Here’s what’s changing in email marketing right now and what to do about it before it catches you off guard. I’ve spent the last year focused on how AI is reshaping social media content and website traffic. Newsletters didn’t even cross my mind. Then the Glasp newsletter landed in my inbox, featuring their interview with email marketing expert Des Brown, and I had my first missed gap realization.
First, if you don’t know Glasp, let me fix that.
I’ve been a longtime subscriber to the Glasp newsletter. Glasp is a web highlighter and research tool I use constantly — primarily for YouTube research and saving articles worth returning to. If you create content, do any kind of research, or just want to stop losing track of good ideas, the app is worth downloading. I also put together a how-to video showing how to use it to create branded social media quotes — you can watch that here.
This week, their newsletter featured a Glasp Talk interview with Des Brown, founder of Email Expert Africa and a serious voice in the email marketing world. Watch the full conversation here — it’s worth your time: Glasp Talk with Des Brown. (or below)
Des also wrote up his key takeaways in a companion article — you can read that here.
But here’s what I took from it, through a business owner's eyes.
Your inbox already has a new gatekeeper. You just didn’t get a vote.
This is what caught my attention, and should catch yours too.
Apple and Gmail are now generating AI-powered summaries of emails before they’re opened. Which means your carefully written subject line, your preheader text, and your opening paragraph are read by AI first and decide what to show your subscriber instead.
As Des puts it, “there’s now an intermediary AI layer sitting between your send and your subscriber’s attention — and that AI is making editorial decisions about your email on your behalf.”
This isn’t coming. It’s already here. Gmail made its AI summary features free to all personal account users as of 2026. Apple Intelligence has been summarizing emails since Apple Intelligence launched. If your audience uses Gmail or Apple Mail — and for most of us, that’s the majority of our list — this is already affecting how your emails are being consumed.
What to do about it.
The answer is actually straightforward, even if it requires a mindset shift. Des’s advice: write for two readers, the human and the machine.
That doesn’t mean robotic copy or keyword stuffing. It means your reader, and the AI summarizing your email, should never have to guess what your point is. Lead with your most important point. One idea per section. Headers that describe what follows, not just tease it. If an AI is going to summarize your email before your reader sees it, you want to control what that summary says, and the only way to do that is to make your content impossible to misread.
Sound familiar? It’s the same principle driving AEO for websites and search. AI rewards content where the point is obvious, the structure is clean, and nothing is buried … everywhere now, including your inbox.
Here’s what changed for eJenn newsletters last year.
Last year, I decided to move my newsletter from Beehiiv to Substack. Both are excellent platforms, and Des mentions both in his piece. But one of my main reasons for switching was that I wanted Clickable Bytes to be discoverable beyond the inbox. I wanted it indexed on the web, searchable, findable by people who’d never subscribed.
I made that call before I fully understood the AI angle. Turns out it was exactly the right one. (If you want to see how that plays out - use AI mode in Google and type in: eJenn Clickable Bytes)
If your newsletter only lives in an inbox, you're leaving discoverability on the table. In an AI-mediated world, content that can't be found on the web can't be cited, surfaced, or recommended by a search engine or an AI tool.
Choosing a platform that puts your newsletter on the open web isn’t just a growth strategy anymore. It’s how your content stays visible in an AI-mediated world.
The bigger picture.
I’ve been saying for a while now that AI is reshaping how people find content — on social media, in Google search, on your website. What the Glasp interview made clear to me is that the inbox is not exempt. The same forces are at work there, too.
AI is not killing email. But it is sitting in the middle of it now — summarizing, filtering, prioritizing. The business owners who’ll stay visible are the ones writing with enough structure and intention that both humans and machines know exactly what they’re getting.
That’s not a new skill. It’s just a newly urgent one.
Not sure where your social media actually stands? The eJenn audit is a good place to start.
Thank you for sharing Glasp!