New Rules for Email That Actually Convert

From: Selling Signals Newsletter

Date: October 15, 2025

Oct 15, 2025

Make every send count: Key insights from the latest email forum

Back in 2010, when I started my first blog, most of my content focused on traveling and attending professional conferences that I’d recap for my readers.

At that time, most conferences required in-person attendance, but now my email inbox is full of virtual events that you can join from anywhere. The only downside? You can’t attend them all.

So today, I’m going back to my roots to share the highlights from MarketingProfs’ October Friday Forum on Email Marketing, which was full of practical insights for marketers and sellers alike.

From Jay Schwedelson’s demand-gen secrets to Brian Minick’s deliverability framework and Jessica Best’s end-of-year audit checklist, this forum covered how to build smarter, more compliant, and more effective email programs for 2025 and beyond.

If you’ve been wondering how to generate real demand, keep your messages out of spam, and plan for a cleaner start to 2026, this one’s for you.

Marketing Signals

✉️ Is Your Email Subject Line Creative... or Deceptive? - A great follow-up to Jay Schwedelson’s Friday Forum talk, this article dives into how marketers can grab attention without crossing into clickbait. Learn the difference between curiosity that converts and creativity that backfires.

🎧 Flex Your Email Marketing Superpowers with Jessica Best - In this episode of The Agents of Change podcast, Jessica Best explains why better data beats bigger lists every time. Tune in for hands-on advice on list hygiene, segmentation, and how to keep your subscribers engaged.

🧑‍💻 Guru Email Marketing Conference - Missed the MarketingProfs Friday Forum? The next stop is the Guru Conference in November, where dozens of email experts will share what’s next for personalization, automation, and AI-driven deliverability (And yes, DJ Graffiti will be there, IYKYK.)

Marketing Movement

It’s time to audit your email marketing data

Although each session of the forum focused on some aspect of email marketing, Jessica Best’s session, "Email Marketing Year in Review," served as a reminder that Q1 is coming. If you haven’t reviewed your annual data yet, it’s time to put a plan in place.

Specifically, her six-point audit framework is the perfect Q4 exercise to help teams clean up their campaigns before the new year.

Specifically, she recommends pulling anywhere from 12 to 24 months of email performance data into a spreadsheet. Then, manually sort by key metrics: open rates, click rates, hard bounces, unsubscribes, conversions, and revenue.

Once you have the full picture, filter for your top 10 performers and your bottom 10 underperformers. Ask yourself: What makes the top 10 stand out? And what went wrong in the bottom 10?

From there, look for quarter-over-quarter trends. Are certain topics or audience segments performing better at specific times of the year? Did your engagement dip when list size spiked? You might find that the culprit isn’t your content, but rather the quality of your list.

This is why my favorite key takeaway from the session was: Not all lists are created equal.

A permission-based list (from people who opted in) performs very differently from a list gathered through passive means, such as trade shows, event sign-ups, or purchased contacts. When evaluating success, don’t compare your click rates to industry benchmarks. Instead, measure them against your own historical data and list sources.

You’ll often find that your most engaged audience comes from where people chose to connect with you, whether that’s Instagram ads, LinkedIn posts, or your own newsletter form. That’s where your growth investment belongs.

Email audit timeline from Jessica Best, Owner/Chief Strategist at BetterAve

Finally, Jessica suggests visually mapping your customer journey to spot gaps and create a cleanup plan for Q4 through January. If your list is messy, your insights will be too. Start by truly getting to know your data outside of the CRM and let it reveal where your audience actually wants to hear from you.

Sales Action

The battle behind the send button

Of course, even the cleanest list doesn’t matter if your messages never reach the inbox. As Brian Minick, COO of ZeroBounce, reminded attendees in the second session of the Friday Forum, “You can’t sell if you can’t land.” Deliverability isn’t just a marketing ops issue; it’s also a sales pipeline problem.

Here’s how to put Minick’s deliverability framework into action:

Validate before you send.
Use a verification tool like ZeroBounce to check every address in your CRM. This is important because hard bounces don’t just waste time; they can lower your domain’s reputation and block future sends from reaching valid leads.
Don’t just automate checks
Build lightweight, repeatable processes to catch problems early and clean your data. In addition to automatic bounce detection, remove unengaged contacts every 90 days and require list validation before uploading new contacts.
Monitor engagement patterns
Pay attention to open and reply rates at the rep level. If certain messages perform better, share that data back with marketing so that you can build smarter subject lines and stronger campaigns over time.
Align cadence across teams
When Marketing sends a nurture email, give it space before sales follows up. Shared dashboards can help both teams see which contacts have been reached recently and prevent inbox fatigue.
Stay consistent, not constant
One relevant message that lands beats three that bounce. Automate your deliverability checks — SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication — so you can spend less time troubleshooting and more time selling.

Deliverability isn’t just about avoiding spam filters. It’s about showing respect for your buyer’s inbox and making sure your message has a fair chance to be heard.

Sale Signals

📉 20 Email Deliverability Killers Sabotaging Your Sales (And How to Fix Them) - We all love actionable insights, and Autobound provides a tactical list of what kills deliverability (bad links, keyword triggers, malformed HTML) and how to remedy each one, which is perfect for sales ops and reps alike.

📊 How to Perform a Sales Analysis Without Getting Lost in the Numbers - As we start Q4, this guide from Selling Signals co-author, Skylar Barsanti, walks you through quarterly goal-setting, helping you identify your top and bottom performers and adjust your KPIs, investments, and messaging accordingly.

🎧 ZeroBounce and HubSpot: The Hidden Cost of Bad Email Data with Brian Minick - If you missed Brian Minick’s session, you can check out this virtual talk to learn how to use your CRM to keep your email lists clean and your sender reputation spotless.

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Mixed Signals

Sometimes, it’s not your content that’s the problem; it’s your subject line.

At the MarketingProfs Friday Forum, Jay Schwedelson shared what he has learned working with brands, including words that consistently hurt open rates, regardless of the email's quality.

The following list provides some examples of these words and tips on experimenting with your email subject lines.

🚫 “Webinar” – Overused and screams boring. Try inviting readers to an “insider session” or “live Q&A” instead.
🚫 “Unlock” – Sounds like a gimmick. Use natural curiosity, not forced urgency, such as saying, “Here’s what really works.” It feels more human.
🚫 “Act Now” – Classic urgency trigger that turns people off. Instead, write lines that downplay the rush, like “You don’t need this email (but you’ll want to read it).”

Slide from Jay Schwedelson’s talk “NEW Demand Gen Secrets for Email (And More!)”

→ Translation: People don’t want to be told what to do, but they do like to be a part of a conversation. Replace salesy commands with curiosity-driven language that sounds more like a human, and less like automated marketing content (even if it is).

Meet Our Writer

Faithe J. Day, Ph.D.

Senior Staff Writer

Faithe has spent more than a decade helping people understand the tools that move business forward. With a Ph.D. in Communication Studies, she breaks down project management, office tech, and social platforms into practical insights for sales and marketing teams.