_______

Hi Max, what’s a day at work like as a CEO in martech?

No two days look alike, which is both the challenge and the appeal. A lot of my time goes into conversations at the intersection of business and technology: understanding what marketing and data teams are actually struggling with, and translating that into product thinking. In martech specifically, the pace of change is relentless. New privacy regulations, shifting platform dynamics, the AI wave: you’re constantly having to update your mental model of the landscape.

I try to carve out time in the mornings for deep thinking before the meeting load kicks in. Running and skiing in the Alps help me reset. But the honest answer is that being a CEO in this space means you’re perpetually juggling the urgency of today with the strategy of tomorrow.

What’s wrong with how marketers today choose, deploy and integrate their martech stacks?

The most fundamental problem is that the customer is rarely the starting point. Martech decisions tend to be driven by internal logic (what the vendor promises, what the team already knows, what the budget cycle allows, etc.) rather than by asking: what does the person on the other end of this actually experience, and does our data infrastructure make that experience better or worse?

That sequencing problem has consequences that compound. The average enterprise today runs dozens of martech tools, each holding a fragment of the customer picture. But because those tools were chosen independently rather than as parts of a coherent whole, they rarely agree on who a customer is, what they’ve done, or what they need next. The result is a degraded customer experience. People receive irrelevant messages at the wrong moment through the wrong channel, because the system of record is too fragmented to know any better.

The deeper issue is that most stacks were built around third-party data assumptions that no longer hold. The architecture was designed for a world where you could fill gaps in your customer understanding by buying data about people from somewhere else. That world is contracting fast. What replaces it has to be built on genuine first-party relationships. Too many organizations are still patching over that gap rather than rethinking the foundation.

There’s also a governance blind spot that ultimately hurts the customer too. When tool decisions are made in marketing without legal, IT, and compliance in the room, you get a stack that looks commercially attractive but creates real risks around how customer data is handled. And these are risks that erode the trust that makes the customer relationship possible in the first place.

What martech stack optimization tips do you think more marketers need to pay closer attention to?

A few things I’d highlight:

Always start with your customer, not your tool wishlist. Before you add anything new to the stack, ask: do we have a clear, consistent picture of our customer data, or at least how we can obtain the data we need? If the answer is no, adding more tools will compound the mess.

Audit your existing stack ruthlessly. Most teams discover, when they actually sit down and map it out, that they’re paying for tools that overlap significantly or that nobody is using at full capacity. Consolidation (where it doesn’t compromise capability) almost always pays off.

Treat interoperability as a first-class requirement. When evaluating any new tool, the question shouldn’t just be “does it do what we need?” but “how cleanly does it plug into everything else?” Poor integrations are where data quality goes to die.

Invest in data quality before you invest in analytics. It sounds basic, but the signal-to-noise ratio in most marketing data environments is terrible. Better models and better campaigns both depend on better underlying data.

Finally, think carefully about where sensitive data flows, as this can present a serious business continuity problem in addition to the more obvious legal implications. Knowing where your customer data goes and who has access to it has become a core competency for modern marketing teams.

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How can modern marketing teams create better data cleaning and data unification processes?

The first shift is cultural: data quality has to stop being treated as someone else’s problem. In too many organizations it lives in a technical backwater, handled by a small engineering team that nobody pays much attention to until something breaks. Elevating data quality as a marketing concern as well as an IT concern changes what gets prioritized and resourced.

On the process side, you need standards before you need software. That means agreeing on what a “customer” is, how identity gets resolved across channels and devices, what counts as a valid email address, and so on. These decisions sound mundane but they’re foundational. You can’t clean data if you don’t have a shared definition of what clean means.

For unification specifically, the challenge is almost always organization at its core rather than technical. Data lives in different systems because different parts of the business own different relationships with the customer. The CRM has one slice, the e-commerce platform has another, the ad platform has a third. Unifying that requires not just technical connectors but trust between teams: agreement on who can see what, under what conditions, and for what purposes. Getting that governance layer right is actually the hard part.

Identity resolution has matured significantly, and the best approaches increasingly combine deterministic and probabilistic methods depending on the context. Many teams still apply a single method rigidly where a more flexible strategy would serve them better. The key is understanding which approach fits which use case, rather than treating it as one-size-fits-all.

A few thoughts on how AI-powered martech is leading to a complete rejig in marketing?

AI is accelerating a shift that was already underway: from campaigns built around broad segments to experiences shaped around individuals. That personalization around scale changes the fundamental unit of marketing strategy.

Here’s the thing that doesn’t get said enough: AI doesn’t create competitive advantage on its own. It multiplies what already exists. If your data is siloed or poorly governed, AI will only amplify the issue. The organizations seeing the best results from AI-powered martech aren’t necessarily those with the most sophisticated models. They’re the ones with the most solid, best connected first-party data foundations.

That’s driving a fundamental rethink of data strategy. For a long time, the dominant instinct was to stockpile and ring-fence proprietary datasets. Today’s marketers are realising that intelligence compounds when data is connected via secure networks. No single brand has a complete view of the customer journey. But through privacy-respecting collaboration across brands, retailers, and publishers, marketers can feed AI richer and more diverse signals without ever exposing raw data. That network effect is where the real AI advantage lives.

