EmailTalk

About EmailTalk

A podcast for emailgeeks, who want to do email marketing better.

Publisher

Elliot Ross

Category

business · technology

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

5 Aug 2020

Latest episode

6 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

11 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   6 Oct 2026

   Why not just AI every email?

   Why not hand every email to AI, from the first build to the final send? It would be faster. It would also give you twenty different versions of your brand, headlines that run past the character limit, and nobody accountable when something goes out wrong. In this episode of Email Talk, Elliot Ross, Joe Cottam and Will Harvey take on the "just AI everything" pitch that's all over LinkedIn. Elliot starts with a real test: he connected Claude to his Gmail and had it unsubscribe inboxes from everything they'd signed up to. It cleared weeks of work, but it still came back with a handful of failures per person to sort out by hand. Joe explains why email design systems, the pre-approved building blocks that keep a brand consistent, are turning into the guardrails AI needs. A prompt or a skill can describe your brand, but a design system with validation rules can enforce it. That matters when an LLM can't reliably count to forty characters. The question now isn't whether AI can build an email. It's how you keep 200 agents building for your brand without drifting off it. Will brings in what CRM teams are telling us: junior builds that look fine and then break in the inbox, taped-together workflows that leave every email slightly off-brand, and how much nuance you'd have to teach a model before it gets things right. They also ask whether every email will end up looking the same, why AI should raise standards rather than cut corners, and which jobs nobody should be doing by hand anymore, like checking every link in 16 languages or copying and pasting all day. In this episode: Letting Claude loose on an inbox Why not just AI everything? Email design systems as guardrails for AI Skills vs validation rules: describing your brand vs enforcing it Keeping 200 AI agents on-brand Accountability: "the agents did it" isn't an answer AI doesn't replace humans, it shows where they're invaluable Ask AI for the process, not just the output If you run email or CRM at a brand, in Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe, Klaviyo or any other ESP, and you keep hearing that AI can do the lot, this episode gives you a better question to ask: where does your team add value, and what does AI need from you to stay on brand? What would you do with the time AI gives back? Tell us in the comments. Subscribe for new episodes on email marketing, AI, CRM and email design systems. Elliot Ross — Founder, ActionRocket; co-founder, Taxi for Email https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamelliot/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamelliot/) Joe Cottam — Co-founder, EmailShepherd https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-cottam-80580352/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-cottam-80580352/) Will Harvey — EmailShepherd https://www.linkedin.com/in/willharvey/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/willharvey/) EmailShepherd — the agentic email creation platform to do what used to take days in just minutes: https://www.emailshepherd.com/ (https://www.emailshepherd.com/) ActionRocket — the independent CRM creative agency: https://www.actionrocket.co/ (https://www.actionrocket.co/)

2. 

   29 Sept 2026

   How Do You Know When to Trust AI?

   AI will tell you it's right whether it is or not. So how does an email team work out what to hand over, what to check, and what to keep? In this episode of Email Talk, Elliot Ross, Joe Cottam and Will Harvey look at trust in AI for email marketing and CRM teams. Elliot has just come back from Ogilvy's Nudgestock, where this year's theme was trust in the digital age. That sets up the conversation: how you learn when to trust AI output and when not to, and why this change is harder to manage than mobile or GDPR ever were. Will talks about the themes coming out of CRM teams at the moment, Joe explains why AI is most useful in work you already know well. They also look at why AI can speed up an email build and still leave you with the same QA time at the end. In this episode: The pattern this week: teams building their own AI tools vs teams doing nothing at all Nudgestock, Rory Sutherland and trust in the digital age How do you learn to trust AI, and when to stop? "AI doesn't replace humans, it surfaces what's irreplaceable" Using AI where you're the expert vs where you're not If you tried ChatGPT two years ago and gave up, try again Skills, context and codifying what "on brand" means Does AI save time if you still have to check its homework? The human sandwich: human, AI, human If you run email or CRM at a brand, in Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe or any other ESP, and you're working out how far to trust AI with your campaigns, this episode gives you a practical way to test it: try it first on the work you know best. Tell us about the best time AI lied to you. Drop it in the comments. Subscribe for new episodes on email marketing, AI, CRM and email design systems. Elliot Ross — Founder, ActionRocket; co-founder, Taxi for Email https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamelliot/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamelliot/) Joe Cottam — Co-founder, EmailShepherd https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-cottam-80580352/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-cottam-80580352/) Will Harvey — EmailShepherd https://www.linkedin.com/in/willharvey/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/willharvey/) EmailShepherd — the agentic email creation platform to do what used to take days in just minutes: https://www.emailshepherd.com/ (https://www.emailshepherd.com/) ActionRocket — the independent CRM creative agency: https://www.actionrocket.co/ (https://www.actionrocket.co/)

3. 

