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What Two 20-Year Pros Said About Email

What Two 20-Year Pros Said About Email

Jeff Sauer
October 26, 2026

Every month I sit down with the MeasureU Mentors. These are 10, 15, 20-year professionals, and the conversations always go deep fast.

This month I brought up email. Specifically, how performance on one of my lists has been slipping, and I wanted help brainstorming why.

Rob and JJ came back with some sharp takes.

Here are some of the insights:

Engagement is everything. If your email engagement is high, you basically write your own rules.
If performance is middling, adding more links, including images, can start working against you.
Center-aligned emails read as spam to inbox providers. Left-aligned is how real people write.
If you're mailing people who haven't opened in a couple of months? You're signaling that you don't clean your list.
The format of your emails matter - instead of linking to an external resource, put the insights right in the email.
Be careful with AI email inbox sorting automatically pulling you out of the inbox and burying you in a folder nobody reads.
Bottom line: If you're doing email, you need really useful content, otherwise you're cooked.

Here's why this advice matters.

I analyzed clicks from one of my emails. About 80% of the registered clicks were coming from bots. Apple Mail, Microsoft, and inbox providers prefetching links before a human ever sees them.

Open rates slid from the 50s to the 40s to the high 30s, and some of that might just be... machines doing machine things. You can't fix email by changing one variable.

Bots are coming up in almost every conversation I'm having right now. That's why I'm covering this more over the next few weeks, leading up to my November AI Traffic Control workshop, which gets into how to identify, understand, and account for bots in your marketing. Cart opens tomorrow for early birds, with a bonus live discussion specifically about email bots this Thursday.

Check your inbox tomorrow for workshop details.

And one more thing: reply to this email. Since my email metrics are so noisy, an old-fashioned reply is the most honest signal I've got that a real person is reading.

To Your Measured Success!
–Jeff Sauer
CEO of MeasureU

P.S. When you reply, I'll send you the Email Bots Field Guide as a PDF. It's 42 pages and grades 33 platforms on how well each one filters bot clicks and Apple Mail Privacy Protection opens out of your data, with a grade and a concrete next step for every platform. A reader asked me to add Shopify after reading it, so if your platform isn't on the list yet, mention it when you reply.

New videos this week from MeasureU

Coming Up This Week at MeasureU

Mastermind (MeasureMastermind)

Tuesday, October 27, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM EDT

Your weekly power-up session! Live, interactive group coaching where our incredible MeasureU coaches answer your burning measurement questions, share strategies, and help you level up.

This call is for MeasureU Pro Members

Roundtable: Can You Still Trust Your Email Metrics?

Thursday, October 29, 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM EDT

📧 Everyone's email setup looks different. Different platform, different list, different way of deciding whether any of it worked. 👉 In this Roundtable, we want to hear how you actually run email: what you send, what you track, and which numbers you trust. We'll talk through questions like: • What does your email stack look like right now? • Which metrics do you act on, and which ones do you ignore? • How do you know a send actually worked? • Where does your email reporting stop making sense?

This call is for MeasureU Pro Members and bonus for AI Traffic Control Workshop members