Top challenges email marketers face — and how to solve them.

That challenge is often compounded by fragmented systems. Many teams are working across multiple Email Service Providers (ESPs) and martech platforms, with data and content scattered across tools that don’t talk to each other. Reporting is inconsistent, integrations are clunky, and decision-making becomes a manual, IT-dependent process. The result is slower production and reduced agility, especially when marketers need to act fast.

That’s why more teams are shifting to a marketer-led model. Instead of being dependent on handoffs or navigating disconnected platforms, marketers are placing themselves at the center of the workflow with access to the tools and data they need to move faster and more independently.

Even the most beautifully crafted email can’t drive results if it never makes it into the inbox. Today, deliverability is getting harder to manage.

Inbox providers — especially Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Yahoo (often grouped as MAGY) — are rolling out new deliverability requirements that go well beyond the basics. It’s not just about sender reputation anymore. Marketers now need to manage increasingly strict rules around spam thresholds, authenticated domains, matching ‘from’ addresses, and clearly visible unsubscribe options.

The stakes are high. Some brands are seeing dips in inbox placement. Others worry about getting flagged at the domain level, which could affect their entire sending program. For companies using multiple ESPs or martech platforms, this complexity is magnified. It’s not uncommon for teams to juggle dozens of IP addresses, parent and subdomains, and inconsistent sender configurations across platforms.

And it’s not just deliverability rules that are changing — it's  how inbox providers present emails too. Apple’s mail application now uses AI to generate previews of email content, often rewriting or misrepresenting what’s actually inside the message. For image-heavy designs or emails with embedded tagging code, summaries can be misleading or out of sync with the intended message. As a result, some marketers are adjusting their structure to prioritize plain-text content or restructuring code to influence how AI interprets the message.

Triggered journeys and real-time engagement are getting a lot of attention — and for good reason. But for most email marketers, the campaign calendar is still the backbone of how they operate.

According to the Litmus survey, only 44% of marketers say they use lifecycle emails to activate, engage, and retain customers, while sending more automated and triggered messages was ranked as the top priority for the year ahead. The takeaway? Journeys are gaining ground, but campaigns aren’t going anywhere. They still drive volume, ROI, and brand storytelling.

The challenge is that campaigns and journeys often live in separate systems, owned by different teams with different goals. That disconnect can lead to inconsistent messaging and a fractured customer experience. Customers don’t know — or care — whether a message came from a campaign or a journey. They just expect relevant, consistent communication from your brand — at all times.

Here’s how marketers can bring campaigns and journeys together in a more cohesive, customer-centric way:

1. Keep the campaign calendar, but expand your view

The journey calendar view in Adobe Journey Optimizer allows marketers to see scheduled, in-flight, and complete activations across all channels and types in one place. This unified timeline helps teams manage cadence, avoid conflicts, and spot content gaps during key seasons or high-volume periods.

2. Flex between campaigns and journeys across the lifecycle

In key moments like seasonal acquisition, campaigns may take the lead. As customers engage and convert, real-time journeys become more relevant. Journey Optimizer gives marketers the ability to toggle between these approaches based on context — allowing them to inform and strengthen each other.

3. Embrace multi-step, high-impact campaigns

Major campaigns still play a critical role in telling your brand story and driving key moments. Campaign orchestration capabilities in Journey Optimizer are designed to support sophisticated workflows with multiple steps, ‘pre-send’ audience insights, and segmentation across product, location, or event dimensions. This gives marketers more control and visibility while maintaining creative scale.

Most marketing teams still plan by channel: What emails will we send? What’s going out over SMS? What push notifications are queued up? But your customers don’t think by channel. They experience your brand as one unified entity — and they expect the messages they receive to reflect that.

Unfortunately, many companies are still operating in silos. Each team manages their own strategy, tools, and cadence, with little cross-channel coordination. The result? Overlapping messages, inconsistent experiences, and missed opportunities to prioritize the right touchpoints.

It’s a widespread issue. Customers receive 139 messages from brands each week and engage across an average of 9.1 channels. Yet few companies can answer basic questions like: How often are we contacting our customers overall? And which messages matter most?