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Email marketing platforms never stand still.
Sometimes the updates are tiny tweaks you’ll barely notice. Sometimes they introduce a shiny new AI feature you may or may not ever use. And occasionally, something changes that could genuinely affect how you use the platform – or how much you pay for it.
Summer 2026 has brought some interesting developments across three of the email marketing platforms I work with regularly: Mailchimp, MailerLite and Klaviyo.
From easier automations and AI integrations to changes to free plans and a much bigger move into social media, here’s what’s new – and, more importantly, what I think is actually worth paying attention to.
Mailchimp is making it easier to turn one-off emails into automations and is introducing more AI-powered tools and integrations. MailerLite has significantly changed the limits of its Free plan, with the new limits being enforced from 13 August 2026. And Klaviyo has launched Social Marketing, designed to help businesses turn social media engagement into email, SMS and WhatsApp subscribers.
Some of these updates could genuinely change how you use your email marketing platform.
Others you can probably ignore.
Let’s look at what’s changed.
Klaviyo has launched Social Marketing, which is designed to connect social media engagement with the customer data businesses already hold within Klaviyo.
This one takes us slightly outside email – but it could have a very interesting impact on how ecommerce businesses grow their email lists.
Instead of treating social media and email as completely separate marketing channels, Klaviyo is trying to bring them closer together.
And I’m particularly interested in what that means for building an audience you actually own.
Klaviyo Social Marketing helps businesses turn social media interactions into customer data that can be used across email, SMS and WhatsApp marketing.
The idea is to turn the interactions you’re already getting on social media into something more useful to your business.
Someone might follow you on Instagram, like a post or leave a comment.
That’s lovely.
But unless the algorithm decides to show them your content again, that could be the end of the relationship.
Klaviyo Social Marketing is designed to help connect those interactions to customer profiles and your other marketing channels.
Klaviyo can use Instagram interactions such as comments and direct messages to help turn social engagement into email, SMS or WhatsApp subscribers.
For example, someone could comment with or send a particular keyword via Instagram DM and receive an automated response that gives them the opportunity to opt into your marketing.
Information gathered through those interactions can also be added to the customer’s Klaviyo profile, giving you more data to use for segmentation and personalisation.
And that’s the bit I find particularly interesting.
I’ve always been a big advocate of building the marketing channels you own.
Your Instagram followers aren’t really yours.
Meta controls the platform, the algorithm and ultimately how many of those followers actually see what you publish.
Your email list is different.
Moving someone from a social media interaction onto your email list gives you the opportunity to build a direct relationship with them rather than continually relying on an algorithm to put your content in front of them.
Klaviyo explains more about how this works in its introduction to Klaviyo Social Marketing and turning social engagement into owned customer relationships.
For ecommerce businesses, Klaviyo Social Marketing could make it easier to connect social engagement with identifiable customers and use that information to create more relevant marketing.
Think about the amount of useful customer information currently sitting in your social media accounts.
Comments.
Messages.
Mentions.
Product questions.
Preferences.
People telling you exactly what they’re interested in.
Traditionally, much of that information has stayed within the social platform.
Bringing some of it into Klaviyo potentially gives you another source of first-party customer data you can use to improve your email marketing.
And it also creates a much clearer journey:
Social media discovery → engagement → email subscriber → customer.
For an ecommerce business already using both Instagram and Klaviyo, I think this is definitely one worth investigating.
MailerLite has reduced its Free plan from 500 to 250 active subscribers and from 12,000 to 2,500 monthly emails. The new Free plan limits will be enforced from 13 August 2026.
Unlike the Mailchimp developments, the biggest MailerLite news isn’t a shiny new feature.
It’s a fairly significant change to its Free plan.
MailerLite updated the plan on 16 June 2026.
On the plus side, Free users now have access to more features, including custom campaign and landing page templates, blogs, promotional popups and the HTML campaign editor.
But the amount you can do without upgrading has become considerably more restricted.
The new Free plan includes:
That subscriber reduction is likely to be the big one for many small businesses.
If your MailerLite Free account exceeds the new limits, your account can enter a restricted state from 13 August 2026. MailerLite won’t automatically charge you, but you will need to reduce your usage or choose a paid plan.
While your account is restricted, you won’t be able to send campaigns or import subscribers.
You’ll also be limited in what you can create, activate or edit until your account falls back within the Free plan limits or you upgrade.
So, if you’re currently using MailerLite’s Free plan, I’d strongly recommend logging into your account and checking it before 13 August 2026.
Don’t wait until you next need to send an email to discover there’s a problem.
The good news is that MailerLite won’t suddenly start charging you.
If you exceed the Free plan limits, you have to actively choose whether to upgrade.
Before automatically upgrading your MailerLite account, check how many of your subscribers are actually engaged. Removing inactive subscribers could bring a small list back within the Free plan limits and improve the quality of your email list at the same time.
This is where I’d start.
Do you genuinely need all the subscribers you’re currently paying – or about to pay – to keep?
If someone hasn’t opened or clicked an email for a very long time, keeping them on your list simply to make the number bigger isn’t necessarily doing your email marketing any favours.
I’d look at your inactive subscribers and consider running a re-engagement campaign before deciding what to do with them.
If that brings you comfortably below 250 active subscribers, brilliant.
If you have 400 engaged subscribers who regularly open, click and buy from you, that’s a completely different story. Don’t start deleting valuable subscribers simply to avoid paying for your email marketing platform.
In that situation, paying for your email marketing software may simply be the sensible next step.
You can read exactly what’s changing in MailerLite’s Free plan update FAQ.
There have been several recent Mailchimp updates, with a noticeable focus on two things: making automation easier and bringing AI more deeply into the platform.
Yes. Mailchimp can now suggest turning a regular email campaign into an automation directly from the send checklist, without you having to rebuild the email from scratch.
This is probably my favourite of the recent Mailchimp updates.
When you’re about to send an email, Mailchimp’s Email Checklist can identify when that email could work as an automated, triggered message instead.
With one click, you can turn the campaign into an automation rather than starting again.
Why do I like this?
Because automations are one of the most useful parts of email marketing, but they’re also something lots of small businesses put off setting up.
You create your regular newsletters and campaigns because they need to go out now. Building automations gets added to the “I really must do that one day” list.
Anything that makes the leap from sending one-off campaigns to creating automations easier gets a thumbs up from me.
And if you’re still manually sending emails that could be triggered automatically, this might be the nudge you need to start looking at what you could automate.
You can keep an eye on Mailchimp’s latest product updates for details of this and other new additions to the platform.
Yes. Mailchimp has redesigned its popup form builder to make creating and editing email signup forms simpler, with styling controls brought together in one place and more protection against accidentally breaking your layout.
That might not sound revolutionary, but I’m all for anything that makes it easier for a business owner to create a decent-looking signup form without needing to involve a developer.
And your signup forms deserve attention.
We spend a lot of time talking about what to send to our email subscribers, but first we need to persuade people to become subscribers.
If your existing popup has been sitting untouched for the past three years, this might be a good excuse to revisit it.
Take a look at:
Mailchimp has a useful guide to creating and managing popup forms if you want to take a look at how its popup forms work.
Mailchimp can now be accessed through Gemini within Google Workspace, making it possible to work with Mailchimp information while using Google tools such as Gmail and Google Slides.
This is an interesting one if your business spends a lot of its working day inside Google Workspace.
Rather than constantly switching between applications, the idea is that you can bring information from Mailchimp into the tools you’re already using.
For example, you could ask for information about a particular Mailchimp campaign while you’re working within Google Workspace.
This is part of a much wider shift we’re seeing in marketing software.
Rather than expecting you to log into ten different systems to find ten different pieces of information, platforms are increasingly trying to bring that information to wherever you’re already working.
Whether you’ll actually use all these integrations is another question.
But reducing the amount of tab-hopping involved in marketing gets a thumbs up from me.
Google explains how the Mailchimp integration with Gemini in Google Workspace works if you want to explore it.
Yes. Mailchimp has integrations that allow its data and campaign information to be used while working with AI assistants including ChatGPT and Claude. Mailchimp has also introduced its own Analytics AI for asking questions about your marketing performance in plain English.
And this is where AI starts becoming particularly interesting to me.
Not because it can write yet another generic marketing email for you.
But because it has the potential to make your marketing data much easier to interrogate.
Mailchimp’s Analytics AI allows you to ask questions about areas including campaign and automation performance, audience growth and engagement and, if you have an ecommerce store connected, revenue and attribution.
Instead of staring at a dashboard wondering what you’re supposed to be looking at, you could ask questions such as:
Which of my campaigns performed best over the last three months?
Is my audience becoming more or less engaged?
Which emails generated the most revenue?
That potentially makes marketing data far more accessible to someone who doesn’t spend their life looking at reports.
Mailchimp is also integrating with external AI tools. Its Mailchimp app for ChatGPT and connector for Claude allow you to use information from Mailchimp while working within those AI assistants.
You can read Mailchimp’s announcement about Analytics AI and its expanded AI integrations and its guide to using Mailchimp with ChatGPT.
As always, though, AI-generated analysis still needs a human brain attached.
Use it to help you investigate your data – not as a replacement for understanding what the numbers actually mean.
You don’t need to use every new feature your email marketing platform launches.
In fact, I’d actively encourage you not to.
There’s a danger with marketing software that we spend so much time investigating shiny new features that we forget what we’re actually trying to achieve.
For me, the useful updates are the ones that help you do at least one of four things:
Mailchimp’s automation update could save you time and encourage you to automate more of your customer journey.
Its AI developments could make your email marketing data easier to understand.
MailerLite’s changes aren’t necessarily something to get excited about, but they are something Free plan users need to act on.
And Klaviyo’s move into Social Marketing could make it easier for ecommerce businesses to turn an audience they’re borrowing on social media into an audience they can communicate with directly.
If you don’t have time to read the whole thing, here’s what you need to know:
There’s something quite interesting about these three sets of updates when you look at them together.
Email marketing platforms aren’t really just email marketing platforms anymore.
They’re becoming places where more of the customer journey comes together.
Mailchimp is connecting email with automation, analytics, AI and the other tools businesses use every day.
Klaviyo is connecting social media interactions with customer data and owned marketing channels.
Even MailerLite’s Free plan changes arguably reflect how much more these platforms now do beyond simply sending a newsletter.
But the fundamentals haven’t changed.
You need to give people a good reason to join your list.
You need to send them emails they actually want to receive.
You need to understand what they do once you’ve sent them.
And you need to use that information to make your next email better.
No shiny new AI button is going to do all of that for you.
But if it can make one part of the process easier?
I’m all for it.
If you’re ready to grow your list fast (without the ick), here are two easy next steps:
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