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/

— Our sponsor: Taxi for Email helps your team make their best email — find out more here https://taxiforemail.com/

Join Jay here:
https://twitter.com/emailjay_

Join us for more #EmailTalk:
https://www.emailtalk.fm/
https://twitter.com/email_talk

Join Elliot here:
http://elliot-ross.co.uk/
https://twitter.com/iamelliot
https://www.instagram.com/emailelliot/

— Our sponsor: Taxi for Email helps your team make their best email — find out more here https://taxiforemail.com/

Join Paul here:
https://twitter.com/Paul_Airy
https://www.beyondtheenvelope.co.uk/

Join us for more #EmailTalk:
https://www.emailtalk.fm/
https://twitter.com/email_talk

Join Elliot here:
http://elliot-ross.co.uk/
https://twitter.com/iamelliot
https://www.instagram.com/emailelliot/