Long the core marketing application for delivering promotional emails, collecting customer insights, and establishing brand loyalty, email marketing now also provides a ripe sandbox for piloting AI to deepen customer relationships. In fact, Forrester’s research shows that competitive pressure plus the revolutionary power of AI pushes the limits of what the email medium can do. After many years of limited change in email marketing vendor capabilities, users can now expect conversational interfaces with and proactive automation from vendor platforms to create segments, find insights, assure compliance, and even create full, brand-compliant messages. We found leaps in innovation in a few notable areas:
Message creation. Putting AI-enabled decisioning at the point of execution, makes it possible to customize the content, offers, delivery cadence and deployment channel for every message for every individual. Communications that have been one-to-a-segment can now be one-to-one regardless of list size or customizable dimensions.
Inbox optimization. Deliverability got an upgrade as vendors innovated to make marketer emails appeal to intelligent inboxes like Gmail Deal Cards or Apple Intelligence. Optimizing send frequency and even order of send improves inbox placement and customer response.
Data management. AI makes data structure set-up and data onboarding possible (simple even!) for self-service marketers. AI can detect where data transformations are needed, recommend which ones to make, and provide a natural language interface for writing transformations.
Platform usage. We also found vendors able to customize the interface of their platforms to individual users and their usage. This is different from turning on or off certain platform modules. This is dynamic adjustments of the interface to accommodate user roles, use cases and even personal needs like translating font language or labels based on how a user interacts with conversational agents.
The Forrester Wave™: Email Marketing Service Providers, Q1, 2026, just went live to help you realize the value of these innovations by discerning which, from a diverse set of vendors, best suits your culture and use cases. In this report, we evaluate 12 of the most significant email service providers (ESPs) – Adobe, Bloomreach, Bluecore, Braze, Cordial, Cheetah Digital, Iterable, Klaviyo, Netcore Cloud, Salesforce, SAP and Zeta Global – and scored them across 26 criteria.
Use this report to identify vendors who are innovating with AI in order to improve email fundamentals and discover new solutions.
In your ESP selection process, look for:
AI as a functionality-enabler, not as a feature. Instead of seeking an email service provider (ESP) that is good at AI, scrutinize how it uses AI to automate, error-proof, and streamline core use cases.
Fast, funded innovation. The difference between your emails being relevant and being ignored is a partner that can develop a faster-than-average pace of AI-fueled development.
Transparency. Transparent AI builds trust and reduces risk. It aligns to a brand’s guidelines and regulatory requirements and exposes logic to be tested or changed
For a deeper dive into this research or to talk through vendor options, please schedule an inquiry with me. And if you are building your ESP shortlist, check out the Email Marketing Service Providers Landscape, Q3, 2025 which catalogs a broader set of email vendors against three core use cases: send emails, extend email utility, improve email value, and six extended use cases: activate customers, assure deliverability, developing messaging applications, manage workflow, personalize, and test messages.
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