Email that actually works in 2026 starts with less chaos, not more hustle

Travis Horton doesn’t describe email success as a hack. He describes it as a system. As founder of Brand Avalanche Media, he runs “five online publications” and built them around “email marketing,” but his clearest lesson for publishers is blunt: “It’s better content. You get better readership, better engagement. Advertisers wanna get in front of those eyeballs.” That’s the upside. The other side is operational reality—because if your newsletter machine is stitched together with workarounds, Marianne Maniero says it becomes “this really complicated, complex workflow that is actually detrimental and inhibits their, their performance across the board.” And when that happens, Bruce Pinchbeck argues, you’re not running email like a product at all—you’re just “send the email and it goes out, send the email goes out,” without a clear role for how it drives value, engagement, and revenue.

Newsletters as a product, not a chore

Bruce Pinchbeck calls “newsletters as a product” a mindset shift meant to wake people up from years of treating email as a utility. Too often, he says, publishers set up email “as you first started doing digital publishing,” and even if it has “some iterations over time,” it remains “essentially a distribution platform.” The result is a habit of pushing content through a channel without defining what the channel is supposed to do. Instead, Bruce argues that a newsletter needs “a distinct job,” and the starting point is clarity: “When you come into letterhead, we’re often trying to ask you like, well what is ultimately your goal of this email?”

That question changes everything because it forces publishers to stop chasing surface metrics and start building a repeatable product experience. Bruce’s framing is straightforward: “Email is just a channel, it’s just like pipes and tubes,” and what matters is what you send through it and how intentionally you package it. When publishers ask him how to “increase my opens” or “increase my revenue,” he says those are understandable questions—but “no one at letterhead will ever answer you just definitively off just a quick conversation,” because you have to “understand again, what’s the goals, what’s the objective?” He boils the answer down to one reality that won’t impress people looking for shortcuts: “Content is is how you increase your opens.”

Marianne Maniero pushes that point into the practical day-to-day of running a newsletter people actually want. “The content is about consistency of the quality content and the type of content that that reader signed up for,” she says, because readers arrive with a promise in mind: “I came to you because I had, I thought I was gonna get this from you.” That’s why she presses publishers to get specific about intent: “It starts with the publisher having a, a really clear understanding of the purpose of their product and the value that it brings to their community.” And it’s why she warns against random pivots: “They’re pivoting, but they’re pivoting based on their gut instincts, not on the data that supports those kind of decisions.”

Travis Horton’s version of the same truth is simpler and harder to argue with. When asked what advice he’d give publishers who feel overwhelmed, he doesn’t pretend there’s a metric trick that fixes weak content. “Content is king,” he says, and he cautions that publishers can “get sucked into the numbers,” because “the content has to be good… for them to engage with.” He even points out that chasing open rates can become a trap, because “you can have a poor open rate, but those who did engage… was off the charts with clicks and conversions.” The goal, in his words, is “understanding what your audience wants and… the relevancy of it and delivering.”

Why scattered workflows quietly kill performance

When publishers struggle with email, Marianne Maniero says the root problem often isn’t effort—it’s the patchwork systems behind the scenes. “We definitely see that,” she says. “We see band-aided systems being put together, which slows people down in their efficiency.” It starts innocently, she explains, because teams “start small and they… add pieces on,” but before long “they’ve got this really complicated, complex workflow that is actually detrimental and inhibits their, their performance across the board.” And when the system gets too messy, performance suffers in two directions: “The C-suite is struggling because they’re saying, they’re not saying revenue the way they want revenue to, to come in,” while “the end users or the curators are struggling because the inefficiencies of what the, the company has handed them.”

Travis Horton knows this problem from the inside because he lived it as his operation expanded. The failures didn’t always show up as one dramatic breakdown. “It wasn’t just one thing that was breaking,” he says. “It would be… small things that add up over time and become an issue.” His workaround, like many publishers, was patching: “Our solution… would be duct taping. We would patch things here or there, but nonetheless they would percolate back up.” Looking back, he says, “I don’t think we did a good enough job of zooming out and seeing the bigger picture… instead of the kind stop gap solutions that we were doing.”=

The day-to-day pain came from exactly the kind of repetitive, error-prone work publishers recognize immediately. “Assets… content handoff can be one of those,” Travis explains, describing how curated content lived in a Google sheet and had to move into the sending platform. The cracks came in predictable ways: “One of the things that would happen is that the Google sheet that you’re using is the wrong Google sheet,” or “you had the wrong links,” and suddenly “you’re importing the wrong links and building out to the wrong content.” Even when nothing broke, time bled out of the workflow: “It’s a repetitive task… it may take you 10, 12 minutes” per curated item, and you’re “reformulating an image” and “having to link everything up.”

