Somebody opening your email is one of the LEAST likely things that will happen today (for a general campaign, not an intent based flow or autoresponder). Somebody clicking is less likely still. Not because your email is bad, not because your subject line needs work, and not because you picked the wrong send time.

Because of everything else going on in that person's life, their day, their head and their inbox that has absolutely nothing to do with you! 

And the sentence I would tattoo on the inside of every marketer's eyelids: these people do not owe you anything. They owe you no attention, no open, no click and no reply. Whatever they give you is a gift, and we have built an entire industry on the assumption that the gift is the normal case.

The starting point

Why the open and the click are so unlikely

Picture an ordinary person on an ordinary Tuesday, because that is who you are sending to, not the persona in your deck (I have a love hate thing with persona's). 

In B2B, the inbox is where work happens

It does not matter how much Slack or Teams a business runs on; the inbox is still where you execute and a place you MUST check. Stakeholders get managed there, tasks get tracked, diaries get arranged, decisions get recorded, it's co-ordination at its finest and things get replied to. It is an operating environment, not a reading environment.

Somebody goes in there to DO something. There is a task, a deadline, a person waiting. And your beautifully constructed campaign lands in the middle of that, asking for a few minutes of a person who is already behind.

In B2C it is habit, retrieval and a low-level worry

People check personal inboxes out of habit, to retrieve something specific, and because of a quiet anxiety about missing something that matters. Not missing a sale. Missing something important.

Still a task environment. Still somebody arriving with a purpose that is not reading your email or to browse. We happen to go in, check, scroll, come out again. 

And everything about how attention works is against you

• People triage rather than evaluate. The question being asked is whether something needs them, not whether it is any good. Quality is not what is being assessed at the moment your email gets judged.

• Recognition is processed before content. Your sender name does more work than your subject line ever will, which means most of the decision is made before a word of your copy has been read.

• Habituation is running constantly. The brain reduces its response to a signal that repeatedly carries no consequence. Automatic, below awareness, and not a verdict on you.

• You are not competing with other brands. You are competing with that person's to-do list, and the to-do list is winning.

Put all of that together and an open is a small miracle. A click is a bigger one, and a email strategy whose entire strategy depends on the unlikely event happening reliably is not a strategy. 

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The double standard

Why do we measure email differently from every other channel?

Something odd happens when marketers walk from one channel to another, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it. Also, the math ain't mathing, or it's girl math or some sort of twisted math I do NOT understand. 

• On social, we track reach and impressions. How many people saw us, how many times. Nobody demands that every post produces a sale.

• On paid, we track impressions, frequency and share of voice. We pay real money specifically to be SEEN, repeatedly, by the right people, and we consider that money well spent.

• In search and AEO, we track visibility, mentions and citations. Being present in the places people look, whether or not they click today.

• And then email arrives and we judge it purely on the conversion event. Opens, clicks, revenue/leads per send. The being-seen part is not measured at all, by anybody, in most businesses! 

Nobody judges a billboard on its click rate. Nobody cancels a brand campaign because this month's impressions did not convert. We understand perfectly well, in every other channel, that the job of marketing is to build demand, and that one of the ways you build demand is by getting in front of as many of the right people as possible, as often as sensible.

Then email comes along, and we forget all of it. We've been taught it's this magically money generating machine, it is but it's NOT that simple. 

And the reason is a measurement accident

Email got treated differently because email was measurable early. Opens and clicks were trackable when almost nothing else was, so the industry built its entire evaluation around them, not because they were the most important thing but because they were the available thing.

"We did not measure what mattered, we made what we could measure matter"

Beth's quote of the century 👆

And two decades later we are still judging a demand-building channel on a conversion metric that has since broken anyway.

Conversion to trust

The metric nobody tracks, and the one that explains everything

Now the idea I care most about in this whole post, and one I do not think anybody is properly naming.

Nobody randomly appears on your email list. To get there, somebody had to take an action AND trust you with something. They bought. They downloaded. They signed up. They registered. They handed over access to the most personal space they have online.

That is a conversion. A significant one. It is simply not the conversion anybody counts.

I call it the conversion to trust, and it is the first and most under-appreciated commercial event in your entire funnel.

Read all about this in my seperate piece here

This is a BIG deal:

• A follow costs nothing. It happens in a feed, it can be undone silently, and the person gives up no access. The platform still stands between you and them.

• A subscription costs access. Somebody hands you a direct line into a space they use to run their life or their job. There is no algorithm in between. You can reach them whenever you decide to.

Which makes your list a trust asset rather than a distribution list, and it makes every email you send a small withdrawal or deposit against it.

