Welcome back to Marketing Qualified! Here’s what we’re talking about this week:

• The 30-second guide to sending cold emails. This is the bare minimum.

• AI won’t steal all our jobs. It’s creating more. Gartner’s AI jobs impact forecast.

🥶 The 30-second guide to sending cold emails.

Cold email gets a bad wrap. But let’s be honest, in 2026, most sales and marketing teams will still be sending them.

If you’re one of them, make sure you at least maintain high-level best practices to keep deliverability strong. Here’s the bare minimum guide to sending cold emails:

1. Never send cold emails from your main domain

If you send outreach from name@company .com, eventually all your emails (including to customers and colleagues) will land in spam. Purchase similar-sounding domains instead. Limit to 2-3 inboxes per domain.

2. Send warm-up emails. 25ish per inbox per day. 2 week minimum.

Email warm-up tools automatically send and receive emails. It’s a way to build up your sender reputation. Don't skip. If you start blasting from a cold domain, you’ll get blacklisted—fast.

Only send warm-up emails for a minimum of 2-3 weeks. Then you can start cold emails.

Continue sending 20-30 daily warm-up emails for each inbox, even after you begin sending cold emails. This will help you maintain your sender reputation as you scale up your outreach.

3. Use Outlook or Gmail

They cost more, but they work. SMTP tools are cheaper, but you’re more likely to get mixed results.

4. Text-only emails

Don’t add images, attachments, or links. They’re spam triggers. Stick to plain text. Focus on driving replies. (Real replies also help deliverability)

That’s it.

Is there more you can do to perfect cold emailing? Definitely. But this will get you started and prevent major issues.

📰  In the news this week.

👋  How to perform personalization at scale in marketing.

✍️  How to become a better copywriter.

🗓  X published a 2026 marketing calendar.

📸 Image SEO for AI.

🛡  How to protect PPC budget from competitor-branded terms.

🤖 AI won’t steal all our jobs. It’s creating more.

Gartner released an interesting forecast about the longer-term impact of AI on jobs.

It shows that starting in 2028-2029, AI will create more jobs than it eliminates. Early years show losses, but the balance will shift as more businesses learn to leverage AI effectively.

To sum things up, the job market isn’t in an ‘AI apocalypse,’ but it is in a transition period.

Right now, we’re all stuck in the messy middle. But businesses (and individuals) investing in AI literacy today will benefit most when jobs gained picks up.

😂 Marketing meme of the week.

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