Five martech thoughts to leave us with before we wrap up?

1. First-party data is not optional. Every strategy that still depends significantly on third-party data has a shelf life, and that shelf is getting shorter. The teams who’ve invested in owning their customer relationships directly will have a structural advantage that compounds over time.
2. Less stack, more depth. The arms race of adding tools has to end somewhere. The best-performing marketing teams I see are the ones who’ve made fewer, better choices when it comes to their tools and actually mastered what they have.
3. Collaboration between data owners is the next competitive frontier. Some of the most interesting marketing use cases require combining data across organizations — retailer and advertiser, publisher and brand, etc. — without either party giving up control. This kind of privacy-respecting data collaboration is still early, but the teams that figure it out will unlock insights their competitors simply can’t access.
4. Treat compliance as a design constraint, not an afterthought. Privacy regulations aren’t slowing down, and neither is enforcement. The organizations building data practices around compliance from the start will spend far less time and money fixing things later.
5. The AI opportunity in martech is real, but it has to be earned. You don’t get the benefits of AI by adopting AI tools. You get them by doing the unglamorous work of building clean, unified, well-governed data foundations and then letting AI do what it’s actually good at on top of that.

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The company specializes in secure data collaboration and offers a platform for data clean rooms, as well as the Collaborative Audience Platform: a unified layer that adds CDP- and DMP-style capabilities to the clean room for real-time segmentation, identity, activation, and shared audience products.  Decentriq has secured significant funding, acquired international customers, and established partnerships with major technology companies such as Microsoft.

About Maximilian Groth

Maximilian Groth is co-founder and CEO of Decentriq, a technology company founded in Switzerland.

LeadHaste data from 10M+ cold emails shows AI-personalized outreach hits 3.2% reply rates, 2-3x the industry average.

New performance data from managed outbound firm LeadHaste, drawn from more than 10 million B2B cold emails sent across multiple industries, shows that AI-personalized cold email campaigns consistently achieve positive reply rates of 3.2% – two to three times the 1-1.5% industry average for template-based outreach.

Cold email is not a one-tool problem. It’s a systems problem. The companies using AI to personalize at scale are seeing 2x to 3x the industry average.”

— Dimitar Petkov, Co-Founder, LeadHaste

The findings, based on aggregate campaign data from LeadHaste’s client base spanning healthcare, SaaS, manufacturing, staffing, professional services, and financial services, point to a widening gap between companies that have adopted AI-driven personalization and those still relying on traditional cold email methods.

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“The industry average for cold email reply rates has barely moved in five years – it’s still stuck around 1 to 1.5 percent,” said Dimitar Petkov, Co-Founder of LeadHaste. “Meanwhile, the companies using AI to personalize at scale are seeing 2x to 3x those numbers. The gap is only getting wider, and it’s becoming a real competitive disadvantage to still be sending batch-and-blast templates.”
Key findings from the 10 million email dataset:

According to LeadHaste’s analysis, AI-personalized sequences outperform templates by 2-3x on positive reply rate. Multi-channel campaigns that combine cold email with LinkedIn touchpoints generate 2-3x more positive replies than single-channel email. A multi-provider email verification waterfall (using four or more verification providers in sequence) significantly improves deliverability versus single-provider approaches. The compound effect is real – campaigns in their third month outperform first-month campaigns by a measurable margin as domain reputation strengthens and targeting refines based on actual reply data. Companies that own their sending infrastructure (domains and mailboxes registered in the company’s name) see more consistent long-term deliverability than those using shared or rented infrastructure.

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The data also revealed that the number of tools in a B2B outbound stack matters. LeadHaste orchestrates 35+ specialized tools per client – covering data sourcing, enrichment, verification, personalization, multi-channel sending, and CRM integration – compared to the 3-5 tools used by most agencies or in-house teams. The performance difference, Petkov argues, is not incremental.

“Cold email is not a one-tool problem. It’s a systems problem,” Petkov said. “When you connect the right data sources, enrich through multiple providers, verify at every step, and personalize with AI that actually has context on the prospect – the output is fundamentally different from what a template and a purchased list produces.”

Industry shift toward owned infrastructure
The data highlights another emerging trend: B2B companies are increasingly demanding ownership of their outbound infrastructure rather than renting access through agencies. LeadHaste’s model – where every domain, mailbox, sending platform subscription, and contact list is registered in the client’s name – reflects this shift.

“Historically, agencies held the infrastructure hostage,” Petkov noted. “You’d pay $5,000 a month, and when you left, you started from zero. The market is moving away from that model. Companies want to own what they’ve built, and they should.”

LeadHaste reports that its owned-infrastructure approach has been a key driver of client retention, with clients citing transparency and data ownership as primary differentiators.

