Quick Answer

What’s the most important thing you can do to improve your email marketing?

Short answer: Take compliance seriously and understand that email is a long-term game, not something you can “turn on” overnight.
Why it matters: Compliance, proper list management, and a thoughtful ramp-up process protect your sender reputation, ensure inbox placement, and help you avoid sabotaging your program before it begins. Email works when you build it correctly, with patience, clean data, and respect for the rules.

Tom Wozniak has watched email evolve from its earliest days to the leading marketing channel it is now. As the Chief Operating Officer of Optizmo, he specializes in the area some marketers overlook: suppression list management and compliance. Those that follow this understand that these are two critical pillars of sending responsibly at scale. When you leverage it, you get better results.

With decades in the industry, Tom has seen companies try to shortcut the process. They buy lists, rush their warmups, or treat compliance as optional. The result? Failed inbox placement, damaged reputations, and programs that never reach their potential.

In this interview, Tom explains: 

• Why email has endured as the “OG” digital marketing channel
• What obstacles stop companies from succeeding with email — and how to avoid them
• Why compliance is non-negotiable for anyone sending email at scale
• How suppression list management protects brands, consumers, and long-term deliverability
• Why email excellence has nothing to do with volume,  and everything to do with craft
• Why AI will change email (but not as fast as the hype suggests)

He also shares predictions for the future of email, reflects on how the channel became central to business, and offers advice for anyone trying to “level up” their email game.

Take his words to heart and you’ll look at email less as a quick tactic or gimmick, and more as an unparalleled platform that rewards discipline, planning, and respect for the audience.

You can also watch our interview below!

“Digital life is built around an email address.”

Tom, what can an email do?

That’s a multifaceted answer. Email is a communication channel that’s been around 40 plus years now. First email went out in the 1970s, if we can possibly believe that. It initially wasn’t thought of as something with commercial or marketing potential or purpose.

It was about communication. It was truly electronic mail — taking the written word you would have previously put on a piece of paper and mailed through the postal service and instead doing it digitally through the computer. It was about streamlining communications between two people, very one-to-one. 

And today we think of email very differently. You and I do, certainly, because we’re in the email industry.

So for us, the real focus is on the business side of it as much as anything else. And sure, we have our inboxes where we communicate with clients, partners, vendors, and people in the space. But we also think of it in terms of true business and scale, and companies reaching out to consumers at volume, whether it’s marketing purposes or transactional email with invoices and bills. 

I’d take it a step further: it may not be the email itself, but your email address has become core to functioning online. 

It’s always been funny to me when prognosticators, just to get clicks, say they’re going to predict the end of email — something’s going to kill it: social, mobile, whatever. It’s been happening for decades. 

But one of the big things they forget is your email address is your login to everything. Your digital life is built around an email address these days. For now, email is really core to how all of us function on a daily basis, whether we think of it that way or not.

“I’m going to tap the brakes that [AI] will replace everybody.”

I know you’re not going to be predicting the end of email coming next year, but do you have any possible predictions for email in 2026? 

I’d be remiss if I didn’t include AI. If you don’t include that, I think you’re crazy. I recently sent in a prediction to a group I belonged to that was collecting marketing and email marketing predictions. Things we think we’ll see. And I tried to be a little contrarian because I’ve certainly predicted in years past that AI was going to be big and that it was going to make a major impact in how we function within email marketing.

But I wanted to take an alternate, contrarian step. AI is clearly here. It’s evolving. It’s coming fast. It’s going to disrupt everything eventually. 

But I’m going to tap the brakes a little on the idea that it will replace everybody in the next year or couple of years — where suddenly all our jobs go away or even all entry-level jobs disappear, or whatever the predictions are.

I still imagine that if we step out far enough, yes, AI will dramatically impact jobs. The entire working world will be affected in various ways. It’s very disruptive. Society will be impacted. 

There’s a lot to unpack there that we won’t go into today. But I think you’ll definitely find some people saying, “Oh my, in the next 12 months, suddenly 50% of people will be out of work.” No! I’m not seeing that.

Technology comes really fast, especially in hindsight. But if you go back and look at it, it takes a minute. 

I remember “the year of mobile” being predicted every year for a decade — mobile was going to take over everything this year, then the next year, then the next. It took time. 

And eventually, yes, mobile became the way people get online. It’s how we interact digitally. Sure, we have laptops and desktops, but the vast majority of traffic is mobile. But it didn’t happen overnight the way it was predicted.

Funny enough, I was watching some TV show from the 1980s or 90s with my wife. It seemed incredibly dated. Somebody on the show said, “HDTV, that is the coming thing. It’s going to take over.” And I thought, “this is the 1980s or early 90s and they’re talking about HDTV?”

That took a minute. It did not come about suddenly — it was well before 2000.

So I’m going to predict that while the long-term impacts of AI will be every bit as disruptive as we think, in the short term, it will take a minute.

And another prediction — is that regulation and guidelines will continue to evolve and get more stringent. When I say guidelines, I’m thinking inbox providers: Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft. As they have in the past couple of years, they’re increasing requirements for bulk senders. 

If you’re going to send a lot of email into a Gmail inbox, you must meet requirements that weren’t in place five years ago. And I imagine those will continue to evolve as those inbox providers look to have more control and impact over consumers’ email inbox experience. 

Try the inbox placement tester for free

“You need an email list.”

What do you see as the obstacles that stop people from being successful in email, today and tomorrow?

I moderated a panel at Affiliate World Budapest a few months ago. It was about people getting into email. If you have data and you’re not in email, you really should be, and we talked about all the reasons why it makes sense.

That’s easy for all of us as email marketers — we see the value. But what came through was all the steps involved. 

If you want to start email, it’s hard. It’s not as simple as social. Not that any marketing channel is simple. They all have challenges. None are easy to do well.

One thing that can be easier in other channels is ramping. In social, it’s about money. Do you have a budget? If so, you can build ads, get online, and start spending. Display advertising works the same way. Budget allows you to deliver more ads, buy more placements, and get in front of more consumers. 

Email doesn’t work that way. You need an email list.

And we know you can’t just go out and buy a list and mail it and expect it to work. There’s a good chance the list isn’t compliant and will get you in hot water, but beyond that, it just doesn’t work. 

Even if you have a massive list of emails in your database — say your CRM has a million emails — if you’ve never emailed these people, you can’t just flip a switch tomorrow, send to all one million, and expect it to work.

They’re not going to get delivered. You’ll have problems before you even start. So one of the basics is that it’s not simple for a company to decide one day, “Hey, let’s get into email.”

Again, even if you have a list, there are so many steps you need to take. You need to cleanse that email list, verify and validate everything on it. You need to warm up an IP. You have to slowly ease your way into this whole process. And these are people who weren’t expecting to hear from you anyway, so there’s going to be no engagement. 

All of those things impact your sender reputation, and you can shoot yourself in the foot right off the bat if you start wrong. You can hurt your long-term email program before it even gets going.

It’s complicated. There’s a lot to it because the nature of doing email well is complex. When I got into it back in the mid to late 1990s, there was a sense of: I’ve got a list, I hit send, I write some copy. 

Back then you couldn’t send graphics — it was all text. 

I sent, and for the most part, it got delivered. As long as my email address was real, it was going to go somewhere. It would hit an inbox because we didn’t have the kind of environment we have today.

Now I’ve got a whole tech stack I have to put in place. Partners I need to help me along the way so my email gets delivered. Then there has to be an opportunity for people to click. Then a website for them to go to and buy a product or whatever it happens to be. There’s a lot involved.

Compliance has become more complex. That’s our area of expertise, our sweet spot at Optizmo. Back in the day, there really weren’t rules. You had some basic marketing rules, but legislation in every country is always behind. Technology moves much faster than regulation can ever hope to.

In the early days of email, you could just send. It was easy in that sense, and a lot of people made a lot of money. 

Then regulation came in because governments recognized there needed to be guardrails. Whether they did them right or not is debatable. But in the U.S., we ended up with the CAN-SPAM Act, which by and large became a business-friendly — or at least business-adaptable set of rules.

A company could still market. It didn’t say you couldn’t use email for marketing. It just set guidelines for how to do it. It didn’t say you couldn’t send to people who hadn’t subscribed. You could send a cold email — just follow the rules: give people a way to opt out, honor the opt-out, those kinds of things.

Just follow the rules in giving people a way to opt out, honoring the opt-out.

Compliance with laws in the early days of regulation was fairly simple. But here we are now, 20+ years after CAN-SPAM, and we’ve got data privacy laws in over 20 U.S. states — all a little bit different. We’ve got business codes with particular requirements for marketing emails. 

And then, outside the United States, you’ve got data privacy laws like GDPR, CASL in Canada, and a host of regulatory developments that have made email far more complicated to do in a compliant way, especially on a global scale.

Compliance is tricky. You need to make sure you’re doing it right because as you’re building any email marketing program — any marketing program — your intention shouldn’t be to be one and done. You want to use this over time to build your business, maintain it, and continue making email a core part of your marketing program. To do that, you need to be compliant, because otherwise you won’t be able to sustain it.

Then there are other aspects, like getting buy-in in your company. That’s a reason some companies don’t get into email. Email is old school. People in marketing and certainly outside of marketing say: “Let’s do something new. Let’s do the shiny thing. Social sounds cool.”

