February 21st, 2026
Lifecycle email strategy is evolving fast. Discover the top trends from Unpacked 2026, from AI co-pilots to design systems and trust-first messaging.
Customer.io's Unpacked 2026 pulled lifecycle marketers from every timezone into a virtual conference on lifecycle email strategy. Complete with an alien theme, space puns, and a co-host named Bog who believes earthlings are fools. (He's not entirely wrong.)
Beneath the intergalactic bit, though, the substance was sharp. Themes kept surfacing across sessions, sometimes explicitly, sometimes as quiet undercurrents connecting talks that had nothing to do with each other on paper. One vibe connected all of it. The teams winning at email aren't the ones sending more. They're the ones who built better systems and let the systems do the heavy lifting.
Here's what stood out, and more importantly, what connects.
If Unpacked 2026 had a thesis statement, it was this line from Brent MacKinnon: "What deserves to interrupt someone?"
That's not a throwaway quote. It was the philosophical backbone of almost every talk.
Sarah Vandersluis designed her entire onboarding around the emotional reality of a 74-year-old man named Ned who just wanted to feel stronger and move without worry. Julie Foley Long deliberately reported her team's metrics at half the actual numbers because being trusted matters more than looking impressive. The Inbox on the Rocks panel, Lianna Patch, Samar Owais, and Shakuri Oguhebe, tore apart event emails that forgot to answer one simple question. "Why should I care?"
Philip Storey made this tangible with eye tracking data. He showed what people actually look at when they open an email, and it's not what you think. People skip past buried CTAs like they don't exist. Faces steal disproportionate attention. Good visual hierarchy beats clever copy every time. It's humbling when the data shows you that the thing you spent three hours on is invisible to readers. But that's the point. If you don't design for the human behind the screen, it doesn't matter how good the offer is.
The through-line is uncomfortable but true. The best lifecycle marketing doesn't start with what you want to say. It starts with whether the person on the other end needs to hear it.
And when every send carries that weight? How it's built matters just as much. The design. The accessibility. The brand consistency. Emails that earn trust aren't duct-taped together in whatever builder your ESP shipped in 2019. They're built with intention, inside systems that make that intention repeatable.
Speaker after speaker arrived at the same conclusion independently. Nobody coordinated this. It just kept happening.
Mark Robbins and Carlos Saborio-Romero showed how their email design system uses atomic components. Buttons that auto-detect dark backgrounds, image captions with real accessibility relationships, context-passing between nested components. The payoff? Marketers build faster, QA takes minutes, and when an email client ships a breaking update at 2am (they will), fixes propagate everywhere at once. As Mark put it, unlike email, JavaScript has good quality, consistent documentation that AI can learn from. That's why writing design system logic in JS and letting it output email HTML is a smarter bet than trying to get AI to write email code directly.
Rob Gaer tackled this at the localization level. He walked through three methods for email localization, from dedicated templates (easy but doesn't scale) to inlining with conditional logic (better, still manual) to dynamic content mapping where content and presentation are fully separated. That last method is what Miro actually uses. The result? 2+ hours per localized template dropped to 20 minutes. 75% faster. And the system gets smarter as it translates, building its own dictionary over time.
Julie Foley Long scaled her lifecycle team from 2 to 25. Not by hiring faster. By proving incrementality through holdouts, building self-serve messaging infrastructure, and creating frameworks that made investment asks defensible to leadership. She actually opened her own performance review on screen and showed how she manually stitched together ROI data. Headcount, agency costs, platform costs vs. incremental revenue. Not flawless. But disciplined.
Brent MacKinnon built a tiered go-to-market framework (Tier 1/2/3) so the email conversation stops being "who gets Tuesday?" and becomes "what tier is this?" Political arguments replaced by a shared system. Wild concept.
Riley Stevenson built a lifecycle knowledge base in Airtable, powered by AI, that centralizes experiment writeups, creative assets, and campaign results into one searchable database with automatic stat-sig calculations and AI-generated readouts. No more "I think we tested that in Q3... maybe?"
The pattern is clear. Every high-performing team stopped relying on one person's judgment for every send. They built repeatable infrastructure that encodes their best thinking. And what Rob's talk made undeniably clear is that separating the creation layer from the delivery layer is the move that unlocks speed at scale. When content lives in a dedicated environment, not tangled inside the ESP, teams ship without fear.
Here's where it got spicy.
The conference had a nuanced, nearly unanimous stance on AI. Wildly useful. But only with a human holding the steering wheel.