And it means something happened before they subscribed

Nobody hands over inbox access to a stranger. Before that moment, there was recognition, an association, a tie in their head to the brand or the person. They read something, they watched something, they were recommended, they bought, somebody they trust mentioned you.

The conversion to trust is the visible output of awareness work you probably did not measure, and it is the closest thing email has to a proof that the awareness worked.

Which is also why cold email cannot produce one. There is no prior relationship for the trust to attach to, no recognition, and nothing converted. You did not earn inbox access, you took it, and the numbers reflect that.

The two stages of trust conversion

• Stage one: enough trust to get in. The opt-in. Somebody decided you were worth the access.

• Stage two: enough trust to stay welcome. Every send afterwards either strengthens or weakens the thing that got you in.

Most businesses optimise stage one relentlessly and neglect stage two entirely, then act surprised when the list decays. The opt-in is not the finish line, it is the opening balance.

How to measure it

• Conversion to trust rate, by source. Of the people who saw you through a given channel, what proportion trusted you enough to hand over inbox access? That is a real conversion rate and hardly anybody calculates it.

• Not volume. Rate and quality. Ten thousand addresses from a discount pop-up is not ten thousand conversions to trust. It is ten thousand people who wanted the code, which is a different event entirely.

• Strength, measured by what happens next. Did they open and click the first email? That first interaction is the best read you will ever get on how strong the trust was.

• Tracked over time, by cohort. Because the conversion to trust is not a one-off. It either strengthens or erodes with every send, and the cohort view is where you can see which.

Reach and impressions

The metrics email should have been using all along

If email is an awareness channel, it needs awareness metrics, and they already exist. Almost nobody uses them.

• Inbox reach. How many real people you reached this week, this month, across ninety days. Not sent to. REACHED.

• Inbox impressions. Total times you landed in front of somebody. Five emails to one person is five impressions, exactly as it would be counted anywhere else in marketing.

Both of those give you what every other channel has had for years: a measure of presence rather than a measure of response. And both of them behave the way a marketer expects a reach metric to behave, which makes them far easier to defend in a room full of people who do not work in email.

However, your email deliverability impacts how many people you reach and your impressions - you only count reach and impressions excluding SPAM. Find out how to audit your email deliverability here.

Which makes deliverability an awareness problem

Both numbers depend entirely on placement. Your inbox reach is capped by your inbox placement rate and your other-folder placement rate, so every point of placement you lose is a point of reach you never had.

Across providers, you should expect somewhere around fifteen percent of a typical send not to reach the inbox, and I expect that to rise. Which means roughly a sixth of your awareness budget is being spent on impressions that never happened, and it does not appear anywhere in your reporting because delivered is not the same as inboxed.

A paid team losing a sixth of their impressions would have a crisis meeting about it. Email teams do not, because nobody told them it was happening.

You cannot build awareness with email that does not arrive

Reach and impressions are both a function of placement, which makes deliverability the ceiling on everything in this post. My free 60 minute Email Deliverability Training covers sender reputation, the metrics worth tracking, and what normal looks like.

 

The Email Deliverability Certification Programme takes you through the full audit process and gets you certified, so you can work out what your actual reach is rather than what your ESP reports.

Join the free deliverability training →

The psychology

Why being seen repeatedly is doing more work than you think

All of this rests on a body of research that has been settled for decades and almost never reaches email, which is a shame, because it explains exactly why the awareness argument holds.

Mere exposure: familiarity is built by contact, not by attention

Zajonc published the mere exposure effect in 1968, showing that simply being exposed to something repeatedly improves your attitude towards it. It has since been demonstrated across sight, sound, smell and taste, and it works even when the exposure is subliminal, which is the part that matters here.

Read that again in the context of an unopened email. The exposure does not require conscious engagement. Your name appearing in somebody's inbox, week after week, is doing work whether or not they open it.

The explanation usually offered is processing fluency. Familiar things are easier for the brain to handle, ease feels good, and we misattribute that pleasant ease to the thing itself rather than to our own familiarity with it. Which is a slightly deflating account of how brand preference works, and an extremely useful one.

Pattern recognition: people know exactly who emails them

Try this. Without thinking about it, who turns up in your inbox the most?

You can answer, immediately, B2B or B2C, and you have never once sat down and worked it out. Your brain has been keeping a record you did not ask it to keep, because pattern recognition is automatic and free.

Which is the whole awareness argument in one small experiment. Those senders built a position in your head through repetition and consistency, most of it without your attention and a lot of it without your opens.

The six month problem, and it is worse than people think

Now the flip side, and the bit I would most want anybody nervous about frequency to understand.