I remember when I was in a B2B tech company years ago, and someone on my marketing team was sure we needed to be on Snapchat. I looked at her like she was crazy. I said, admittedly I’m not the audience, maybe you’re right, we’ll test it, but I’m not sure a tech platform for business should be focusing its branding efforts on Snapchat. And I was correct. It didn’t do much for us.

All of that makes email a challenging medium to get good at, to start, and then to succeed with it long-term. That’s probably why not everybody gets into it.

Learn how to secure your domain with DMARC

Why email suppression list management matters

Do most marketers know about email suppression list management? 

I would say yes and no.

If you’re an acquisition marketer or a marketing company sending on other people’s behalf in the affiliate space, you fully understand what suppression lists are for. You get it. 

It’s part of your mailing routine because you’re mailing offers from other companies. As part of that mailing process, you’re going to have suppression files from those companies. They’ll be unsubscribes — people who said, “I don’t want to hear from you, Mr. Brand,” and those suppressions extend to the affiliate.

There could also be files of current customers where the brand says, “Hey affiliate marketer, focus on net-new. I want new customers from you. You don’t need to mail my existing customers — I’ll take care of that.” So again, a suppression file for that mailer of all current customers.

So I think people in that acquisition side of email have a common understanding of what suppression files are for at a very standard level.

If you’re a CRM mailer sending to your house file — newsletters to subscribers — it’s not that you don’t understand suppression lists, but it’s not something you spend a lot of time on. 

If you’re mailing your own list through your CRM or ESP — HubSpot, whatever you’re using, you don’t have to think much about suppression files on a normal basis. Unsubscribes are collected and suppressed automatically behind the scenes. You don’t even have to think about it.

A lot of email marketers prefer not to think about it because those are people who said no. Nobody likes rejection. So it’s easier to say, “Out of sight, out of mind. Some people fell off my list after the last newsletter because they don’t want it anymore. I don’t want to think about that.”

So I don’t know that they give a ton of thought to it except when they get into certain audience-targeting scenarios, where it can make more sense to suppress a segment of your audience or a list you have from an upcoming mailing rather than trying to positively identify the people you’re targeting. If you have a big list, sometimes it’s easier to pull people out of it than to build a new email list without those people in the first place.

So I think probably everybody in email has at least an understanding of suppression lists, but for people on the acquisition side, it’s part of their day-to-day.

“You need to be compliant.”

How serious should someone take email compliance? 

Very — it has to be the core, one of the foundations of your email program. If your plan is to build a long-term email program, you need to be compliant. It’s not negotiable.

Obviously this doesn’t apply to people sending phishing emails or things like that because they don’t care. But if you have a legitimate business and email marketing is going to be part of it, you 100% have to be compliant. Period.

The key is understanding what you need to comply with. The table stakes for rules like CAN-SPAM are well understood and well established. Most email marketing software will make it easy — hopefully, to comply. But you still have to keep in mind things like not using deceptive subject lines. That’s general marketing compliance — you can’t deceive the public. 

Deceptive can be subjective, but I’ve often heard people say: if my grandmother would be confused by it, then we shouldn’t do it. Keep it understandable.

Compliance is absolutely a non-negotiable starter for anybody getting into email or marketing in general.

“Every email marketing program is different.”

What would you say to someone who feels like they’re in the minor leagues of email marketing and wants to be in the major league?

I don’t know that I like to call it minor leagues versus major leagues in email. Every email program is unique. If you’ve got a smaller business, you’re probably never going to be emailing tens of millions of people. There’s no realistic way for you to build a list like that — and why would you want to? It’s not necessary for a small business selling a product you create. 

That doesn’t mean you can’t be fantastic at the craft of email marketing. In fact, you could be much better at it than somebody sending 10 million emails. If we think of the major leagues as a volume play, sure. Someone could be doing spray-and-pray, the way email used to be done 20 or 30 years ago: hit send on millions and wait to see who responds and collect revenue.

Now it’s much more about honing in on the right email to the right person at the right time, with the right offer, and getting good at that. When I think minor leagues vs. major leagues, I don’t think about volume. It’s about getting better at the craft: improving engagement and responsiveness.

That comes down to your email practices. Compliance can be part of that. Dialing in your audience segmentation and making sure you know as much as you can about what interests your recipients, and then giving them what they want. That’s marketing 101.

Put a compelling message in front of the right audience, and they’re a lot more likely to engage with it and respond.

You’re an OG in this space. If there was a theme song that played anytime you walked into an industry event — it’s like: that’s Tom Wozniak. What would that song be?

It does remind me of a movie from the 80s — apparently I’m on an 80s kick. I don’t know if it was a good movie, but I remember it fondly. It was called I’m Gonna Get You Sucka. It was the Wayans Brothers before they became as big as they did.