   24 Sept 2026

   Series 2! The Email Playbook Is Not One-Size-Fits-All Anymore

   For about a decade the email playbook was close to a solved problem: build the components, follow the process, ship the campaign. AI has reopened all of it, and the interesting part is that there's no longer one right answer for what an email team should look like. EmailTalk is back. Six years after the first series, Elliot Ross restarts the show with Joe Cottam and Will Harvey to work out where email marketing, CRM and lifecycle actually stand now. Elliot runs ActionRocket, the independent CRM creative agency, and co-founded Taxi for Email, built in 2016 after a client asked for 800 emails in 20 languages and balked at the five-million-pound quote. Taxi sold to SparkPost in 2021, then MessageBird, now Bird. Joe Cottam was on the engineering team through that acquisition, worked on MessageBird's ESP and email builder, and went on to co-found EmailShepherd. Will Harvey joined this year from consulting and sales, and is on the show to ask what any of it means for the person who has to get a campaign out on a Tuesday. In this episode: Why reboot Email Talk now Elliot Ross: ActionRocket, and how Taxi for Email started with an 800-email problem Joe Cottam: from Taxi engineering to building EmailShepherd Will Harvey: the customer's voice in the room How email quietly became a solved problem in the 2010s Marketers now expected to lead on AI without an AI background Why there are multiple right answers instead of one Technology used to be the guardrail. Now it moulds around your team Email design systems, MCP and what's newly possible The bits you shouldn't hand to AI — starting with accountability Against the "I automated 100% of everything, want my prompt ebook?" crowd What's coming: practitioner voices, and the pitfalls people didn't see coming If you run email or CRM at a brand, whether in Klaviyo, Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe or any other ESP,  and the AI conversation has left you unsure whether you're behind, this is the reassuring version. Nobody is as far ahead as LinkedIn suggests. We're not claiming to have it worked out. What we do want is the real questions: what you're stuck on, what you tried, and what went sideways. That's what we'll take into the next episodes. Subscribe for new episodes on email marketing, AI, CRM and email design systems. Elliot Ross — Founder, ActionRocket; co-founder, Taxi for Email https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamelliot/ Joe Cottam — Co-founder, EmailShepherd https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-cottam-80580352/ Will Harvey — EmailShepherd https://www.linkedin.com/in/willharvey/ EmailShepherd — the agentic email creation platform to do what used to take days in just minutes: https://www.emailshepherd.com/ ActionRocket — the independent CRM creative agency: https://www.actionrocket.co/

4. 

   21 Oct 2020

   08 — Dark mode w/Jay Oram

   Jay Oram is an email coder and interactive email specialist at ActionRocket. He spends his time working on interactive email, and also creating modular templates for a variety of ESPs and Email tools. He’s also a certified Salesforce Marketing Email specialist, an expert in making email design systems for Taxi for Email and is one of our resident email geeks. In this episode, we’re talking about Dark Mode - what is it? How does it work? And what do email marketers need to do about it?

5. 

   30 Sept 2020

   07 — Accessibility and Typography in Email w/ Paul Airy

   Paul Airy is an Email Accessibility Consultant who has done a lot of work around typography in email, and also accessibility and inclusive design in email. In this episode we're talking about how all three of those things are interlinked, and also why it's important to consider these things in your marketing work.

6. 

   9 Sept 2020

   06 — Privacy Round Table w/ Dylan Smith, Jacques Corby-Tuech & Jay Oram

   In this episode of EmailTalk we’re hosting a privacy round table with Dylan Smith, Jacques Corby-Tuech and Jay Oram. The relationship that email has with privacy is changing - partly fuelled by things like the GDPR, but also because the public has never been more aware of privacy issues, thanks to things like social media scandals and high profile data leaks.

7. 

   2 Sept 2020

   05 — Making Awesome Email Design Systems w/ Crystal Ledesma

   Crystal Ledesma is the Manager of the Email Design System at Zillow, which is a real estate marketplace based in the states. She’s done a lot of work getting the email design system off the ground at Zillow, so in this episode we’re talking about how she’s managed to do that and what challenges there were along the way.

8. 

   26 Aug 2020

   04 — Making Email at News Organisations w/ Dan Oshinsky

   I first met Dan Oshinsky in 2013 when we were both talking at the first Litmus Live. At that point he’d been helping Buzzfeed get email marketing off the ground. These days he runs Inbox Collective, an email consultancy, and he also publishes a great non-email called Not a newsletter. In this episode, we covered a lot of ground, but one key thing we talked about is how email in the editorial and news space is the same, but kinda different.

9. 

   19 Aug 2020

   03 — Proving the Value of Email w/Gavin Laugenie

   Gavin Laugenie is the Head of Strategy and Insight at dotdigital. He’s on the product side, but he spends a lot of time working with brands to get the best value out of their tech. In this episode we had a great chat about doing better email marketing, and also how Gavin helps people on brand side prove the value of email.

10. 

    12 Aug 2020

    02 — The Impact of Coronavirus on Email Marketing w/Chad White

    Chad White is the Head of Research at Oracle Customer Experience Marketing Consulting, and he’s been writing lots recently about Coronavirus and the impact of that on the email ecosystem. In this conversation Chad shared some gems - from what he’s seeing right now, to lots of ideas on what might happen next.

11. 

    5 Aug 2020

    01 — Emotional Intelligence in Email Marketing w/ Kait Creamer

    Kait Creamer is the CRM Marketing Manager at Framer, which is a prototyping tool for web designers and developers. Kait’s done a lot of work talking about emotional intelligence in email - she keynoted all three litmus lives last year . In this episode we’re talking about why it’s important to actually think about the audience, rather than just what we need as marketers.

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