If I stopped emailing tomorrow, a handful of people would notice within a week or two. Fine. But if I stopped for six months and then came back, something different happens. People do not think oh, Beth is back. They think that is strange, I thought I unsubscribed from this.

• Memory decays, and the association goes with it. The link between your name and whatever you meant to somebody fades without reinforcement, so you return as a half-familiar stranger.

• People believe they unsubscribed. Which is a real phenomenon and it produces complaints, because from their side an email is arriving from a sender they are fairly sure they removed.

• And your reputation fades from disuse. Gmail in particular starts to cool on you after around four weeks of silence, so the long gap damages your deliverability as well as your memory position.

So consistency is not only a relationship habit. It is a memory mechanism and a reputation signal at the same time, and going quiet costs you on all three.

Repetition also erodes attention

Yes I know you can't win can you!? 

Repetition builds recognition and erodes attention at the same time, from the same input. Habituation means a signal that repeatedly carries no consequence stops being noticed, and sending more frequently accelerates it rather than overcoming it.

What breaks habituation is consequence, not creativity. A sender whose emails sometimes matter keeps earning attention. A sender whose emails never matter gets filtered out regardless of how well written they are.

Which is why awareness through email is not a volume play. It is a consistency-plus-relevance play, and those are very different things.

The ratio

80% awareness emails and only 5% ask emails

Which brings us to what the programme should be made of, and my numbers are more aggressive than most people are comfortable with.

• Around eighty percent of the job is awareness and trust. Showing up, being useful, being recognisable, strengthening the conversion to trust that got you into the inbox in the first place. Giving.

• Around fifteen percent is preparing the ground. Proof, worked examples, answers to the questions somebody would need resolved before they could ever buy. Still not an ask.

• And around five percent is the ask. Not twenty. Five. The direct commercial request, aimed at the people whose data and behaviour say they are ready for it.

And let me own this, because everybody gets it wrong including me. We all need sales. I have absolutely been guilty of asking too much, and it is the easiest mistake in the world to make when there is a target on the wall. But people buy from senders they trust and who are not visibly shoving something down their throat every fortnight, and the maths on that has never once gone the other way.

The 5% has to be earned by data, not by hope

The ask only works when it is pointed at the right people, which is an intent problem rather than a copywriting one.

• Behaviour over declaration. What somebody clicked, browsed, downloaded or returned to beats what they ticked in a form.

• Intent is time-limited. A browse signal is worth a great deal for a few days and nothing after a fortnight, so the ask has to be triggered rather than scheduled.

• Derived data does the targeting. Engagement tier, affinity built over time, cycle position. The things you work out rather than the things you collect.

Get the eighty percent right and the five percent converts at rates that make the whole programme look like a revenue channel. Get it wrong and the five percent is all you have, which is exactly the programme everybody complains about.

What to do

How to run email as an awareness channel

1. Add inbox reach and inbox impressions to your reporting. Immediately, and put them above opens. They are the metrics that describe what the channel does, and they survive contact with people who do not work in email.

2. Start measuring your conversion to trust. By source, as a rate, with the first-email engagement as your read on strength. It is the first commercial event in your funnel and nobody is counting it.

3. Stop reporting open rate as a headline number. Useful as an indicator, worthless as a success metric, and reporting it at the top of the deck is how email keeps getting judged as a conversion channel.

4. Fix the deliverability, because it caps your reach. Every point of placement is a point of awareness, and you cannot build a presence with email that does not arrive.

5. Send consistently and never go quiet for months. Memory decays, associations fade, reputations cool, and people start believing they unsubscribed.

6. Hold your sender identity absolutely still. One name, one voice, one promise. Recognition is the asset and every change resets it.

7. Vary the shape, repeat the subject. Repetition of what you are about builds the association. Repetition of the format is what makes people stop noticing.

8. Make something matter, regularly. Consequence is the only reliable defence against habituation, so the programme needs emails that are worth having, not just emails that arrive.

9. Point the five percent using intent data. Triggered rather than scheduled, aimed at behaviour rather than at everybody, and sized so it never dominates the relationship.

The conclusion

Every other channel in marketing is allowed to build demand. Email is the only one we expect to close, every week, on command, and then we conclude it does not work when it fails to do a job it was never the right tool for.

The open and the click are the least likely things to happen, and building a programme around them is building on the exception. The likely things are that you arrive, that your name is recognised, that a small amount of familiarity and trust accumulates, and that when somebody is finally in the market they think of you rather than of somebody else.

That is awareness. It is what your paid team is spending money on and what your social team is reporting on, and you have a direct line into the most personal space your audience owns, given to you voluntarily by people who trusted you enough to hand it over.

Treat it like the privilege it is, measure what it does, and ask for something roughly five percent of the time. The rest of it compounds.