But all that’s changed in the last year. After reviewing the latest Newsletter Ad Performance Report—compiled after a review of millions of dollars in spend and insights from more than 1,500 advertisers—it’s clear that newsletter advertising has crossed an important threshold. It’s no longer a test channel. It’s now an operating channel, and marketers are beginning to treat it that way.

What stands out most isn’t any single metric, but rather the consistency of outcomes across advertisers, publishers, and categories. In a market where volatility has become the norm, newsletters are doing something increasingly rare: delivering predictable results.

The Performance Shift No One Can Ignore

The data shows a 30% year-over-year increase in newsletter revenue and a 40% increase in total newsletter ad campaigns, alongside an 80% expansion in reachable subscriber pools. Those numbers by themselves matter, but what matters more is what they collectively signal.

They suggest that advertisers moved beyond experimenting to scaling, something that only happens once a channel proves it can deliver repeatable performance, rather than just one-off wins.

In parallel, rebooking intent grew more than 50% year over year. That’s a leading indicator of trust. Marketers don’t rebook because something “worked once.” They rebook because they understand why it worked and believe it will work again.

That’s the difference between performance marketing and performance confidence.

Why Newsletters Fit the Moment

The resurgence of newsletters isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s a direct response to structural shifts across digital media.

Audiences are tired of interruptions. Platforms are less transparent. Targeting is more constrained. And performance marketers are under pressure to show real outcomes instead of modeled assumptions.

Newsletters offer a rare combination: direct access to an opted-in audience, delivered in a predictable format, with minimal signal loss. There’s no feed or algorithm to fight. No scrolling competition. No ambiguity about whether the message was actually seen.

That simplicity turns out to be a competitive advantage.

What the Best Ads Are Doing Differently

Advertiser surveys from high-performing placements reveal one of the report’s strongest insights. The patterns across the best ads are remarkably consistent.

Short copy wins. It’s about being clear, not clever. Top-rated ads get to the value immediately, often in the first line. They use formatting that respects how people actually read emails: bullets, bolding, links, and white space.

Native presentation matters. The best-performing ads don’t feel like ads. They feel like part of the newsletter experience. When creative blends naturally into the surrounding content, engagement follows.

And clarity beats persuasion. High-intent CTAs like signups and downloads outperform more aggressive asks. Inboxes are not places for heavy lifting. They’re places for momentum.

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Alignment Is the Real Targeting Advantage

Advertiser satisfaction tracks closely with audience fit, yet many overlook it.

Newsletters with the highest rebooking rates share a few traits. Predictable performance, clean layouts, and strong alignment between advertiser and reader. That last point is doing more work than it gets credit for.

In newsletters, relevance must be explicit. Readers choose what they subscribe to. When advertisers show up in environments where the audience expectation is already aligned, performance becomes less about targeting tricks and more about message fit.

That’s why categories like tech, AI, productivity, and professional content consistently score high. It’s all due to clarity of intent.

Why Native Email Ads Are Scaling Fast

Advertisers are increasingly seeking the effectiveness of newsletter advertising without the associated difficulties, as evidenced by the significant growth of native email ad networks. Over 80% year-over-year in unique reach for some.

Historically, newsletter buying required manual outreach, negotiation, and fragmented reporting. That operational drag limited scale. As infrastructure has improved, the channel’s inherent strengths are finally able to surface at volume.

This is the same evolution we’ve seen in every major media category. Performance comes first, then tooling catches up.

What This Means for 2026 Planning

As budgets get tighter and scrutiny increases, marketers are gravitating toward channels that answer three questions clearly:

• Did it reach the right people?
• Did it drive action?
• Can we do it again?

Newsletter advertising increasingly answers yes to all three.

That doesn’t mean it replaces other channels. But it does mean it deserves a more permanent seat at the table, especially for brands focused on efficiency, credibility, and sustained engagement.

The takeaway isn’t that newsletters are new. It’s that they’re finally being used the way they were always meant to be used: as trusted environments where value is exchanged, not interrupted.

In a digital landscape obsessed with novelty, email’s old-school reliability is starting to look like real innovation.

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Today, businesses are optimizing their content strategies to cater to LLMs and AI-powered search engines, prioritizing structured, direct language, and increasing content volume to improve their chances of being featured in AI-generated results. While increasing content output may land a brand higher on a search engine page or lump it into an AI summary, it also means consumers are being flooded with more content and information than ever. Furthermore, inclusion in AI-generated search summaries might get some additional eyes on brand content, but ultimately yields less engagement, clicks, and conversions than traditional search.

However you crunch the numbers, brands are competing for consumer attention in an atmosphere jammed with unprecedented amounts of clutter and noise. Rather than working harder to churn out content that will simply flood the consumer marketplace and get lost amid all the other brands with the same idea, marketers should work smarter, opting for strategies that don’t just cut through the clutter but avoid it altogether.

Why Calendar Marketing is Making a Comeback

The search engine race is a zero-sum game that favors established brands and organizations with deep pockets willing to throw reams of content at the algorithm. Even companies that have had success catering to SEO and AEO can sometimes find their visibility marginalized by subtle shifts in search engine standards. As an alternative – or, more accurately, as a complement to existing strategies – brands should consider the more reliable, richer experience of direct marketing.

