Not tooling, but discipline: Mark Kruisman on what actually makes email work
Would you agree that a successful email marketer is, above all, a disciplined one? Someone who regularly reviews every automation they’ve set up and makes sure the data they’ve collected is actually put to work for proper segmentation. Someone who keeps an eye on all the metrics but measures real success by impact: by purchases, not just opens. Someone who builds in accessibility while templates are still being approved, not in the final moments before hitting “send.”
Mark Kruisman, an email marketer with 16 years of experience who skillfully combines strategy with hands-on work, shared his thoughts with Stripo on why all of this matters.
Key takeaways
- Don’t collect data you’re not going to use. Once a customer hands it over, act on it. The most common failures are ignoring what people told you and failing to sync data across platforms.
- Automations break down from neglect, not bad design: “still returning data” isn’t the same as “still working right.” The fix is a periodic review of content, images, links, entry criteria, and conversion trends, plus signing up for your own campaigns so you see exactly what recipients get.
- Personalization sits on top of segmentation: it fills the dynamic parts individually. Segmentation groups people; personalization fills the dynamic parts on an individual basis. So, if you have good data, layer it onto the segment instead of treating the two as a trade-off.
- Accessibility belongs in your approval process, not as an afterthought.
- Look at the email’s impact as a whole instead; that’s what tells you how the channel is really performing. Stop measuring success with near-useless KPIs.
Expert
Mark Kruisman is a Dutch email marketing enthusiast, best known for his deep experience with Deployteq, which he has used for over 16 years, since before it was even called Deployteq.
He works as a senior digital marketing specialist at Centraal Beheer, where he is responsible for email marketing, marketing automation, and innovation (both strategically and operationally) across projects related to campaign optimization, retention, and cross-selling. Mark is an award-winning email marketer with experience spanning B2C, B2B, and agency roles.
As the founder of his own company, Mark Kruisman Digital Business Solutions, he offers Deployteq consulting without long-term contracts. He is also a member of the DDMA Email Commission.
All in one channel: Why email won Mark over, and how he works strictly on his own terms
Stripo: What first convinced you that email was the channel worth specializing in, and after 16 years in the field, what still keeps it interesting for you?
Mark: I fell in love with email marketing during my first job as an online marketer at a webshop. I was responsible for all online marketing there, so I did my fair share of SEO, SEA, and content at the time, too, but email had it all. I am quite a nerd, to be honest. I built my first website in my first year of secondary school, and I loved figuring out programming languages and making applications as efficiently as they can be. Also, thinking of new ways to solve problems and analyzing their effects. Playing with content and design. All of that came together in one channel: email. And I never left since.
Stripo: Your whole consulting model is to come in, fix things, and make yourself redundant: the opposite of the long-term retainer most agencies live on. What does that say about how the traditional dependency-based agency model serves email clients, and why did you choose to build your work the other way?
Mark: I combine my own company with my full-time job. My job has priority over my company. And I also have a family, friends, sports, and a social life. I don’t want to be chained to a certain company for a long time; I’d rather stay flexible. So, it works both ways.
Meanwhile, many companies that come to me need help with a specific problem or project. They don’t need someone for X hours a week. They just need help with speed dial. That’s exactly what I do. I come in, I help you out, I show your people how it works, and we can both move on. No strings attached for both.
I can allow myself to work like this because I love my full-time job, and that pays all my bills. All the money I make with my company is extra. So, if there’s a period where I have no work with my company, there is no pressure. When I work with you, that’s because I choose to work with you. Not to make it sound arrogant, but I don’t need you or the money to pay my bills. So, when we do work together, you get a dedicated professional, intrinsically motivated to help you. But on my terms.
I also say no to a lot of requests because they want me to commit to several hours per week or month. Or want me to help out with something really boring. That’s not what I will sacrifice my spare time for.
Stripo: Email programs keep getting more technically complex. Where do you see the field heading when it comes to the split between strategy and hands-on implementation, and what does that shift mean for how marketers like you, who do both, fit in?
Mark: I think it’s very important to at least understand both sides. You can have a good career specializing in either strategy or hands-on implementation. But it’s crucial that you at least understand each other’s worlds.
If you know technical boundaries and opportunities, it’s easier to create a strategy where you know everything you think of is possible. And you will be able to explain it to technical people much better. On the other hand, if you are technical and understand the strategy, that will also give you a lot of benefit, for example, in understanding plans and directions from that strategy.
Stop counting opens: Measuring real impact
Stripo: Open rates have collapsed as a signal since Mail Privacy Protection, yet many teams still report on them out of habit. Which metrics should email marketers actually base decisions on in 2026, which are the most undervalued, and what separates teams that use data as a real competitive advantage from those that just report on it?
Mark: My take would definitely be to stop reporting on opens and open rates. They are no longer to be trusted. It’s good to monitor them over time and see what happens when you spot trend breaks in your data. That could point to a deliverability issue, for example.
But I would focus on a more holistic approach. Try to match the people who get your emails to their behavior on your other channels. For example, if you work in eCommerce, how many people who have received at least one email in the last week have also made a purchase?
In contrast to Apple MPP, which opens all your emails, there’s also a case to be made for people who never open your emails but still shop with you because your name is top of mind (since they see it in their inboxes regularly). It’s better to report on email impact. And how you do that exactly can vary from company to company and situation to situation. The key is to agree with all parties involved before you send out the campaign, so you won’t get into many arguments afterward.
Maintenance over magic: How automation, personalization, and AI really play out in the build
Stripo: Where do automation programs most often quietly break down? And what’s the most overbuilt automation you keep seeing teams pour time into for almost no return?
Mark: They break down over a lack of maintenance. Lots of automations are set up and switched on. And as long as data is still being returned, people assume it’s still running as planned.
You should have a good plan in place that periodically reviews all your automations. Check the following:
- Is the content still right, or should it be optimized?
- Are the images still working?
- And the links?
- Are the selection criteria for entering the automation still doing the right thing?
- How is the trendline in conversions moving?
I have seen multiple examples where, during such a tour along their campaigns, they find out that certain automations haven’t been running for weeks (or worse!) for some reason. I always advise people to sign up for their own campaigns or add their email address to a seed list. In that way, you can really see what recipients actually receive. It would not be the first time people receive their own campaign and be like, “Oh no, is this what people are getting in their inboxes?” By regularly checking in, you can avoid a lot of that.
Stripo: Zero- and first-party data is everyone’s priority now, but collecting more isn’t the same as collecting useful data. What are the most common mistakes you see in how organizations gather it, where do brands fool themselves about how “consented” their data really is, and what does it take to turn it into something actionable rather than just more rows in a database?
There’s no point in collecting data without a plan. You should collect data for a reason.
Mark Kruisman,
Mark: If you want to know if someone owns a pet, and people let you know, use that data. People often don’t mind sharing zero-party data, but people are also quite spoiled in personalized online experiences nowadays. It’s a commodity, pretty much. Easy example: if I share with you that I love summer holidays and hate skiing, I expect you to act as I told you. And do not send me offers to go skiing in February. I see that happening quite often.
A very common mistake I also see is that companies don’t have their data synchronized across their platforms. Another easy example: if my name is known in software A and I get an email from software B saying, “Dear customer,” that’s a missed opportunity.
Stripo: Personalization has been a major theme in your work for years. Where’s the honest line where deeper personalization stops beating good old segmentation? And is there a risk that algorithmic targeting quietly squeezes out strong creative and human storytelling in email?
Mark: That is a good question. In many campaigns, people confuse segmentation with personalization. I don’t think there’s a real line from where segmentation is beaten by personalization.
I think personalization goes on top of segmentation. Personalization, for me, starts where dynamic parts of email campaigns are filled on an individual basis.
Mark Kruisman,
But that’s often not the case. For example, showing me the last five browsed articles will likely be different from yours, just as my first name or my most recent orders would be. That is personalization; it’s only right for me.
However, having an algorithm promoting holidays I could possibly like based on bookings by look-alike customers who have profiles similar to mine could be explained as personalization, but also as a segment. However, if we also add recent bookings and browsing history, we are getting closer to personalization.
Let’s get back to summer holidays. I can be in your segment for “summer holiday lovers” or maybe even “Spain lovers” to make it more specific. If you send an email to all Spain lovers telling them to book their next holiday in Spain, it’s segmentation. However, if you do that while showing my recently checked-out hotels or hotels similar to ones I have booked before, that’s personalization on top of segmentation. If you have (good!) data, use it to your benefit.
Stripo: When you’re actually building automation flows and smart objects in Deployteq, where does AI genuinely save you time, and where does it fall apart the moment real platform logic and data are involved?
Mark: AI saves me time when I want to write a piece of code. For example, in Deployteq, you can use Smarty template language in emails and pages. There are a lot of functions and modifiers available. And although I know most of them by heart, when you want to make a really complex one (using regex, for example), I use AI to write it for me. That saves a lot of time.
Or when there’s a rendering issue in a large block of HTML. I can go by each line of code to find it, but I can also ask AI to point me to the typo causing the error. Again: saving time.
I don’t use AI directly in Deployteq yet because there’s no implementation. I have built connections with ChatGPT in the past, but that was pretty much always for getting quick content suggestions.
