Benchmark Email October newsletter

October 2026 Your Brand, However You Build Hi [First name], Open your promotions tab and scroll for 10 seconds. Plenty of those emails could have come from anyone: same layout, same stock photo, same "Shop Now" button. Making yours look like yours doesn't take a design team anymore. Maybe you design in Canva. Maybe you ask ChatGPT for the HTML, or a designer hands you a file, or you build straight in our drag-and-drop editor. This issue covers all of those, starting with a live session tomorrow on building HTML emails with Stripo. Let's get to it! Allie Wolff 
 VP, Product Marketing Live Webinar · Tomorrow Build it in Stripo. Send it in Benchmark. Thursday, October 22 · 12:00 PM CT / 1:00 PM ET · Free You've got a design you love. Getting it into an inbox without the layout breaking is where things usually fall apart. Tomorrow, Natalie Slyman, our Content Marketing Manager, and the team at Stripo will walk through the whole workflow live. You'll see why HTML email works differently from a web page, how to build a responsive, inbox-ready template in Stripo, and how to bring that code into Benchmark's new HTML Editor and hit send. No developer required. Save Your Spot Build It Your Way Three Ways to Make Your Emails Look Like You Start from your website. Your site already has your colors, fonts, and spacing worked out. Pull the exact values (your browser's developer tools will show you the hex codes), give them to an AI tool as a detailed brief, and refine the first draft until it matches. One tip worth stealing: custom web fonts often don't load in email, so pick a safe fallback like Arial or Georgia. Read: From Website to Inbox → Let ChatGPT write the HTML. No coding background needed. Our free prompt already has the inbox-safe HTML rules built in. Add your website, what the email is for, and what you want readers to do, then paste the result into Benchmark's HTML Editor. Leave the footer out, since Benchmark adds one for you. Get the ChatGPT HTML Email Prompt → Design it in Canva. Canva handles the look and HTML handles the structure. Design on a 600px-wide canvas in stacked sections, keep headlines and buttons out of your images so they stay readable and clickable, and export photos and logos as separate files. Read: The Canva Workflow → Whichever route you take, send yourself a test on desktop and mobile before it goes out. Hype Check Is AI Making Every Email Look the Same? Spend a few minutes on marketing LinkedIn and you'll hear the worry. Now that anyone can generate an email in 30 seconds, inboxes are filling up with the same polished, forgettable layout and the same "Elevate your experience" headline. Is it true? Partly. An AI tool fills every gap you leave with the most common answer it knows. Don't tell it your colors, and you get the colors everyone uses. Don't show it how you write, and you get copy that sounds like everyone else's. The fix is the same thing that made emails look like yours before AI: give it your brand. Your hex codes, your fonts, your logo, and a few lines of copy you've written yourself. The posts above show how to do that with ChatGPT and Canva, and inside Benchmark, the new Brand Kit keeps your logo, colors, and fonts ready every time you build. So AI makes a generic email easy to send. Your brand is what makes it worth opening. New in Benchmark Fresh From the September Release Brand Kit. Save your logo, brand colors, and fonts once in Settings. Your colors show up first in the color picker, your fonts apply to new heading and text blocks, and your logo sits at the top of your image uploads. Share your emails anywhere. Every email now includes a View in Browser link in the footer. After you send, grab a shareable link to the web version and post it on social or your website. A new AI Assistant. Click the AI icon on any block in the email or sign-up form builder and describe what you want. It writes or rewrites copy, creates or edits images, and can change whole