By creating a direct connection with consumers, brands don’t have to rely solely on cumbersome and expensive content campaigns to win the search engine race. Rather than taking a scattershot approach based on volume, most organizations will get better results – and more bang for their marketing buck – by appealing to their customer base and core target audience with a more straightforward, personalized approach. Specifically, there is one direct-marketing channel that should hold special appeal to every marketing professional: digital calendars

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Digital Calendars: Always On, Never Intrusive

If you were creating a marketing channel out of thin air to maximize exposure and engagement with a target audience at a minimal expense, it would be difficult to top the digital calendar. And what makes it uniquely valuable in this moment is its utility and effectiveness outside of the search engine chase.

With the right approach, brand marketing calendars have the potential to:

• Extend campaign visibility beyond the inbox and feed
• Deliver timely nudges, updates, and upsell opportunities when attention is highest
• Reinforce brand presence without competing for clicks
• Turn one-off events into ongoing engagement

Calendars are a fully opt-in, direct channel that consumers already check each day. Positioning your brand alongside a customer’s other high-priority reminders delivers ongoing and high-value exposure without the risk of invasiveness. When customers subscribe to your calendar feed, they are not only indicating their interest in what your brand has to share but also granting permission for that brand to have a reasonable amount of their attention and personal real estate.

That permission should be respected with meticulously curated content – no filler or empty blasts. There is exceptional value in a direct, always-on, and timely marketing communication channel that solves multiple industry challenges. Calendars as a marketing channel can help brands circumvent oversaturated SMS and email channels, avoid an overreliance on winning the AEO and GEO search race, and capture the attention of their target audience at the right time.

Using Calendar Marketing to Overcome Shortening Attention Spans

That last characteristic is an important one. Research suggests that attention spans are shrinking, and the irony is that marketers are fighting a problem partially of their own making. Information overload has conditioned audiences to spend less time with any given piece of content and make snap decisions about whether to investigate further or to move on.

Calendars help overcome that growing barrier. Because calendar subscribers have opted into a brand’s content, they are intuitively deeming any content that follows from that brand as being worthy of their time. By self-selecting up front, a subscriber has infused greater value in a brand’s content from the moment it lands on their calendar.

Digital calendar marketing is an underutilized direct-to-consumer channel that marketers will come to depend on as AI-generated and automated content increasingly crowd out traditional marketing channels. Marketers should continue to use legacy channels such as email, social media, and SMS, but an evolving audience requires new tactics. Digital calendars are becoming an essential component of marketing tech stacks in helping brands achieve higher-quality, longer, and more timely audience engagement.

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Truelist releases 20+ free, open-source SDKs and framework integrations for email validation — Node, Python, React, Next.js, Laravel, and more.

Truelist, the email verification platform known for its unlimited email validation at a fixed monthly cost, today announced the launch of a comprehensive suite of free, open-source developer tools designed to make email validation first-class across every major language, framework, and workflow.

We want every developer — regardless of stack — to have a world-class, zero-friction path to email validation. These tools are free, open-source, and built to meet developers where they already are.”

— Grant Ammons

Available now on GitHub under the Truelist-Labs organization (github.com/orgs/Truelist-Labs/repositories), the toolkit spans more than 20 open-source repositories — all free to use under the MIT License — and gives developers everything they need to integrate production-grade email validation directly into their applications, CI/CD pipelines, and AI-powered workflows.

A Full-Stack Developer Experience

Truelist’s new developer toolkit covers the entire spectrum of modern software development:

Language SDKs: Official SDKs are available for Node.js/TypeScript, Python, Go, Ruby, PHP, Java, and C#/.NET, enabling developers to call the Truelist API from any backend stack with minimal setup.

Frontend Framework Components: Developers building with React, Vue.js, Svelte, and Next.js can drop in ready-made hooks, composables, and components that perform real-time email validation on the client side. The Next.js integration supports Server Actions, Edge Middleware, and Zod schema validation out of the box.

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Backend Framework Integrations: Native integrations for Laravel, Django (including Django REST Framework), and Ruby on Rails allow teams to add email validation directly into their existing model validation layers with just a line or two of configuration.

No-Code and Low-Code Automations: Truelist supports Zapier, Make.com, and n8n through dedicated integration packages, making it easy for non-developers to incorporate email verification into automated workflows.

AI and Developer Tooling: A dedicated MCP (Model Context Protocol) server enables AI coding assistants — including Claude, Cursor, and VS Code extensions — to validate emails natively. Agent skills are also available to teach AI tools how to use the Truelist API in code generation contexts.

Command-Line Interface: A Go-based CLI tool lets developers validate email addresses directly from the terminal, making it easy to test, script, or integrate validation into build processes.

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OpenAPI Specification: A full OpenAPI 3.1 specification for the Truelist API is publicly available, allowing developers to generate clients, explore endpoints, and integrate Truelist into API management tooling.

WordPress Plugin: A ready-to-install WordPress plugin brings Truelist email validation to the world’s most popular CMS.

“We want every developer — regardless of stack — to have a world-class, zero-friction path to email validation,” said the Truelist team. “These tools are free, open-source, and built to meet developers where they already are.”

How many screens filled with apps does your phone have? Three? Five? Too many? Ever had to search for an app you knew you had but couldn’t find?

We’re being overrun by digital clutter, with branded apps being a big contributor. They compete for our attention and, as a “reward,” each one gives us another set of logins, updates, and notifications that can easily exasperate. No wonder less than 7% of users who’ve downloaded a business app stick around after 30 days.

In this environment, almost any marketing outreach can feel like an intrusion.

How can you reach customers drowning in this flood of attention? Try engaging them in an environment they already prefer: messaging.

Rich Communication Services (RCS) is poised to provide app-like performance with the simplicity of sending a text—or responding to one. Unlike standard text messages, RCS messages can include interactive buttons, high-quality images, read receipts, and other advanced features. This allows financial institutions to create trusted, branded, professional communications that build trust. Importantly, RCS enables interactive elements so they can take immediate action without leaving their texting app.

According to the data, people are ready for RCS, especially in financial services.

An Audience Is Waiting

Research by Datos Insights, in collaboration with Solutions By Text, found that nearly 80% of consumers prefer text communication with their lenders, but only 22% consistently receive text messages from financial providers. This gap is especially wide among younger consumers, who expect a digital-first and frictionless experience.

Until now, traditional texts have been made up of just that: text. This has made it virtually impossible to create an app-like experience. Adding an option for a user to take action meant including a link. But many users balked at the idea of clicking on a link in a text with just a phone number for an ID. In that same study, 51% of non-adopters cited fear of scams as their primary reason for avoiding financial texts.

RCS gives marketers a viable alternative. It enables verified sender identity, company logos, and branded visual elements in every message. A company can now confidently deliver offers and updates that customers can trust, and that stand out from spam, boosting both read rates and consumer confidence.

Unlike simple text messaging (SMS), RCS enables rich media, interactive buttons, read receipts, and in-message calls to action. Marketers can deliver app-like experiences—including secure payments, account management, and click-to-apply features—directly within a customer’s default messaging app. This dramatically increases consumer willingness to engage; when shown RCS features, over 80% of surveyed users expressed readiness to interact more frequently with financial brands.

It also makes a difference in who they choose to engage with: almost 60% are more likely to choose a lender using RCS messaging over one that doesn’t provide RCS.

But RCS isn’t just a cool new technology. It’s an opportunity to reshape your customer journeys. Data from the Datos study shows that consumers are not only more likely to read and act on RCS messages, but also to make critical decisions—from bill payment to account applications—without leaving their messaging app.

So how do you do it?

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Strategies for Making the Most of RCS

• Act Now, Not Later:

Early adopters of RCS will secure distinct competitive advantages. In addition to customer preference noted above, they’ll be able to shape customer benchmarks and maintain relevance as the locus of engagement shifts to messaging. Begin by partnering with trusted RCS platforms, integrating brand elements, and crafting interactive experiences that drive immediate action.

• Personalize Messaging Cadence:

Timing and relevance are critical. Use data-driven insights to send targeted reminders (e.g. payment alerts) near critical dates and to manage promotional frequency to avoid overwhelming recipients. Align message timing with customer lifecycle events.

• Prioritize Trust and Security:

Build campaigns around verified sender credentials, visible brand logos, and professional message formatting. Highlight these features in your marketing materials to address consumer skepticism and position your brand as secure and accessible.

• Put Rich Interactive Elements To Work:

Replace static messages with interactive prompts: “Enroll Now,” “Ask a Question,” “Set Up Autopay.” Interactive RCS elements enable one-tap actions, dramatically improving conversion rates.

• Segment and Test Generational Content:

Gen Z and Millennials rely on text for nearly all interactions, but older demographics require education and reassurance. Use segment-specific messaging to raise awareness about RCS capabilities and maximize overall engagement. Consider pilot campaigns that highlight ease of use for less digitally native users.

• Cross-Marketing and Customer Lifetime Value:

RCS makes it easy to have meaningful conversations that build loyal relationships. For marketers, this means offering personalized options to expand the relationship. For example, 43% of younger generation consumers would prefer to apply for a loan or increase their credit limit via RCS rather than through a mobile app.

• Measure and Optimize:

Track engagement metrics across RCS communications, including read rates, click rates, and conversion events. Continuously optimize message design, frequency, and offers based on real-time insights. Leverage A/B testing to refine creative elements and messaging styles.

Next Steps

• Audit Your Communication Channels:

Catalog every point of contact—apps, SMS, email, web—and identify opportunities to consolidate functions into RCS.

• Educate Your Teams:

Ensure marketing, technology, and compliance teams understand RCS standards and capabilities. Host workshops to share findings from recent research.

• Collaborate Across Departments:

Integrate RCS into servicing, billing, and collections—not just marketing. Unified campaigns reduce friction and maximize operational efficiency.

