In this edition:

→ The 80/20 email rule

→ Intent over personalisation (scroll to blogs)

→ Crack sales psychology, and you win at email (scroll to end)

→ A guide to better email results (scroll to end)

HI HEY HELLO 🤸‍♂️

I put a poll out on LinkedIn asking what training I should build next and strategy is currently winning by a mile...vote below:

THis is my poll from Linkedin - what do you want?

Cast your vote here!

While we're on training: my Email Design Masterclass has September dates live

Right, and because I don't like asking without giving first, here's something to take away this week:

Stop using AI to write your subject lines. It's so obvious now, the same rhythms, the same clever-clever openers, and your audience can feel it.

You don't need it; you CAN create.

One of my lovely clients has generated £1,051,566 in pipeline since March from email (and one of my strategies that will always work)

We launched a newsletter built entirely around the questions their audience already has.

Answering a question that's in someone's head will beat an AI-polished subject line every single time. Because it's theirs. It's relevant. It sounds like something they'd think, search, feel, ask, or say.

And this will make so much more sense if you read the 80/20 rule...

The 80/20 email rule

Roughly 80% of your emails should give, and 20% should ask

Four emails that leave someone better off, they learned something, got a resource, enjoyed it, for every one that asks them to buy, book, register or refer.

A give is an email that delivers value with no strings.

An ask is one that primarily wants something back for you.

So let's break it down:

1. The psychology: reciprocity:

When someone gives you something valuable, sometimes you feel a small, subconscious pull to give something back.

Consistent giving builds up a kind of credit balance with your subscriber.

Every ask draws it down. Ask before you've given enough, and you're withdrawing from an account that's empty, so the ask falls flat, no matter how good the copy or the offer.

2. The behaviour: pattern recognition:

Every email you send, the brain makes a split-second judgement: is this for me, or for them?

When the answer is consistently "for them," your sender name gets filed under "demand,".

And that association alone is enough to make people open you less. Not because anything went wrong. Because you stopped giving!!

3. The deliverability: it all compounds:

Fewer opens, fewer clicks, weaker engagement- that's exactly the signal mailbox providers use to decide where you land. An ask-heavy programme will always results in worse inbox placement.

Giving generously keeps engagement healthy, which keeps you in the inbox. The give protects the deliverability that lets the ask arrive at all.

Hence...my email strategy. Except I felt I had been asking too much lately, so it's giving season!!

But there is one exception:

When someone shows matches your intent (you have hopefully read my piece on intent buckets - scroll to blogs for it) The most helpful thing you can do then is give them what they need to decide and ask clearly.

The give built the trust; the intent signal marks the moment; the ask converts it.

Do this today: pull your last four weeks of emails, per segment, and count the gives vs the asks. If asks outnumber gives anywhere - that's your rebalancing priority.

READ: 80/20 email rule →

Last chance to enrol: Deliverability Certification

The Email Deliverability Certification Programme

ONLINE, SELF PACED TRAINING

Enrolments for the Email Deliverability Certification close 31 July - so this is your final nudge.

If you've been meaning to join but life got in the way, or you need a little more time, just hit reply and let me know. I'd rather sort something out than have you miss it over timing.

Enrol before 31 July →

From the Vault

A blog a day keeps the spam filter away

⌚ 5 min read:

→ Intent Over Personalisation: What “Personal” Actually Means in Email (and How to Build It)

⌚ 7 min read:

→ Email Copywriting Psychology: How Copy Influences Buying Decisions

⌚ 4 min read:

→ A Guide to Getting Better Email Results

From the Queen’s Court

Voiceover video verdicts

This is a pattern interupt email

Hear the verdict

Pre flight emails...YAS

Virgin's amazing email experience before my flight

Hear the verdict

The Inbox Drop

Crack sales psychology, and you win at email

"What's the number one skill that makes you a better marketer?"

LEARN SALES 🫡

Trust me! I didn't mean to work for myself; it all just happened, and I had to learn how to sell to people and FAST

And hands down it's made me a much better marketer and email marketer

But we write email as though the reader is a logic machine, here are the features, here's the spec, here's why we've been trading six years, now please assemble these facts into a purchase.

That's not how anyone buys or makes decisions!!

There's a man in neuroscience known only as Elliot. Surgery damaged the part of his brain connecting emotion to reasoning. His IQ, memory, language - all intact. But he couldn't make a single decision.

Asked to pick Tuesday or Thursday for an appointment, he'd reason endlessly and never land, because no option ever felt better than the other. He knew everything and could decide nothing.

Most email copy is written for Elliot. And it fails for the same reason he couldn't choose: decisions get made emotionally and justified logically - not the other way round.

Binet and Field's thirty years of IPA data:

Emotional campaigns beat rational ones on every brand metric, and were nearly twice as likely to drive top-box profit growth.

B2B is more emotional, not less:

Google/CEB research found personal value drove decisions twice as hard as business value. Buyers who felt personal stakes were 3x more likely to buy and 8x more likely to pay a premium.

Makes sense because a consumer who buys the wrong moisturiser wastes £20. A Head of Marketing who signs off the wrong platform stakes their credibility and maybe their job.

Emotional ≠ sentimental:

It's not founder's-grandmother stories or manufactured "ENDS AT MIDNIGHT" panic. It's recognition (that's exactly me), relief, safety, status, hope. Quieter emotions, far more powerful.

Sequence beats content:

Average email read time (if you can get someone to read) is 12 seconds (says Litmus, but my research shows around 4-8 seconds).

This is why the old frameworks (PAS, BAB, AIDA) survive: they force you to make someone feel before you ask.

If you can write copy that works with how the brain actually decides - feel first, justify second - you win.

Not because you're manipulating anyone (the difference is whether the feeling you're activating is true), but because you're finally speaking to the human instead of the spreadsheet.

READ: Email Copywriting Psychology →

Quick win for you

A guide for better email results

Grab the hex codes from your last email and drop them into the WebAIM Contrast Checker.

You can test everything: body copy, headlines, button background against button text, links, footer text, even images with text sitting on top of them.

Around 8% of men have some form of colour blindness. Add low vision, older readers, and anyone squinting at their phone in sunlight, and that's a big chunk of your list struggling to read you.

And if you've got EU subscribers, the European Accessibility Act made this a legal requirement back in June 2025.

Better email results →