Email Marketing News, October 2026:
Campaign Agents, Account Data, and Send Controls

This October 2026 email marketing news roundup covers campaign agents, customer and account data, tracking controls, automation changes, and platform incidents announced in September. It also identifies the releases and deadlines scheduled for October. The reporting cutoff is September 30, 2026; linked sources were rechecked on October 4. Availability labels below reflect the vendors’ announcements, including beta access, phased rollouts, and planned launches.

The main email marketing updates for October#

Campaign agents expand drafting and send decisions#

HubSpot: Marketing Studio and email drafts from Claude#

HubSpot’s September 16 Marketing Studio documentation describes a campaign workspace that generates campaign details, suggests assets and automations, and leaves those generated assets unpublished. Its separate approval guide says that setting up and using Marketing Studio approvals requires Marketing Hub Enterprise, even though the workspace also supports Professional subscriptions.

On September 30, HubSpot announced a Claude workflow for marketing emails that drafts or edits copy and transfers it into HubSpot as a draft for review, editing, and sending there. The same announcement describes direct publishing for landing pages, giving the two content types different publishing workflows.

Klaviyo: external agents, SQL preview, and Meta Muse#

At K:BOS on September 9, Klaviyo announced access through external AI tools to 260+ Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools and capabilities and 490+ APIs. The K:BOS release also introduced SQL access in Composer and MCP as a preview covering profiles, events, segments, lists, and catalogs; support for forms, flows, and custom objects was listed as coming later.

On September 29, Klaviyo announced its Meta Muse connection, allowing conversations with Muse to use Klaviyo account data, analyze campaigns and flows, draft campaigns, and schedule sends. Klaviyo also describes ongoing performance monitoring and recurring summaries through Muse.

Salesforce: Campaign Agent is an October launch announcement#

Salesforce introduced Campaign Agent on September 14 with campaign assembly, content generation, and decisions about which competing campaign should reach a recipient. Its described workflow includes marketer review before launch, followed by decisions about content variants, channels, timing, prioritization, and suppression once a campaign is running.

The launch article places general availability in October in Marketing Cloud Next, without giving a specific October day.

Braze: available send controls and forthcoming AI features#

Braze’s Forge product announcement describes Message Prioritization as available: ranked message categories determine which message goes first, while lower-priority messages are rescheduled. The same announcement lists Operator Connect as beta, with actions governed by the user’s Braze dashboard permissions.

Braze’s September 29 release identifies Decisioning Studio Go, Agentic Standards, Operator Connect, and Conversational Agents as beta capabilities. It expects Decisioning Studio Go to become generally available on October 14, with Agentic Standards also expected in October but no specific day stated.

Email creation and customer-data updates#

Customer.io’s September 24 Design Studio release adds AI-generated brand rules based on websites, logos, and files, plus email layout and copy generation using brand documents and existing emails. Its inline editing agent can make changes to individual components, including wording, buttons, and image alt text; importing brand rules includes a choice about replacing existing styles.

Iterable’s September 24 fall release introduces scheduled Salesforce imports for Contacts, Leads, Accounts, Opportunities, and custom objects into profiles, events, and catalogs, plus segmentation using Catalog data. The release also adds optional Live Data caching, reusing identical webhook responses for up to 10 minutes.

Customer.io’s September 25 Databricks update allows query results to be imported directly as people, events, and objects, including accounts. The documented import process maps query columns to those records and runs on a selected sync schedule.

Braze’s Accounts feature groups related users under a shared account, so account information can support messaging without being duplicated across each individual profile.

Tracking controls, measurement, and unsubscribe changes#

Klaviyo separates click tracking from email subscriptions#

Klaviyo’s click-tracking guide says tracking is enabled by default and that disabling it stops new click events while links still reach their destinations. Its documented downstream effects include changes to click metrics, click-based attribution, segments, and flow triggers.

The consent controls are separate from email-marketing consent: changing a recipient’s click-tracking status does not change their email subscription, and account-wide tracking settings override individual tracking consent.