• Plan Your Rollout Phases:

Start with high-impact use cases (onboarding, payment reminders, promotions), then expand to account management and collections.

• Collaborate to Stay Compliant:

Stay abreast of compliance requirements for verified messaging by partnering with experienced providers of robust compliance support.

• Promote Your New Capabilities:

Use outbound campaigns and social channels to let customers know about secure, frictionless RCS offerings.

The Road to Less Clutter

In a landscape where competing for app downloads and in-app engagement has become a costly, uphill battle, RCS messaging is the shortcut to next-level conversion and loyalty. For marketers ready to leave complexity behind and meet consumers where their attention is highest, the message is clear: RCS can simplify, amplify, and drive results—one trusted text at a time.

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High-margin pricing, full white-label control, and zero-friction deployment position partners to outcompete legacy vendors

MailRoute, a proven leader in email security with more than 25 years of operational excellence, today announced a major expansion of its MSP and channel partner program, delivering a direct challenge to legacy vendors with a faster, more profitable, and fully brandable alternative.

As email remains the primary entry point for ransomware, phishing, and business email compromise, MSPs and resellers are being forced to rethink outdated, margin-eroding security stacks. MailRoute’s enhanced partner program is engineered to give partners a decisive advantage: higher margins, tighter customer control, and enterprise-grade protection without the complexity.

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This is not a minor update: it’s a competitive shift.

What sets MailRoute apart:

Margin Expansion Built In
– Aggressive, volume-based pricing enables partners to significantly increase recurring revenue while undercutting legacy providers
– Full White-Label Ownership
– Deliver a complete email security solution under your own brand
– Zero-Friction Deployment
– API-level integration with Microsoft 365 (including GCC High) and Google Workspace enables rapid rollout without operational drag
– Enterprise Protection Without Enterprise Bloat
– Multi-layered defense against phishing, ransomware, impersonation, and advanced threats, backed by a 99.999% uptime SLA
– Channel-First Execution
– Dedicated partner support, streamlined onboarding, and infrastructure that eliminates the need for in-house overhead

“MSPs are done sacrificing margin for mediocre protection and bloated platforms,” said Rachel Plecas, Vice President of Sales & Marketing at MailRoute. “We built this program to give partners control, profitability, and a security platform they can actually rely on. This is about winning business, not maintaining the status quo.”

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Unlike competitors that lock partners into rigid ecosystems, MailRoute delivers flexibility, transparency, and performance, allowing MSPs and resellers to move faster, close more deals, and retain customers with confidence.

With real-time searchable mail logs, granular administrative controls, customizable quarantine management, and a fully managed backend, partners can deliver a premium security experience without added operational burden.

• Consumers in 2026 are investing in their home life and securing their future

• Home improvement, finance and insurance are booming, despite economic uncertainty

• The high-intent internet is here, as zero-click kicks in across all channels

Analysis of a giant cache of nearly 70 million email marketing messages reveals how consumer behaviour has shifted dramatically from discovery to intent in 2026, as people invest in their homes and focus on reducing their bills – turning sectors such as home improvement, finance and insurance into a new goldmine of high-value leads.

The data, from digital marketing platform esbconnect, lays bare how UK purchasing behaviour is reverting to cocooning patterns familiar from the Covid years – and shows that while consumers are clicking less frequently than before, the intent behind those clicks is significantly stronger.

The figures also demonstrate that, in a zero-click era, other forms of engagement are clearly influencing sales, with increasing numbers of consumers responding to messages by going directly to brands’ own sites.

The data, which details 67 million marketing messages, 200k+ consumer clicks and 17,584 qualified leads, highlights three major new trends in digital marketing:

1. High-intent channels are outperforming broad-reach advertising

Brands targeting consumers when they are already researching purchases are seeing significantly higher conversion rates.

2. Lead generation is once again proving its value

Sectors focused on driving leads – such as home improvement, finance, and insurance – are generating higher-value customers than ecommerce channels that are simply trying to push a sale. Click-to-conversion rates are increasing by between 2x and 5x in many cases, showing the value in reaching customers early in their journey.

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3. Quality traffic is replacing cheap traffic

The data suggests the era of high-volume, low-quality acquisition may finally be at an end, as intent increases and clicks become rarer but more valuable.

Suzanna Chaplin, CEO at esbconnect, says: “Consumers are becoming more selective about what they engage with, but far more likely to convert when they do. In other words, the internet is moving from a discovery economy to an intent economy. Clicks are becoming rarer, but far more valuable, and brands that capture consumers when they are actively researching a purchase massively outperform those chasing cheap traffic.”

Deeper data insights by sector include:

Home improvements are dominating revenue

With the housing market suppressed, consumers are boosting the long-term value of their homes and nesting in the face of difficult times. Their engagement goes well beyond browsing – they are booking design appointments and investing in major home upgrades.

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“Consumers may be cutting back on smaller purchases, but when it comes to improving their homes the intent is extremely strong,” says Chaplin.