Marianne says these workflow gaps show up in governance too, not just labor. “You see errors where they don’t have the right permission set for team members to come in and, and, and audit things and, and approve things,” she says, which becomes another reason teams fail to take advantage of tools that could help. “So they’re not really using any of the automations that are really out there and available to them in the, in the industry.” In her view, “scattered workflow is a huge piece of it and it just creates bottlenecks in efficiency.”

Bruce Pinchbeck frames the consequence of this mess as capacity strain—especially for smaller teams trying to run multiple sends. He says Letterhead tends to fit organizations that “are operating multiple newsletters” and have “different distinct patterns of behavior that you’re trying to organize around.” And the signal he listens for is the one most publishers say out loud: “If you catch yourself saying like, man, this is so tedious to put this thing together,” he says, that’s often where a unified workflow starts paying back time immediately.

The metrics that matter now: clicks, engagement, deliverability

If publishers have been trained for years to obsess over open rate, Marianne Maniero says the ground shifted under that habit. “Of all the privacy changes and whatnot, the open rate is, it’s just not a reliable metric anymore,” she says. “It’s a false metric… it’s just not accurate.” What matters more is whether real people are engaging: “A CTOR is unique opens and unique click,” she explains. “I am a unique person, I’m a live person and I actually made a click.” That’s why, in her words, “that is the, the key metric that you should be regularly looking at.”

Travis Horton agrees and uses CTOR as his daily engagement anchor. “The metrics I’m looking at are… definitely click to open rate,” he says, because it shows “what engagement looks like on a daily basis through our newsletters.” He does pay attention to opens, but mostly as a trend line with context: “We know we have seasonality in our list,” he says, and “what the open rates look like in December will look like different in July.” His rhythm is discipline without obsession: “I zoom out and see the bigger picture on a monthly basis,” using “several years of data” he compares “month over month, year over year.”

Bruce Pinchbeck tries to keep publishers from getting trapped by the wrong scoreboard. “People get really obsessed with… list size,” he says, “and ultimately that doesn’t matter.” Why? Because “your list size is often not your audience,” but instead “an entire amalgamation of people that have some idea of what the promise is when they gave you an email.” What matters is whether you’re delivering on that promise and whether engagement behaves like a healthy product. He describes watching ranges and signals: “We’re looking above 30%, 30 50, 60% is like kind of a range we want to typically be in,” and then asking, “are they engaging?” Because when something looks off—“I’ve got this 30 to 60% open and then 0.001% clear”—it can be a sign of deeper problems like deliverability.

That’s where Marianne goes even further than metrics and into inbox reality. “You really need powerful insights to be able to drive the right… decisions,” she says, and that includes “checking your deliverability,” not just whether you sent. “It’s more than just, am I getting into the inboxes?” she explains. “It’s which inboxes am I getting into?” She describes how deep analysis can reveal platform-specific suppression: “Is Google pushing me out at a larger rate than somebody’s some other email client might be?” And she points to the payoff when you fix it: “In a three week period, we were able to get their lowest one… 7% up to 18… up by 11% across the entire organization.”

List hygiene and segmentation: how to grow without wrecking trust

One of the hardest operational decisions for publishers is admitting that “big list” doesn’t mean “healthy list.” Bruce Pinchbeck doesn’t soften the consequences of clinging to vanity size. If you keep mailing people who never engage, he says, “you are just slowly eroding the health of that list.” The damage compounds: “It’s landing in more spam,” and “you’re training Google and, and Apple to ignore your emails because it’s going to… people who are not engaging and not opening.” His blunt summary is the one publishers most need to hear: “So the people who do want it are not getting it.” The upside is that “it is reparable,” but only if the mindset shifts away from bragging rights and toward performance.

Marianne Maniero describes list hygiene as a non-negotiable step, especially during onboarding. “We identify what… problems they might have,” she says, including “have they been doing list hygiene, what is their reputation score look like?” If the situation is risky, she says, “we avoid having them do their first send if their reputation is low, we clean that list.” The practical tool is activity-based targeting: “We have what we consider… smart segments… active openers or active clickers over the past 30, 60, 90 days.” In other words, stop sending to ghosts and start serving the people who opted in for a reason.

