→ My framework for building a data collection strategy (scroll to blogs)
→ Set up your intent buckets (scroll to end)
→ Google Postmaster understanding (scroll to end)
HEY YOU,
I hope you're doing good & you're enjoying life to the fullest.
When was the last time you searched your own inbox?
We don't do it loads, but we do, do it.
And with AI in the inbox, providers WANT you to search; they are supporting:
Search Inbox Optimisation
Learn what it is, how to make it searchable and more 👇
How to make your email searchable
Search Inbox Optimisation (SIO)
We've been sold email as a performance channel - instant opens, instant clicks, instant attribution, behave-like-paid-media.
But that's not how email lives in people's lives. Email is a utility. It's where you place orders, store receipts, find codes, document decisions, reference things later.
At work, it's the literal system of record.
People don't browse their inbox the way they scroll a feed - they enter it with intent, to do something or find something.
If you've ever seen opens trickle in long after send in your ESP, that's inbox search in action.
Inbox search is recognition, not discovery.
Google search is often "find me something new." Inbox search is "retrieve the thing I know I already have."
How do you actually make your emails searchable?
Use live, readable text. If it can't be indexed, it can't be found.
Kill the all-image email.
Be ruthlessly consistent with your sender name, people search for who they remember
Reinforce the same core topics and subject matter
Write descriptive subject lines, and use the preheader
Put meaning in the body copy, not just visuals and CTAs
Design for later, measure over longer windows because search value compounds.
Real personalisation is contextual: the right message landing at the right moment, given what someone is actually signalling.
That's intent, and it beats personalisation every time, because intent is the behavioural truth sitting underneath the email address.
People are always signalling something - interested, hesitating, warming up, gone quiet.
The job isn't to tweak the creative until it feels personal.
It's to read what they're telling you and respond to that.
And the first step is sorting those signals into three buckets, because each one demands a completely different response.
How to build your intent buckets:
Start with what you can actually track. Open a doc, three columns - Active, Passive, Negative. List every signal you can see right now in your database - it needs to be usable
Drop each signal into a bucket
Active= "I'm close to a decision" (demo requests, repeat pricing visits, abandoned baskets)
Passive warming = "I'm paying attention, but I'm not ready" (content in clusters, repeat blog visits, a webinar).
Negative = "this is the wrong time" (email engagement stops, warm goes cold, a support ticket opens, a trial goes inactive).
Write per signal: if this happens, what's most likely true and not true? You're not building automation rules yet - you're building behavioural hypotheses.
Match the bucket to the move
Active needs help to act (with restraint - it spikes and overlaps)
Passive needs sequencing and reassurance, never a hard pitch.
Negative needs you to back off - exclude, don't keep selling into a frustration moment
Add suppression & exclusion rules. Open support ticket? Marketing shuts up. Sales mid-conversation? No mixed signals. In onboarding?
The point of all this isn't to send more email. It's to send fewer wrong ones. That's what actually feels personal, and you'll get BETTER results.
If you send any real volume to Gmail addresses and you've never opened Google Postmaster Tools, that's your job today.
It's free, it's straight from Google, and it shows you your domain and IP reputation, spam complaint rates, authentication pass rates and delivery errors
But your domain reputation can show as "High" and your emails can still land in spam
HOW?!
Because reputation in Postmaster is a programme-wide average, and inbox placement is decided per subscriber.
Those are two different things. Postmaster tells you "across everyone, Gmail broadly trusts this domain."
Gmail's filtering in 2026 runs on per-recipient engagement prediction, so the same email, sent in the same blast, lands in the inbox for someone who opens you every week and in spam for someone who's ignored you for six months.
The only way to TRULY understand deliverability is to learn it in my programme.
%20(700%20x%20350%20px).png?upscale=true&width=400&upscale=true&name=REmarkable%20logo%20by%20astral%20(700%20x%20500%20px)%20(700%20x%20350%20px).png)
.png?upscale=true&width=160&upscale=true&name=a.%20final%20%20(1).png)