Financial services, utilities and telecoms drive high-volume lead generation

While home improvement generated the highest value leads, financial services brands delivered some of the highest lead volumes, with conversion rates up by between 2x and 5x for products including car finance checks, life insurance/PMI, mortgage and remortgage offers, boiler and energy switches and broadband:

“Click-to-conversion rates for a lead have doubled in the last 12 months,” says Chaplin. “Consumers are actively trying to reduce monthly household bills by focusing on remortgaging, energy switching and broadband switching – and the ongoing global situation has only increased this.”

Ecommerce brands generate engagement – but lower value

Some of the highest lead volumes came from ecommerce brands, but the time to conversion has increased – indicating a hyper-competitive market for consumer spend.

“There is still demand here, and people are spending, but you are better off getting consumers into your first-party database and nurturing, rather than focus on pushing a sale now,” says Chaplin. “Consideration periods have lengthened, and brands need to work on their own brand awareness to ensure they are front of mind for when they do convert.”

esbconnect helps brands use email like they use paid media – to acquire new customers at scale.

By turning anonymous consumers into addressable audiences, esbconnect enables brands to reach their next best customers through one of the UK’s largest opted-in email communities, spanning 17 million consumers. As cookie pools shrink and acquisition costs rise, brands can no longer rely on rented audiences alone. esbconnect gives brands a way to take back control, build first-party data, and actively drive new customer growth. Powered by over 440 data attributes, including real-time inbox behaviour, brands can identify, target and convert high-intent audiences across email, social, programmatic and offline channels. Its proprietary Inbox Intelligence reveals what consumers are engaging with in their inbox, allowing brands to reach people at the moment of intent.

At the centre of this is Optivo – the UK’s first privacy-first, email-based retargeting solution. Optivo identifies anonymous website visitors, matches them to opted-in email profiles (excluding existing customers), and re-engages them through a measurable email journey – all without cookies and fully GDPR compliant. The result is simple: more customers you can identify, more data you own, and a more efficient acquisition engine. Trusted by over 600 brands including Clarks, Tails and HelloFresh, esbconnect partners with brands to reduce reliance on paid media, unlock new scale, and build sustainable growth.

Email validation platform Truelist delivers 2x more accurate results than any other platform by combining layered multi-strategy validation techniques.

Truelist, the email validation platform built on accuracy, announced its position as the most accurate email verification solution available — delivering up to two times more accurate results than any other provider on the market. The company’s unique multi-strategy validation approach addresses a critical gap in the industry: the inability of single-check tools to reliably determine whether an email address is truly deliverable.

Accuracy isn’t a feature — it’s the entire point of email validation. We built Truelist to solve exactly that, using layered multi-strategy validation that goes far deeper than competitors.”

— Corey Haines, CMO, Truelist

The Problem With Single-Check Validation

Email marketers, sales teams, and growth operators rely on clean lists to protect their sender reputation and maximize deliverability. Yet most email validation tools on the market take a one-dimensional approach — running a single SMTP check and calling it done. The result? Large numbers of “catch-all” domain emails that come back as “unknown,” leaving users with no actionable signal and forcing them to either risk sending to bad addresses or abandon entire segments of their list.

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“Accuracy isn’t a feature — it’s the entire point of email validation,” said Corey Haines, CMO of Truelist. “When your platform can’t tell you whether an email is valid or invalid, it has failed at its core job. We built Truelist from the ground up to solve exactly that problem, using layered multi-strategy validation that goes far deeper than anything competitors offer.”

How Truelist’s Multi-Strategy Validation Works

Unlike platforms that rely on a single verification pass, Truelist offers three validation strategies of increasing depth and accuracy:

Quick Validation performs syntax and DNS checks to instantly identify malformed addresses and non-existent domains — the baseline layer that catches obvious invalids.

Standard Validation adds a full SMTP check, verifying whether the mail server acknowledges the address as deliverable before an email is ever sent.

Enhanced Validation is where Truelist truly separates itself from the competition. This top-tier strategy adds catch-all domain detection, SMTP verification, behavioral analysis, and third-party data cross-referencing to resolve addresses that other tools simply classify as “unknown.” The result is a definitive valid or invalid determination — even for the most difficult catch-all domains.

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This layered architecture means Truelist’s Enhanced Validation delivers up to 2x more accurate results than competing platforms. While other tools stop at a single check and leave catch-all domains unresolved, Truelist combines multiple validation strategies across SMTP, automated browser checks, and third-party APIs to provide the most accurate signal possible.

A Differentiated Approach in a Crowded Market

The email validation space is crowded, but accuracy has long been an afterthought — with providers competing primarily on price or speed while leaving users with uncertain results. Truelist was built with a different philosophy: that the only result worth returning is an accurate one.

Beyond its superior accuracy, Truelist offers a flat-rate unlimited validation model — meaning teams can validate as many emails as they need without worrying about credits, overages, or per-email pricing. This removes the incentive to skip validation on portions of a list due to cost concerns, ensuring that every contact gets the full multi-strategy treatment.

Truelist also integrates seamlessly with the tools marketing and sales teams already use, including Clay, HubSpot, Zapier, Make, Mailchimp, and ConvertKit — allowing clean, validated email data to flow directly into existing workflows without manual effort.

