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More than presentations
Strong presentations remain an important part of Forum. The programme also creates room for panels, questions, discussion and competing perspectives.
16 & 17 November 2026 Marylebone, Central London
The whole of email, under one roof.
Discussion. Debate. Controversy.
The marketers and the engineers. The senders and the receivers. The strategists and the people who build the machinery.
Presentations, panels and conversations. Different perspectives, difficult subjects and more opportunities to question, challenge and discuss.
Early Bird £575 + VAT, ends 7 September 2026 · Full Rate £725 + VAT thereafter
12 days left at this rate.
Primary sponsors
Why Forum
It is called Forum for a reason.
Questions. Arguments. More Questions.
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More opportunity to engage
Some sessions deliver ideas in depth. Others create more opportunity for the audience to ask, challenge, explore and continue the conversation.
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Conflicting viewpoints
Different parts of the email ecosystem often approach the same problem from very different perspectives. Forum makes room for those perspectives to meet.
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Conversations worth being there for
Important, difficult, emerging and contested subjects, with room for perspectives that are not always put side by side.
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A fraction of the size, deliberately
Other London marketing events run into the thousands. Forum caters properly for around 250. That's the difference between watching someone from the back of a hall and actually talking to them afterwards.
What happens in the room is the point.
The people in the room
The people shaping the conversation.
Meet some of the hosts and contributors joining us in London. More contributors and the full programme will be announced separately.
Andrew Bonar
Founder, emailexpert
Forum host
Riaz Kanani
Host and MC
Forum host
Featured contributors
Relevant voices. Different perspectives.
From CRM and lifecycle to deliverability, infrastructure, abuse and the inbox itself. A small selection of the voices that will be present in the room. More to be published soon.
Discussion at Forum
Questions worth arguing about.
A flavour of the questions and disagreements we expect to surface across Forum.
These are relevant voices joining the Forum, not confirmed session line-ups. The full programme will be announced separately.
- 01
Is AI in the inbox helping recipients, or coming between brands and their customers?
Summaries, prioritisation and automated actions may increasingly influence what is seen, understood and ignored.
Relevant voices in the room
- 02
Has deliverability become an excuse for bad marketing?
When performance falls, it is tempting to blame placement. Sometimes the problem is the audience, the offer or the email.
Relevant voices in the room
- 03
Is cold email a legitimate channel, or just spam with a sales target?
Relevance, lawful basis and personalisation do not settle the argument.
Relevant voices in the room
- 04
Is the CDP dead, or has it finally become useful?
After years of promises, what should a CDP actually own, and what is better left elsewhere in the stack?
Relevant voices in the room
- 05
Is email measurement now largely fiction?
Opens are imperfect, automated activity complicates clicks, and attribution changes depending on who is measuring. What can we still trust?
Relevant voices in the room
- 06
Should the ESP be a dumb pipe?
Send what the customer tells you to send, or intervene? As platforms optimise, filter and enforce, where should their responsibility end?
Relevant voices in the room
- 07
Is sending less email better marketing, or simply less profitable marketing?
Frequency, fatigue, revenue and retention do not necessarily point in the same direction.
Relevant voices in the room
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Who should decide what deserves to reach the inbox?
Recipients, mailbox providers, senders, blocklists and regulators may all have a view. Their interests do not always align.
The format
Different conversations need different formats.
- Presentations
- Shorter talks
- Panels
- Audience Q&A
- Moderated discussion
Some subjects deserve a substantial, carefully prepared presentation. Some are better explored by putting different perspectives together. Some become most useful when the room can ask questions and contribute.
Where the programme benefits from it, there may also be opportunities for smaller discussions and breakouts away from the main stages.
Not less substance. More ways to engage with it.
Sometimes the presentation is the point. Sometimes it starts the conversation.
Not your average conference where you have already seen half of the presentations elsewhere. The people, the content, the venues. It is growing into a real community and it feels like having a secondary family.
Raymond Dijkxhoorn / SURBLTwo stages. One Forum.
The message and the machine.
The Message and The Machine run across two stages, one in the Great Hall and one in the Undercroft. Move between them freely and follow the subjects, speakers and arguments that matter most to you.
Great Hall
The Message
Marketing, CRM, lifecycle, customer engagement and the commercial reality of the inbox
Strategy, engagement, data, audience and the numbers the business asks about. Built for discussion rather than a procession of slide decks.
Undercroft
The Machine
Deliverability, infrastructure, standards, security and the systems that make email work
Sending architecture at scale, the receiving side, standards implementation, abuse prevention and enterprise email security. Full technical sessions and deep dives sit alongside the panels and discussion here.
Two stages, different perspectives, and plenty of reason to move between them.
The programme is not for sale.
Sponsors support Forum. They do not buy the conversation.
Sponsors do get a small number of brief promotional moments alongside the programme, always clearly separate from it. Full detail in the FAQ.
Open submissions have now closed. Where we approach someone directly, the same criteria apply: relevance, originality and whether the room gets something it cannot get elsewhere. That applies equally to sponsors, to our advisors and to first-time speakers.
Twenty years of neutral ground.
Who the room is for
For people with skin in the game.
A room for people who own problems and outcomes, rather than observing the industry from a distance.
- Own the customer relationship
- Are accountable for revenue and engagement from email
- Run CRM and lifecycle programmes
- Decide how customers are communicated with
- Manage significant sending operations
- Build or operate email infrastructure
- Are responsible for deliverability
- Work on reputation, abuse, standards or security
- Control data and automation
The Forum experience
Four days. Two days of Forum. One connected gathering.
- Sun 15 NovArrival and welcome drinks
- Mon 16 NovForum Day One
- Mon 16 NovEvening conversations and networking
- Tue 17 NovForum Day Two
- Tue 17 NovGalaseparate ticket
- Wed 18 NovOptional Wednesday activitiesoptional
We have deliberately made room for conversations between sessions and into the evening. Both Forum days, both tracks and the time around them are designed as one connected gathering.
Venue
Not another hotel ballroom.
St Mary's Marylebone is Grade I listed. The church was designed by Sir Robert Smirke and completed in 1824. Stone, light and proportion, with the Undercroft below the Great Hall for the conversations that continue after the sessions. It changes how a room behaves.
- Wyndham Place, London W1H 1PQ
- 5 minutes from Marylebone station
- 6 minutes from Edgware Road
- Baker Street about 8 minutes, Marble Arch about 12 minutes
Tickets
Be in the room.
16 and 17 November 2026 at St Mary's Marylebone. One ticket covers both Forum days, both tracks, refreshments and lunch on both days, and the evening conversations on 16 November. The Gala on 17 November is ticketed separately.
More than half the room is already spoken for.
- Early Bird
- £575 + VAT
- Ends 7 September 2026
- 12 days left at this rate
- Full Rate
- £725 + VAT
Sponsors
Backed by the industry.
Platinum
Gold
This room is deliberately about a tenth the size of the big London marketing conferences. Full Forum tickets, including lunch, are limited to around 250. Once those tickets are gone, we may release a small number of limited-access tickets covering the sessions and refreshments, but not lunch.