By the end of the movie, one of the things the hero got was theme music. A bunch of musicians would walk behind you on the street and play your theme music. 

My musical taste is pretty eclectic. It’s all over the place: not too much opera, not too much bluegrass or country.

So I don’t know. Depending on my mood that day, maybe some fun EDM. Maybe some classic rock. That’s probably more in line with my age and, like I said, my OG status in the industry, which is really just because I’ve been around so long. Longevity.

“Email is the grandfather of digital marketing channels.”

Email gets bigger and bigger, year after year. Can you remember a time when you thought: okay, email is the channel? 

My career goes back a long way. Email has been part of it throughout, but I really started in marketing before email was a major channel. In the late 1990s, it was something we did, but a lot of marketers I talked to didn’t think much of email.

I worked at one of the first dot-coms.. One of the projects I helped the website owner with was building the email list, because he hadn’t thought about it. He said, “Oh yeah, is that something we should do?” And I said, “Yeah, that sounds like something we should do. Let’s massively collect more emails from our customers so we can email them. And I don’t have to send as many catalogs since I was on the print side then. We can send emails instead — it’s cheaper, and I bet we’ll make more money.”

Maybe that — going back to then — was when I started recognizing the value of email.

But even then it was early days. I think it was an over-time thing. Now, being someone who’s been in this a long time, I look at email as the grandfather of digital marketing channels. 

Digital is marketing now, but back then, offline was marketing and digital was the new thing. Websites existed, but not everyone had easy access, bandwidth was terrible, people were on dial-up.

Email was a growing way to connect and get offers out, but it wasn’t a fully understood or established marketing medium. It was novel.

Now I look at it and see that it’s the one that stood the test of time. Other channels remain, but none have been around as long. 

Email is the OG digital marketing channel for a reason. And again, getting back to it — it grows every year. It’s not going away when more email is sent every year, over and over, year after year, and that’s not changing.

I don’t know if there was a magic moment when I recognized all that email was. I think it was over time. Now I look back and see that for a lot of companies, email is the center — the core of their marketing. Everything else revolves around it. And I think that’s a very logical place for it to be for a lot of marketers today.

Test your deliverability for free

“Email is always evolving.”

Is there something you think is on its way out with email, maybe in the next five years, or something you just wish would go away?

Beyond the real bad practices in email. I think this is all of us as consumers — not even just as marketers — we all have a vested interest in it. But if we could clean up the true black-hat stuff in email: the phishing, the malware, all of that junk — wouldn’t it be better? Fortunately, spam filters, at least mine, do a really good job catching the vast majority of it, and that’s awesome.

Spam filters are tough because they also catch stuff that, as marketers, we wish they wouldn’t. But at least in my inbox, they catch all the malicious stuff. It’s rare for those things to get through. It does happen, but not often. So I wish that would all go away.

I think society would be better, the industry would be better, because we wouldn’t have to deal with it. And the perception among consumers of email would be better without that stuff. Sadly, I don’t know that I can predict that. I can only wish it.

Email, from a marketing standpoint, is always evolving and self-optimizing. People stop doing what doesn’t work and keep doing what does, while constantly testing new things. Because at the end of the day, it’s business. It’s about driving performance. What drives more engagement, more sales — that’s what sticks. And things that don’t won’t. 

I do think there are things that have popped up in the industry that seemed like they had potential. BIMI comes to mind:  a brand’s logo sitting in the inbox as an indicator, a bit of validation that the email really came from the brand. 

I don’t know if consumers care. For years I heard from a lot of people that BIMI was the coming thing. I don’t know. I haven’t seen it. Let me put it this way: I don’t see it in my inbox. I don’t notice it if it’s there, and if I’m not noticing it, I’m guessing consumers aren’t either. So that might be something that, at least from an email marketing standpoint, was perceived to be coming. I’m just not so sure.

Try our free email tools

What can anybody who’s reading this do to make today better?

Wow! Philosophical. 

I believe strongly in being as positive as you can and appreciating every day. None of it’s guaranteed: our jobs, personal lives, physical lives. There are no guarantees for tomorrow.

I think appreciating what you have today and taking a positive outlook on damn near everything you can is a good way to start your day. I try to start mine that way. 

Sometimes you have to remind yourself. It’s not always instinctive. Many of us go through something disruptive:  a health crisis, a challenge, personal relationships, all kinds of things. Getting through those, for me, can be a reminder that you really should appreciate what you have, because things could be a lot worse.

Absolutely. I’m glad you said that, Tom. 

And since this is the last email talk of 2025, I’ll just remind everybody: floss every day. Don’t be naughty. Eat your greens. Clean your list. And remember compliance. Don’t forget compliance. 

Tom Wozniak, thank you so much for spending time with me. I’ve enjoyed this greatly.

Thanks Paul, really appreciate it.