Real Results for Email Marketers and Sales Teams

The accuracy advantage translates directly into business outcomes. Validated lists built on Truelist’s multi-strategy approach mean lower bounce rates, better inbox placement, higher sender reputation scores, and ultimately stronger engagement across every campaign and outreach sequence.

“The industry standard has been to accept ‘unknown’ as a valid response,” said Haines. “We refuse to accept that. Our customers deserve to know the truth about every email on their list, and our multi-strategy validation engine is designed to find that truth — even when it’s hard.”

But new data suggests that assumption no longer holds. According to findings from Shift browser’s State of Browsing Report: Browser Usage Spotlight, the modern browser has become the primary environment where work, personal life, and digital identity collide. But it is buckling under that weight.

U.S. consumers are exhausted by outdated technology and are demanding greater control of how they navigate online. The one-size-fits-all browser model is actively contributing to widespread digital fatigue, with well over half (62%) of users reporting occasional or regular burnout tied to online life. What was once a passive container is now a daily operating system for modern work and life, but without the structure or adaptability to support either.

Work, Life, And Identity In One Window

One of the most striking findings from the report is how decisively browsing has shifted away from being work-first. Forty percent of respondents say their desktop browsing is now primarily personal, compared to just 26% who use their browser mainly for work. The remaining users toggle fluidly between both, often within the same session.

This collapse of boundaries matters. Browsers were designed for linear tasks—search, click, read, repeat—not for managing multiple roles, accounts, and contexts simultaneously. Yet that is exactly how they are now being used. Email, collaboration tools, financial dashboards, shopping carts, streaming services, side projects, and social platforms all coexist in a single browser window. The browser has become the connective tissue of digital life, even as its underlying design remains rooted in a simpler era.

Tab Overload As A Symptom, Not A Behavior

Tab overload has long been treated as a personal productivity quirk. The data suggests it is something else entirely: a structural failure. One in five users reports managing 11 or more tabs at a time, while younger cohorts are especially likely to keep six to ten tabs open concurrently.

Tabs have become placeholders for memory, context, and intention, essentially operating as a stand-in for the task management systems and project boundaries that browsers were never designed to provide. When users are forced to rely on tabs to remember what they were doing, overload becomes inevitable.

Notably, this pattern is no longer limited to traditionally “tech-heavy” roles. The report shows that tech and IT workers mirror the broader workforce in their browsing complexity. In other words, advanced browser usage has evolved from a niche problem to a mainstream headache.

Productivity’s Central Tension: Help And Harm

If browsers are where modern productivity happens, they are also where it breaks down. Nearly half of users (47%) say their browser helps and distracts them equally. That statistic captures the core tension facing knowledge workers today. The same environment that enables speed and access also fragments attention and erodes focus.

This ambivalence helps explain why digital burnout has become so widespread. When every task, notification, and identity shares the same space, friction is constantly reminding users of what they are not doing instead of supporting what they are trying to do now.

Demand For Change Is No Longer Subtle

Perhaps the clearest signal in the data is how ready users are for something different. Eighty-one percent say they are willing to or are considering switching browsers to better fit their workflows. Ninety-two percent say personalization matters. These numbers suggest a market actively questioning assumptions that have gone largely unchallenged for years.

When asked what they want most, users point to structural capabilities rather than cosmetic features: support for multiple accounts and logins (39%), task or project organization (34%), and notification or distraction blocking (31%). Users are not asking browsers to do more things. They are asking them to do the right things that are better aligned with how people actually work and live online.

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Moving Beyond The Passive Container

Users are moving beyond the idea of the browser as a passive container and actively seeking platforms that adapt to their complex, multi-identity lives and behaviors. Traditional browsers such as Chrome, Edge, and Safari were built for scale and standardization. That approach worked when usage patterns were relatively uniform. It breaks down in a world of freelancers, hybrid workers, side hustles, and always-on digital presence.

In that sense, the old browser debates about performance benchmarks or market share have given way to whether the core interface of the internet can evolve to support autonomy, focus, and wellbeing at the same pace as modern work.

What This Means For Martech And Digital Leaders

For marketing and technology leaders, these findings should land close to home. The browser is the primary channel through which tools are accessed, data is analyzed, campaigns are managed, and decisions are made. When that environment amplifies friction and fatigue, productivity losses cascade across teams and organizations.

More importantly, browser dissatisfaction signals a broader expectation shift. Users now assume that software should adapt to them, not the other way around. Platforms that fail to recognize this—by clinging to one-size-fits-all design—risk being seen as outdated, regardless of how entrenched they are.

The Unresolved Question

The takeaway from Shift browser’s State of Browsing data is not that users are browsing “wrong.” It is that the browser itself has not kept pace with reality. Work, life, and identity have collapsed into a single browser window, but the browser has not evolved to manage that complexity.

As digital fatigue becomes mainstream and appetite for change accelerates, the question becomes who will define what comes next. Will the next generation of browsers finally be built for the way people actually live online? Or will we have to endure more of the same?

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