I have been working with Deployteq (and the names it had before being renamed to Deployteq) for over 16 years. If I can think it, I can build it. Very fast. I have not been in a situation where AI could beat me to that. So, for now, AI is mostly my useful colleague that saves me time in programming and looking up things that would take me much more time.
Where email is heading: Industry standards, future bets, and writing for AI and humans
Stripo: Everyone talks about accessibility now, yet inbox failure rates are still close to 100%. Is the industry actually getting better, or do teams talk about accessibility far more than they actually build it? And if a team could fix just one thing this year, what should it be?
Mark: Email is, of course, quite hard to get everything right because of the huge amount of different rendering engines that are used to render emails in people’s inboxes. But it’s also about awareness.
For example, it’s not embedded in most approval processes. Often, emails are approved by getting an OK on the Figma design and a final one on a live screenshot of the email. People check if the images look good and the links are working correctly. But I’ve pretty much never seen people check whether all images have alt text or the email’s readability when images are switched off.
Accessibility is still primarily a compliance issue. Marketing people care about opens, clicks, conversions, and revenue. But no one reports on screen reader usability.
Have you ever had your email campaign read to you by a screen reader? Probably not. You will be surprised. Especially if you use a design system or a dynamic template, it probably wouldn’t cost much to make it a whole lot better in terms of accessibility.
Mark Kruisman,
Please keep in mind that an estimated 32% of your readers have either a permanent, temporary, or situational disability when reading your emails.
My advice would be to implement accessibility in your approval process with the following steps:
- Check how the email renders with images switched off. Does it still deliver the message?
- And have it read to you by a screen reader. How did you like the experience?
- And if you are too busy to do this for every email, then at least try to do it periodically.
Stripo: As a member of the DDMA Email Commission, you help shape where the discipline is heading. Where do you see the biggest gap between what bodies like the DDMA push for and what ESPs and marketers actually implement in practice?
Mark: That’s hard to tell. I work with just one ESP for 99.9% of my time, so I can only take that perspective into account. There’s no conflict between what the DDMA pushes for and what they deliver, in my opinion.
The DDMA shares knowledge, provides an impressive network, and has several self-regulating rules to oblige if you are a member. All in place to maintain a certain level of quality and trustworthiness for when a company says, “We are a member of the DDMA.” And the ESPs often follow these guidelines as much as possible, too, because it’s in their best interest to keep their customers, who are also DDMA members, happy.
Stripo: If you had to give experienced email marketers, people who feel they’ve seen it all, three non-obvious, high-impact pieces of advice, what would they be?
Mark: Three things I would focus on are:
- Stop measuring for pretty much useless KPI’s such as open rates or attributing to the last click. Start measuring email impact in a holistic view.
- Stop comparing yourself to industry benchmarks. I can give you loads of reasons why they make no sense at all. It’s much better to compare your performance with your own previous performance.
- If you’re not already doing it, start treating your email campaigns as if you are writing them for your customers, but also for AI. As AI is being trained on email data too, and Gemini will soon be curating your inbox (with more to follow), you must know how to play the game. If Gemini decides your email is unclear or probably irrelevant to the recipient, your recipient might never even get a chance to check it out.
Stripo: Looking 3-5 years out, which shift: technical (authentication, rendering, privacy), behavioral (attention, consent fatigue), or strategic (channel competition) will most redefine email, and where should serious marketers be placing their bets now?
Mark: It’s very hard to tell at this moment. Four years ago, no one had ever heard of ChatGPT or Claude, for example. And look at the world now. But my guess now would be to make sure you get familiar with the new game that seems to be coming up. With AI curating your inbox, summarizing the received emails for your recipients, and maybe even having agents handle the required tasks and calls to action, it would be very clever to understand exactly how these things work and what you need to do to make sure your emails are still interpreted correctly.
I bet accessibility plays a role here, as algorithms also need to understand the contents of your emails. And they have no eyes, obviously.
One of the biggest advantages of email is that no company has the power over your inbox. No algorithms decide what you get to see (in contrast to Instagram or TikTok, for example), and you can’t buy a better spot in someone’s inbox, as you can with paid ads in a search results page.
Mark Kruisman,
We are not yet at a point where AI moderates everyone’s inboxes. I use Apple Mail, for example, and it still can’t even correctly decide which emails should be in which tab (if you use the tabs interface). But it will likely get better. And fast. You do not want to miss that boat.
Wrapping up
Our thanks to Mark for walking us through so many sides of email marketing: automation, personalization, data collection, and accessibility. The thread running through all of it is the same: most email problems come down not to complexity but to discipline: using the data people gave you, maintaining the automations you switched on, and checking accessibility during the email creation process rather than treating it as an afterthought. As Mark puts it, no algorithm owns your inbox, which is why email rewards marketers who understand both the strategy and the build.
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