The growing use of AI in email marketing is creating a hidden risk for businesses. 81% of businesses use email as part of their marketing strategy, including 64% of small businesses that rely on it to compete with larger brands without significantly increasing marketing spend.
While AI enables companies to produce and scale campaigns faster, higher email volume does not necessarily translate into stronger engagement, and AI-generated content can jeopardize audience trust.
Ben Billups, Founder of Breaker, a leading B2B newsletter platform, discusses how businesses and startups can strategically use AI to make email marketing more targeted, relevant, and effective without sacrificing audience trust.
1. How can startups leverage AI to scale email marketing while maintaining the authenticity and consumer trust necessary to build lasting customer relationships?
Ben Billups:
The first step is separating two jobs that get lumped together under “AI for email.” One is producing content. The other is deciding who should receive it. Most startups only use AI for the first job, and that is exactly where authenticity dies. Out of the box, default model output sounds like every other founder’s first draft.
We still hire real copywriters at Breaker. I know they use AI, but writing a lot of words was never the skill. The skill has always been understanding the customer and crafting a message that builds trust and converts. Ultimately, AI is an acceleration tool for research and drafting, not a replacement for that skill.
The bigger opportunity is the second job. Give a model your subscriber list and your customer list and ask which subscribers look like your best customers, how long people typically stay on the list before they buy, and who clicked a pricing link this week without taking the next step. That is where AI lets a two-person marketing team operate like a ten-person team.
2. Why could AI make precise audience targeting more important than ever, even as businesses gain the ability to generate and distribute marketing content at unprecedented scale?
Ben Billups:
Because generic content is now free, and that means irrelevance is cheaper to produce at scale than it has ever been. When every competitor can generate unlimited content, volume becomes a race to the bottom. The only things left to compete on are who you are reaching and whether you understand their problem better than the next vendor.
B2B is almost always a niche. A billboard is 95% wasted money for a B2B company, and a blast to a broad email list is not much better. Most founders’ Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is usually smaller than they think. A company will say “our ICP is Shopify stores” when their best buyers are actually Shopify stores with over $1 million in revenue in the sports and outdoors category. The more specific you get, the more specific your messaging can be, and the better the results.
AI also makes a kind of targeting possible that “basic Apollo” filters never could. A stack of filters identifies industry, company size, and title – those tell you who could buy – but behavioral signals analyzed at scale tell you who is likely to buy.
AI is good at weighing a multitude of variables at once and finding the nuance a search bar just can’t. That is the actual edge, and it has nothing to do with how fast you can write.
3. How should teams measure the success of AI-powered email marketing beyond open rates and click-through rates, particularly when evaluating lead quality and revenue generation?
Ben Billups:
Start by understanding what your data actually says. Open rates have been inflated since Apple began preloading tracking pixels. Security scanners click links to check for malicious content, so unfiltered click data is noisy (I built a solution for that with my team). A growing subscriber count feels great and means nothing if the new names are outside your ICP.
The leading indicators that hold up are the verifiable ones: what percentage of new subscribers match your ICP, verified clicks on high-intent links, email replies, etc. The lagging indicators are the ones your boss cares about: calls on the calendar and contracts signed.
The leading indicators are helpful signs of life, but the lagging indicators (which can take months of nurture to start producing volume) are where the money is.
4. How can startups use targeted email marketing to acquire their first customers and build brand credibility when they lack the resources and recognition of established competitors?
Ben Billups:
Startups have one advantage over incumbents that they rarely use: they can afford to be narrow. An established competitor has to speak to an entire market. A startup can speak to the 50 people who have the exact problem it solves, and speak to them better than anyone else does.
The average B2B buyer sees or interacts with a brand somewhere between 12 and 21 times before taking any action. Cold email is like door-knocking in your neighborhood. You can rack up touchpoints, but you only capture the 1 percent of the market that is ready to buy right now. A newsletter nurtures the other 99% until the timing is right. It is the least expensive way to accumulate those touchpoints with the same people.
Credibility comes from the content. Most B2B purchases go to vendors the buyer already knew before they started searching, and a newsletter is how an unknown vendor gets onto that list ahead of time. The goal is content your ICP finds useful that positions you as an authority on a topic they care about (without making them pay you). Then, when someone shows intent, tell them more about your product or service.
The hardest part is patience. One agency we work with has about 80,000 subscribers in the e-commerce niche. They saw nothing for months, then closed nine six-figure deals from subscribers who had joined ten months earlier. I asked the owner what changed in the offer or the content, and the answer was “nothing.” Most startups quit at month three, before it starts working.
5. What gap in the B2B newsletter and audience acquisition market led to the creation of Breaker, and how does the platform address that problem differently from traditional email marketing solutions?
Ben Billups:
Every growth channel for newsletters was either cheap and ineffective or effective and incredibly expensive. Nobody had solved both at once. That was the gap.
Underneath that was a bigger problem I kept running into across industries. The best marketers live in low-margin, hyper-competitive categories like retail, because they have to be. B2B has the luxury of high margins and less competition, so the growth and marketing intelligence are rarely on the same level. On top of that, most social and advertising platforms are built for consumer use cases, which makes B2B targeting way harder than you would think. I took what I learned in competitive industries and found it was enormously valuable in B2B.
Traditional email platforms start from “who wants my emails” and then segment by “who engaged.” That is fine, but it is far less precise than starting from “who matches the profile of people who actually buy from us,” then “who wants my emails,” then “who engaged.”
Breaker starts at the front of that sequence. We grow a B2B newsletter’s distribution with verified prospects who match the ICP, so you know the content and engagement you accumulate actually matter.
The technology behind that is what we call TruSend™, or email intelligence. In the same way AI made it possible for software to understand intent and nuance instead of following rigid rules, TruSend™ weighs a multitude of variables to understand interests, intent, and probabilities for a given offer in a given market.
We do not assume we know your customers better than you do. We assume you know your message and your market, and we just cut the cost of getting that message in front of the right people at scale.
6. How does Breaker help businesses translate newsletter audience growth into tangible outcomes, such as qualified leads, stronger customer relationships, and revenue growth?
Ben Billups:
A big list of prospects is like undeveloped real estate; it has potential, but it does not cash flow without sweat equity. An engaged audience that reads your content every week is developed real estate; it produces returns and builds equity in the brand.
Breaker handles the development side by making sure the people coming onto the list are the right people, and then by surfacing who among them is showing intent.
That second part is where revenue happens. If someone receives a newsletter, clicks the demo link, and does not book, someone on your sales team should call them that day. If a second person from the same company subscribes, that account just warmed up. We filter out the noise, like security scanner clicks, so the signals a team acts on are real.
I know multiple Breaker customers whose newsletter is now their number one source of leads. What they all have in common is that they move fast when a reader shows high intent, and they keep sending when the results have not shown up yet. Those two habits matter more than anything else.
The economics follow from there. When your cost per qualified lead drops from $30 to $1.50 because new subscribers are actually in your ICP, every downstream number improves without changing your offer or your content.
One piece of advice I would give any founder reading this: AI tools are an amplifier for skills you already have, not an excuse to skip building them. Learn the market, learn the message, and then use AI to move faster.