Getting an email written has never been easier. The challenge is making it worth opening. The difference? It lies in the framing, the relationship and the direction – and those are your responsibility.
21. september 2026
AI can now help with much of the time-consuming work involved in email marketing.
It can write first drafts of newsletters and campaign emails. It can suggest subject lines and create five versions of the same text for five different target groups. It can rewrite a product description, shorten an email, make the tone friendlier or help you find new angles for a campaign. It can automatically send follow-up emails based on your customers' behavior and insert targeted product recommendations into both automated and manual emails.
That can be both good and useful. We find that it frees up real time for marketing teams that constantly have more tasks than they can get through – and the more of the practical work AI can take over, the more time there is for the work that requires people.
The way we see it, if you and your company view email marketing as just another advertising channel, you can easily build an almost fully automated email marketing setup – and that's also the direction we see many companies going.
If, on the other hand, you see email marketing as a personal communication channel that makes real dialogue with your customers and other stakeholders possible, AI and automation can't do the job alone.
In our experience, a lot depends on who takes responsibility for how email marketing builds relationships with long-term value – for the company and for the recipients.
In our experience, the first emails you send to new subscribers are the most important part of your email marketing setup. If you don't get new subscribers used to your emails being worth opening right from the start, that chance rarely comes around again on its own.
At best, recipients who don't think your emails are worth opening will quickly unsubscribe. At worst, they create a rule that moves your emails to a folder they rarely open, or your emails end up among the ones they routinely delete from their inbox without opening.
And once that habit has formed, it's hard to change.
First and foremost, by focusing on relevance. And that work doesn't start with the copy. We often see that this is where the effort goes – and it's rarely where relevance is decided.
When you want to create relevance in your welcome flow, you can start by looking at:
Who do you want to sign up? Do you have a clear definition of the ideal profile for the customers or other stakeholders you want to sign up?
How do you get the right people to sign up? What would make signing up relevant to them – knowledge, entertainment, discounts, competitions – or something else entirely?
What information do you need about your new subscribers?
How can you put the information you have or collect to practical use?
What value can and will you offer that subscribers experience as genuine value?
Once you've answered these questions, you have a foundation for defining (or redefining) your welcome flow.
You can ask AI to answer the questions, but in our experience, without competent people taking responsibility and making decisions, the result is rarely better than mediocre.
Even after you've answered the basic questions, you can't simply hand control over to AI. The next step is to look at where your new sign-ups come from:
Purchases in your online store or new agreements.
Various pop-ups on your website.
LeadAd ads with competitions.
Other competitions, quizzes and the like.
Downloads of different kinds of lead magnets – whitepapers, knitting patterns, etc.
Surveys.
Webinars, seminars, after-work sessions and other events.
The sign-up form at the bottom of your website.
For each type of sign-up, you then need to consider how your welcome flow can best build on the situation your new subscriber was in when they signed up.
You can easily get help from AI to write copy for all these different situations. But it's up to you to decide whether, for example, you want to use a discount to get new subscribers who haven't bought anything yet to place their first order.
These are the decisions that shape the experience – and that pull the relationship in one direction or the other.
We see that it's very common for companies to lose up to 20% of their subscribers every year. If that's also true for your company, it means your entire current subscriber database will have been replaced within five years.
If you want to get ahead of that trend and start making changes to your email marketing setup yourself, our experience is that the welcome flow is a good place to start.
Once you've defined the framework for how you'll create relevance in your welcome flow, you also have a solid foundation for the rest of your email marketing program.
From there, a natural next step is to give your existing subscribers the same experience, adapted to the fact that they're not new.
AI keeps moving the limit of what can be written quickly. But the limit of what's worth opening doesn't move in the same way. As long as that difference remains, the five questions are worth coming back to.