Christian Lundgren @ChrisRemint

"All subscribers are equal" sounds fair until you look at the revenue. In a lot of e-commerce programs a small VIP segment drives most of the sales, so treating them like a first-time signup isn't fairness, it's just leaving money on the table. #Remint

Preview text is your second subject line. open.substack.com/pub/remintemai…

Highest-leverage edit to any copy prompt: an anti-pattern list. Models are better at avoiding than approximating, so tell it the words, structures and tones your brand never uses. "Do not write like X" beats "write like Y" because negation is binary and direction is fuzzy.

Myth: more emails always means more complaints. Honestly it's conditional. Email people who actually value you and complaints stay near zero, which is why post-purchase and browse flows send heavily and barely register. Relevance drives complaints, not frequency. #Remint

Your AI is confidently wrong. open.substack.com/pub/remintemai…

An em dash shipped in preview text on a live broadcast. The rule existed; the model deprioritized it under context pressure. Hooks in settings.json do not. A PostToolUse hook validates every file Claude writes. If it fails, Claude Code stops. Structural, not advisory. #Remint

Healthy unsubscribe rate per send sits at 0.1 to 0.3% (Omnisend 2025). Above 0.5% is a relevance problem. But very low is not always good: if the unsubscribe link is buried, disengaged subscribers hit spam instead, which costs you far more than a clean opt-out. #Remint

A high unsubscribe rate is not automatically bad. An unsubscribe is someone leaving cleanly instead of hitting spam, and that is the better outcome for your reputation. The real warning sign is low unsubscribes paired with rising complaints. Make unsubscribing easy. #Remint

Yahoo runs a feedback loop: a subscriber marks you as spam and your ESP auto-suppresses them. Gmail does not. It only reports aggregate complaint rates in Postmaster Tools, so Gmail complaints never auto-suppress. You must watch that rate yourself and act at the campaign level.

On a live campaign the deepest rule in a bloated CLAUDE.md got ignored. Path-scoped rules fix it: .claude/rules/ files with paths: frontmatter load only when Claude touches matching paths. @import still loads everything. Trimming is not the fix, routing is. #Remint

Segment rewrite prompt with locked CTA and offer as invariants. Prerequisites declare VOICE.md, master email, segment description. Self-validation rejects any output that touched the locked fields. Human gate before send. Same offer, different angle, governed. #Remint

The custom email build, six steps: brief, design and sign-off, HTML dev, render testing, live send test, ESP upload. Agencies skip render testing. In-house teams skip the live send test. Both belong in every build. A real iPhone catches what a simulator misses. #Remint

Gmail CSS in 2026 mostly works: style blocks, media queries, class selectors. The trap is treating it as one environment. Desktop web and mobile render differently, and mobile handles media queries its own way. Fluid layouts beat media-query layouts there. Test both, not one.

The best DTC email programs are not glamorous, they are disciplined. Custom template, not an ESP default. Mobile-first. One CTA per email, not one per section. Every send QA'd across clients before it leaves. A year of sends and you could name the brand without the logo. #Remint

Whitespace is not wasted space. It is the tool that makes hierarchy possible. Packing an email edge to edge feels cheap no matter how premium the product. The space tells the reader what matters by separating it from everything else. More whitespace, fewer elements, higher value.

Crossing 0.1% complaints does not trigger an instant Gmail block. The response is graduated: inbox placement slips first, then mail gets deferred, then rejected. Recovery takes weeks of sustained low complaints, not one good send. Act early and the climb back is shorter. #Remint

The abandoned checkout flow for a $200 product should do more work than one for a $30 product. More emails, more objection handling, more social proof. "Order in the next two hours" pressure works on impulse buys, not considered ones. For high AOV, build trust over time. #Remint

Claude learned your bad habits from your last brief. open.substack.com/pub/remintemai…

If you segment your email performance by email client, you will see dramatically different numbers. Apple Mail users have inflated open rates due to MPP. Gmail users have historically lower click rates because Gmail's image caching behavior affects tracking. Outlook users may see

Email marketing in 2026 is what? Not blasting a newsletter every Tuesday. A system of triggers, segments, flows, transactional. It is a system: triggered sends, segmented campaigns, lifecycle flows, and transactional touchpoints working together. Many brands only use one of those