Email Academy: From 2025 data to 2026 strategy 

As the year draws to a close, email marketers are looking ahead, eager to make the next year their most successful yet. But a winning 2026 strategy doesn’t just appear out of thin air; it’s built on a solid foundation of data and insights from the year gone by. In a recent Mailjet Email Academy webinar, in-house experts Natalie Lynch (Principal Product Manager) and Julia Murljacic (Senior Email Marketing Manager) broke down the cyclical process of turning 2025 performance data into a powerful, actionable 2026 email strategy. 

This guide summarizes their key advice, providing a step-by-step framework for email marketers and senders to analyze their past performance and plan for future success. 

TL; DR  

If you’d like to watch a full replay of the webinar, simply scroll down to the bottom of article.   

Before you can plan for the future, you must understand the past. The first step is to gather and evaluate your 2025 campaign data. However, diving into a sea of metrics without a plan can be overwhelming. The key is to start with a clear methodology. 

The most crucial rule is to analyze your audiences separately. Your customers will interact with your emails differently than your blog subscribers or prospects. To get a clear picture, compare the performance of each audience segment against itself over time.  

As Julia mentioned, “You want to compare apples to apples and not apples to oranges.” This approach allows you to establish reliable benchmarks based on your audience’s specific behavior, which is far more valuable than generic industry benchmarks. 

Gather a comprehensive set of metrics from your Email Service Provider (ESP) for each audience segment: 

• Engagement levels: Look at your highest and lowest performing campaigns in terms of unique clicks and opens. While Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection has added a caveat to open rates, they still provide directional insights, especially when your ESP filters out bot opens. Clicks remain the gold standard for measuring true engagement. 

• Unsubscribe rates: A high unsubscribe rate is a clear signal that your content missed the mark. A low rate suggests the content resonated well. Don’t overlook this important feedback. 

• Post-click behavior: The journey doesn’t end at the click. Track what actions users took after clicking through. Did they make a purchase, download a resource, or sign up for a webinar? Connecting email clicks to business conversions is the “sweet spot” for proving your channel’s ROI. 

• A/B test results: Review your A/B tests, paying close attention to statistical significance. This helps you determine whether a variation’s success was a real, repeatable result or just a coincidence. 

With your data collected and organized, it’s time to look for the story it tells. What were your biggest successes and your “not-so-successes“? Remember, a campaign that underperforms isn’t a failure – it’s a valuable test that provides insights for future optimization. 

Ask yourself these questions: 

• What are the outliers? Did a campaign perform surprisingly well or poorly? Dig into the “why.” Was it the topic, the verbiage, the CTA placement, or the time of day it was sent? 

• What content drives action? Natalie shared an example where “feature-specific education newsletters performed way better than generic productivity messaging.” This conclusion is a goldmine, indicating that the Mailjet audience prefers tangible, product-focused content. 

• Is there a content gap? The webinar highlighted a common scenario; strong open rates but variable click-through rates. This points to a content gap. Your subject lines are working, but the email body isn’t compelling enough to drive a click. The challenge isn’t inbox placement; it’s post-open engagement. 

By analyzing your data this way, you can move from raw numbers to clear conclusions, such as “vague value propositions underperform” or “our audience is most engaged in late summer.” 

Your data-driven conclusions are the foundation for your 2026 goals. These goals should be directly linked to your company’s overall business objectives.  

• Objective: The high-level goal. What are you trying to achieve? (e.g., “Increase email’s contribution to website traffic.“) 

• Key Result: The measurable outcome that defines success. How will you know you’ve achieved it? (e.g., “Increase the average unique click rate from 8.6% to 12%.“) 

When setting goals, make them simple, actionable, and realistic. Aim for the moon, but don’t set yourself up for failure with impossible targets. A 100% click-through rate isn’t happening, but a 4% increase is an ambitious yet achievable target. Your Key Results become your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for the year. 

Now, you can build the strategy to achieve your goals. This is where you translate your insights into campaigns, tests, and workflows. 

Email segmentation is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal. The webinar detailed four key segments to build now for 2026: 

1. Engaged: These subscribers actively click and interact. Keep serving them content similar to what they already love and use them as a testbed for your A/B test winners to further refine your approach. 

2. Unengaged: This group hasn’t opened or clicked in a set period. Use this as an opportunity for re-engagement. Test different content that might resonate with them. If they remain inactive, it’s time to consider a sunset policy and remove them to protect your deliverability and keep your engagement rates healthy. 

3. Opened but didn’t click: They’re interested enough to open but not to act. Your subject line worked, but the content didn’t. Test new designs, different copy styles, and clearer calls-to-action to find what finally “clicks” with them. 

4. New subscribers: Treat this group separately. Onboard them with a warm welcome email and a double opt-in process to confirm their interest and set expectations. 

Once your segments are defined, use email automation to deliver personalized journeys at scale. An automation workflow can send different content to your engaged versus your unengaged segments, creating a “sidekick” that keeps your audience nurtured while you focus on strategy. 

The path from 2025 data to 2026 strategy is a continuous loop: you analyze performance, draw conclusions, set new goals, and build a strategy to achieve them. By rooting your plan in concrete data, you move from guesswork to a deliberate, informed marketing practice. Take the time this month to dig into your analytics, listen to what your audience is telling you through their actions, and build a 2026 plan that is destined for success. 

If you missed the live session, you can catch the recap below: