A short look at what’s shifted in email marketing for local food, plus a free guide that walks through each fix in detail.

Email is still the highest-leverage marketing channel for most farms, food hubs, and CSAs. It outperforms social, paid ads, and SMS on return-per-dollar. And for a business where customers reorder week to week, staying in their inbox matters more than staying in their feed.

But what works in email marketing has shifted in the last two years. We put together a short, practical guide called the 2026 Email Marketing Update Pack, covering the four changes worth making before your next send. Here’s a quick look at what’s inside.

If your list has grown past a few thousand contacts, the rules that govern whether your emails reach the inbox are now stricter. Domain authentication, a one-click unsubscribe header, and a low spam complaint rate are now necessary. Most small senders aren’t compliant, and don’t know it.

The guide walks through the four must-haves, a 30-second test to confirm your setup is right, and what the LFM-Mailchimp integration handles automatically.

Your storefront tracks every order. Your email service provider tracks every open and click. Together that’s a richer picture of your customers than most farms are putting to work. Two practices change that.

The guide walks through three segmentation patterns you can build today, four automation flows worth setting up once, and how the two reinforce each other.

ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have hit a point in the last year where they save real time on subject lines, drafts, and brainstorming, without replacing the parts of your voice your customers actually signed up for.

The guide walks through three high-leverage AI uses with copy-paste prompts, plus three rules for using AI well without inventing facts or leaking customer data.

Most of your customers open marketing emails on a phone. Many also use larger text or screen readers. If you’re still designing for a laptop, you’re working against your audience.

The guide walks through a mobile-first checklist for layout, typography, and imagery, plus the pre-send test that catches most issues in under a minute.