George B. Thomas
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Let me take you back in time for a minute. I swear, this has to do with emails... When COVID hit, everybody did the same thing. They hunkered down, ate comfort food, gained weight, and waited for the world to tell them what to do next. Everybody was talking about the "freshman 15 LBS/COVID 15 LBS" they had gained.Here's what I did instead. I lost 79 pounds. I walked three hours a day, visited friends' pools, and refused to let the narrative everyone was buying into become my narrative. Not about COVID itself, but how to survive mentally, physically, and spiritually through it.
Why am I telling you this in an article about email marketing? Because the same thing is happening in your inbox strategy right now. Most B2B marketers are following rules that expired years ago, doing what everybody else is doing, and getting the same mediocre results as everybody else.
And just as during the pandemic, the humans who question conventional wisdom and do the opposite are the ones seeing real results.
Here's what's actually working right now.
Open Rates Aren't Dead (You're Just Reading Them Wrong)
Let me say something that might surprise you: open rates are still incredibly valuable. I know, I know. Everybody and their brother has declared open rates dead because of Apple's Mail Privacy Protection and bot clicks.
And sure, the raw numbers aren't as accurate as they used to be. But here's the thing.
When you A/B test a subject line and version A gets a 40% open rate while version B gets 30%, you may not know exactly how many humans opened each one. But you know A won.
You have directional data, and it's the foundation of smarter marketing.
The marketers who threw open rates out entirely? They're now making decisions based on a 3 to 5% click-through rate, ignoring what the other 95% of their audience is telling them.
That's not a strategy. That's flying blind.
Here's what to do: keep using open rates as a comparative metric, not an absolute one. A/B test every single send. Every time you hit send without testing something, you're wasting an opportunity that costs you nothing to use.
Send More, Not Less (Yes, Really)
This one makes humans uncomfortable, so let me set the table first. If what you're sending is irrelevant garbage, then yes, sending more of it will hurt you. But let's assume you're sending content that actually matters to the humans receiving it. The most successful email marketers are those who send more frequently, not less.
When campaigns underperform, the knee-jerk reaction is always "we're sending too much." But in most cases, the problem isn't volume. The problem is relevance.
Here's where it gets practical. Stop treating your entire database as one population. Someone who hasn't opened an email from you in 60 days is a fundamentally different human than someone who opens weekly.
Segment by behavior, not just job title or company size.
In 2026, with AI-powered behavioral intelligence now built into platforms like your HubSpot account, there's no excuse for batch-and-blast anymore. Your CRM can tell you who's engaged, who's drifting, and who's gone. Use that data. And while we're busting myths: unsubscribes are not the enemy. An inflated list is an inflated ego, and it's poison for your data.
When someone unsubscribes, they're cleaning your list for free, they're actually generating an open and a click (which helps deliverability), and they're making room for you to find the right contact at that organization. Google's one-click unsubscribe feature is accelerating this trend in 2026, and that's a good thing. Your list gets leaner, and your engagement goes up.
Don't let nasty grams from three angry humans having a bad day dictate your entire marketing strategy.
Three Quick Wins You Can Implement Today
Here are changes that cost nothing and move the needle immediately.
Front-Load Your Subject Line
Whatever matters most goes first. Not buried at the end. Put your offer or content type in brackets at the front: [Webinar], [Guide], [Case Study]. This tactic is used by companies like Meta in their B2B emails because it works.
Then, tell humans who they are. "Just for HR professionals." "CFOs only." "This is for marketing leaders."
When someone sees that an email was made specifically for them, they almost feel like they're not doing their job if they don't open it. Specificity creates connection, and connection drives opens.
Rewrite Your CTA Buttons
Stop telling humans to "Register" or "Download." Those words are robotic, cold, and they position you as a machine barking orders. Instead, use language that puts the human in the driver's seat: "Save my spot." "I want in." "Watch now."
That last one is key. "On-demand" sounds like a trip to the doctor. "Watch now" sounds like Netflix.
Same content, completely different emotional response.
Use the Play Button Trick
Don't embed video in your emails. It causes deliverability problems and file-size issues, and humans aren't trained to watch video in an email anyway. Instead, take a screenshot of the first frame of your video, add a big red (or branded color) play button right in the middle, and make the entire image link to your landing page.
We are trained to click play buttons. It's practically involuntary at this point. You get the click, you get the engagement, the video plays on your landing page, and you avoid every technical headache.
The Rules That Changed While You Weren't Looking
If you've been Googling "spammy words to avoid in email subject lines," stop. Those lists are based on how email filtering worked over a decade ago. Back then, content determined whether you hit the inbox or the junk folder.
Today, deliverability is driven by your sending reputation and engagement metrics, not whether you used the word "free."
What has changed, and this is critical for 2026: email authentication is no longer optional. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are now mandatory across Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. As of late 2025, unauthenticated bulk emails don't get filtered to junk. They get rejected outright. Bounced. Gone.
Your spam complaint rate needs to stay below 0.3% (Google recommends under 0.1%), you need one-click unsubscribe headers in promotional emails, and your sending infrastructure needs to be technically sound. This is the new table stakes, and it's actually good news for legitimate marketers. Humans who follow the rules get rewarded with better inbox placement because the bad actors are filtered out.
Also, test your emails on mobile. About 70% of first opens happen on phones, and if your creative team uses spacer GIFs, they can create garbled code in the pre-header that makes your email look like spam. If it looks broken on mobile, humans assume it's not legitimate, and no amount of great content inside will save you.
Build Your Own Benchmarks
Here's what I want you to walk away with. Don't rely on industry benchmarks to tell you if your email program is working. Your business, your content, your brand reputation, your database makeup, all of that is unique to you. The path forward is testing, learning, and building internal benchmarks that you beat.
Make your own ecosystem. Every send is a chance to learn something.
Every A/B test is a data point.
Every unsubscribe is information.
The marketers who are winning right now in 2026 aren't the ones following the crowd. They're the ones who questioned the conventional wisdom, tested what actually works for their audience, and kept showing up with content that matters.
Same lesson I learned walking three hours a day during a pandemic, while everybody else was on the couch. Stop following the crowd. Start testing for yourself. If your email strategy needs a reset, or you want someone to look under the hood of your HubSpot email setup, that's what we do at Sidekick Strategies. Let's talk.
