Email marketing has long been the core marketing application for delivering promotional emails, collecting customer insights, and establishing brand loyalty, but it now also provides a ripe sandbox for piloting AI to deepen customer relationships. In fact, The Forrester Wave™: Email Marketing Service Providers, Q1 2026 shows that competitive pressure, combined with the revolutionary power of AI, is pushing 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 and proactive automation from vendor platforms to create segments, find insights, ensure 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 historically 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 marketers’ emails appeal to intelligent inboxes like Gmail Deal Cards or Apple Intelligence. Optimizing send frequency and even send order improves inbox placement and customer response.
  • Data management. AI makes data structure setup and data onboarding possible (even simple!) 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 that vendors can customize the interface of their platforms to individual users and their usage. This is different from turning on or off certain platform modules — this represents dynamic adjustments of the interface to accommodate user roles, use cases, and even personal needs such as translating language, font, 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 of 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, Cheetah Digital, Cordial, Iterable, Klaviyo, Netcore Cloud, Salesforce, SAP, and Zeta Global — and score them across 26 criteria.

Use this report to identify vendors that 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 ESP that’s 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 with 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’re 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, develop messaging applications, manage workflow, personalize, and test messages).