Segmentation is where Marianne believes many publishers miss the real unlock. “Most people try to segment based on demographic or GeoMarket,” she says, but “the key interest… is in behavioral segment.” Her approach is to “create segments based on interest and preferences,” then look for performance differences and learn from them. “If… I’ve got low CTOR… in some areas and high CTOR and other areas, why is that?” she asks. “What are these people clicking on? What are their interests?” This isn’t segmentation for complexity’s sake—she frames it as a growth engine: “That segmentation was critical to… engagement but also growth opportunities. Huge for growth opportunities.”

Travis’s own portfolio becomes her illustration. She points out that his brands reflect exactly that discipline, because he’s paying attention to what readers respond to and building around it. And Travis frames the broader principle as relevance: “It comes back to that understanding what your audience wants and… the relevancy of it and delivering.”=

Revenue and margins: why efficiency is a business strategy, not a tech preference

Travis Horton’s revenue logic is the kind publishers can repeat to their teams without translating it into jargon. When asked about profitability, he starts with the same chain that drives audience outcomes: “It’s better content. You get better readership, better engagement. Advertisers wanna get in front of those eyeballs.” From there, he explains why workflow matters financially. “In terms of efficiency and higher margins… it’s time and labor,” he says. “If it takes me more time and more labor to produce the output, that’s going to increase my cost, which means my margins go down.” The reverse is the strategy: “If I can remove time… less labor, then my profit and my margins go up.” That’s what he’s optimizing for: “I’m looking where can I create better efficiencies to improve my profitability.”=

That operational stability shows up not as surprise wins, but as fewer fires. Asked what surprised him, Travis connects it to his earlier comment about the team staying quiet during implementation: “There’s nothing unexpected,” he says, and “that’s the good news.” In his view, the absence of chaos is the outcome.

Bruce Pinchbeck also reframes what monetization means in practice by focusing on what advertisers truly value. Publishers may brag about subscriber counts, he says, but “that’s not what shows up on reports.” What matters is delivery and action: “They need to know who… how many I saw my thing, how many people engaged with my call to action and ultimately like converted.” That’s why he argues the most scalable path isn’t one giant newsletter and one giant list, but a smarter product portfolio: “You might have many newsletters with lots of smaller different list sizes that you’re engaging for more impressions across your portfolio.”

Marianne Maniero adds a practical, publisher-facing monetization view: “We get a lot of people that come in and they… wanna talk about monetization right away,” she says, “but when you peel it back, the content strategy isn’t in place yet.” She warns publishers not to confuse list size with readiness, because sometimes “the list size is not it… not big enough to generate… monetize.” But she’s equally clear that revenue is possible with the right structure and niche. If you’re relying only on programmatic, she says, “you want upwards of a hundred thousand subscribers or more,” but “if you’re doing direct sold… you can have a much smaller… and you’ve got a powerful niche.” Her point is that advertisers respond to clarity: “The more carved out… the niche is really defined,” and “you can charge more for those.” In her view, even a smaller engaged list can produce revenue: “You could have a list as low as 10,000… with a pretty solid CTOR, then you can make revenue off it.”

Travis reinforces the advertiser side of that argument in a sentence that every publisher wants to be able to say with confidence: “Very strong,” he says of advertiser retention, and “the types of advertisers that come to us repeated.”

What “taking email seriously” really means in 2026

When publishers feel they don’t have time, Travis Horton doesn’t tell them to grind harder—he tells them to focus on what actually drives engagement. “You can get sucked into the numbers,” he warns, but “the content has to be good.” The work is not simply sending more; it’s delivering what the audience came for, consistently, with relevance.

Bruce Pinchbeck says the right fit for a modern email operation is often a mindset: teams that are thinking “like a portfolio mindset,” treating newsletters as “one aspect of the ecosystem of ways we make revenue and how we operate and we provide value.” And Marianne Maniero insists the foundation is respect for the reader as community: “I think organizations should think of their subscribers as, as part of the community,” she says. “Do you consistently deliver on that promise of why they signed up for you… to begin with?” If publishers do that—while tightening workflows, measuring real engagement, and running email as a product—the result is the kind of repeatable performance advertisers will keep paying for, because, as Travis puts it, “advertisers wanna get in front of those eyeballs.”