makes sense for our ultimate goal.
Finally, they need to be humble. After so many years in the business, I’m humble enough to understand that I don’t know everything and that we must try and keep learning nonstop. Things change so quickly that we must always be in the loop so as not to miss the train passing by.
Wrapping up
We are incredibly grateful to Rui Nunes for sharing his knowledge and experience in this interview. His insights shed light on the art and science of email marketing and the mindset needed to succeed in a constantly evolving industry.
Here are the key takeaways from our conversation:
- Personalization is essential — Rui emphasized the power of tailoring emails to individual subscriber preferences, combining zero-party data with creative storytelling to increase engagement.
- Testing unlocks success — A/B testing and iterative learning remain nonnegotiable when refining email campaigns. Rui’s examples demonstrate how even small tweaks can lead to significant results.
- AI tools are the future — while creativity remains crucial, leveraging AI and automation tools can help streamline processes and achieve better outcomes, enabling marketers to focus on strategic goals.
We hope Rui’s expertise inspires you to innovate and refine your email marketing strategies.
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