Dotdigital changes open-tracking consent behavior#

Dotdigital’s September 9 release adds a timestamped audit trail for open-tracking consent and keeps tracked links recording clicks when a contact opts out of open tracking. Its September 23 update stops further open tracking on previously sent emails after consent withdrawal and lets the Contacts API view or update open-tracking preferences.

Iterable announces recipient-level pixel controls#

Iterable’s September 21 note says an email tracking-pixel consent feature will become available in early October, allowing pixel inclusion to depend on a recipient’s consent status.

ActiveCampaign repairs tracked links and conditional footers#

ActiveCampaign’s September 8 release notes describe fixes for duplicate tracked-link records that could exhaust memory and stall campaign sends, including cleanup of existing duplicates and restored tracking for affected links. A separate fix that day supplies a default footer when conditional sender information or unsubscribe content does not appear for a recipient; emails already in flight are not changed retroactively.

Adobe adds journey holdouts with limited availability#

Adobe’s September 1 Journey Optimizer release entry introduces journey-level holdouts for a limited set of organizations, excluding a chosen share of the audience from entering a journey. The release notes describe comparison in Customer Journey Analytics to measure the journey’s incremental effect.

Ireland reports an email-consent and opt-out prosecution#

In its September 8 prosecution announcement, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission reported that Brown Thomas Arnotts pleaded guilty to sample charges involving invalid consent and missing email opt-out functionality. The case account identifies intermittent unsubscribe failures caused by third-party software and continued marketing after some recipients withdrew consent separately.

Journey publishing, API changes, and October deadlines#

Adobe’s September 7 Journey Optimizer migration guide states that new, draft, or duplicated journeys using batch audiences in Audience Qualification or Exit Criteria cannot be published from September. Its migration instructions say existing live journeys continue running, but republication requires an updated configuration: streaming audiences for those nodes, or Read Audience for batch-based entry.

Marketo’s September release notes set September 30 as the start date for error 1003 on Get Lead Activities and Get Lead Changes requests that include listId for a static list with 10,000 or more leads. The same notes reiterate the August 31 deprecation of query-parameter access_token authentication and direct integrations to the Authorization header.

HubSpot’s September 15 developer release makes Projects version 2026.09 generally available and introduces email-template API access requiring user-level authorization, while Marketing Forms and Automation Workflows APIs are public beta. Its legacy-app notice sets September 2027 as the enforcement date for the announced support changes affecting v1–v3 APIs and legacy apps, with migration directed to date-based API versions.

The October dates in those notices are:

• October 1: Adobe’s dataset-retention guide schedules enforcement on existing sandboxes of retention limits for affected system-generated data: 90 days in the profile store and 13 months in the data lake. It distinguishes expired dataset data from profile deletion; the profiles themselves are retained.
• October 26: HubSpot’s legacy-app notice says existing accounts will lose the ability to create legacy private apps; the corresponding date for new accounts was September 28.
• Late October: Adobe’s audience reminder says the October release will stop journeys and campaigns referencing Audience Composition audiences whose source dataset lacks a primary identity descriptor.

Brevo incidents and Adobe Campaign maintenance#

Brevo’s September 10 SAML SSO incident report says an access-scoping flaw exposed 138 accounts: six were used to send phishing emails and contacts were exported from 43. Brevo reported closing the entry route and resetting active sessions, with a permanent scoping fix being deployed at the time of that report.

A separate September 14 Brevo incident involved malicious content injected through its Cloudflare account, affecting public pages and embedded forms or widgets. The published timeline places public-site impact from 15:01 UTC, extension to embedded scripts from 16:07 UTC, and removal at 20:30 UTC; Brevo says its application, API, email sending, and stored customer account data were unaffected.

Adobe’s September 11 Campaign Classic v7 build 9402 addresses critical vulnerabilities and calls for on-premise and hybrid installations to apply the update and restart nlserver. Its release notice says Adobe-hosted instances were already remediated, requiring no customer action for that update.

Frequently asked questions#