Jay Oram showed that AI is already summarizing your emails in the inbox, whether you asked for it or not. Apple Intelligence, Gemini in Gmail. They're reading your HTML and your plain text version and generating previews that subscribers see before they ever open. Jay walked through how semantic HTML, live text, and accurate plain text versions give AI the right information to summarize. (Spoiler: if your email is all images and no live text, AI is going to make stuff up about it. Good luck with that.)
Dasha Shakov dropped 10 prompting tips that treated AI like an agency relationship. You wouldn't tell a contractor "just build me a website." You'd give them context, constraints, brand voice, goals. Same energy with AI. Her best tips? Use AI to write the prompt for AI (17% quality bump), break big tasks into separate conversations so the context window doesn't get exhausted, and dictate instead of typing. 150 words per minute vs. 40. Math checks out. She also made the case for Claude over ChatGPT for complex reasoning and shouted out Claude's skills feature for turning repeatable prompts into reusable instruction files.
Naomi West and Molly Evola ran a "Stellar or Space Junk" segment where they polled the audience on emerging trends. When they asked if AI-driven personalization was the future, the vote was zero for stellar. Zero. The fear isn't about capability. It's about handing over the keys to what lands in your customer's inbox. As Molly put it, AI is "a good co-pilot, not the writer."
Neha Mittal presented the counterargument. AI decisioning that learns which email works for which segment through explore/exploit cycles. ClickUp used it to handle 300+ segment permutations no human team could test manually. Outschool tested 300+ variants monthly. But even in these models, the system feeds learnings back to humans. AI runs the math. Humans call the shots.
The consensus is clear. AI isn't replacing lifecycle marketers. It's handling the combinatorial complexity that humans physically cannot, while humans keep strategic control, brand voice, and the final say. The tools that earn trust embed AI where the work happens, not where the data lives.
The RGE Email Makers Survey has tracked email tool satisfaction since 2018. The average rating has never budged from 6 out of 10. Meanwhile, 64% of teams supplement their ESP with another tool because no single platform covers everything. And yet, people stay. Not because the tools are great, but because change feels risky.
Beefree exists for that exact gap. It's a design and production layer that sits on top of your existing ESP or CRM. No migration. No disruption. Centralized brand kits, built-in accessibility checks, AI-assisted creation with human control, and clean portable HTML that works in any downstream system.
Free to try. No credit card. No awkward sales call.
Sarah Vandersluis's talk was the one that stuck with people. You could feel it in the chat.
She works with adults 65 and older who are trying to build an exercise habit, many without an existing routine. Not exactly the audience most lifecycle playbooks are written for. But her framework translates to any product where the user might be hesitant, skeptical, or scared.
Her four-step playbook:
Her key line: "If you treat hesitation like a conversion problem, you'll try to optimize your way out of it. If you treat it like a trust problem, you'll build a relationship."
That's not a UX fix. That's a philosophy.
Julie Foley Long's incrementality work backed this up from the leadership side. She framed wins in terms of the growth org's KPIs, not lifecycle's KPIs, because trust with stakeholders works the same way trust with customers does. You earn it slow. You earn it with receipts.
Everyone wants to email your subscribers. Your product team. Your content team. Your CEO who read a thread about "founder-led marketing." Everyone.
Brent MacKinnon's talk reframed this problem with a few mental shifts that hit hard:
The Stellar or Space Junk data agreed. 42% of marketers now use in-app messaging. 48% are growing it. Julie's story proved the case too. In-product messaging went from "wild west" to a multi-million dollar channel once it was properly owned and measured.
Here's the kicker though. As teams spread across more channels, the creation problem gets harder. More formats. More stakeholders. More places where brand consistency quietly falls apart. The teams that scale aren't the ones with the biggest budgets. They're the ones with one place where brand assets, components, and guardrails live, producing clean output that works everywhere it needs to go.
Unpacked 2026 wasn't about one big revelation. It was about a bunch of smart people, working on very different problems, independently arriving at the same conclusions.
Put humans first. Build systems instead of relying on heroics. Use AI where it helps, but keep your hands on the wheel. Earn trust through consistency, not flash. And if you're going to send something, make sure it deserves to interrupt someone's day.
The lifecycle email strategy that wins in 2026 isn't louder. It's more intentional, better built, and designed to survive whatever the stack throws at it next.
If Unpacked shaped how you think about lifecycle email strategy, Unspam is where you go to pressure-test those ideas with the people actually doing the work.
Unspam 2026 is an email marketing unconference. April 20–22. Long Beach, California. Speakers eat lunch with attendees. Sessions are shaped by the room. You leave with actual relationships, not a lanyard and a bag of stickers.
Intimate. Opinionated. Practitioner-first. If you vibed with what any of the Unpacked speakers brought, Unspam is that energy in person, with the conversations that don't fit into a 30-minute talk slot.
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