---
title: "How to get better results from email: the five things I would fix first, in order, and what I would ignore"
description: "How to get better results from email marketing: the five things to fix first, in priority order, what to stop doing, and the popular tactics worth ignoring."
---

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 11/2026

# How to get better results from email: the five things I would fix first, in order, and what I would ignore

![Picture of Beth O'Malley](https://app.hubspot.com/settings/avatar/2761c9d87ba551994b382ed8415ad538) [Beth O'Malley](https://weareastral.co.uk/thevault/author/beth-omalley)

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Most advice on improving email performance arrives as a list of forty-seven things, which is useless, because nobody has time for forty-seven things and the list never says which one matters.

So this is the version I would give you if I had one quarter, your programme and your data. Five things, in priority order, and nothing else until they are done.

They are not best practice. I do not believe in best practice, because the thing that works for a weekly e-commerce sender is wrong for a membership body mailing quarterly. They are the five levers that move the number in almost every programme I audit, and the order matters more than the list does.

 

## What this covers

1. Send to fewer people.
2. Replace the calendar with signals.
3. Lead with the feeling, prove it with the feature.
4. Make it readable in two seconds, by a person and by a machine.
5. Measure across a quarter, not a send.
6. Plus what I would ignore, which is most of what gets discussed.

 

## Before you dig in, why don't you get access to RE:markable

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# One: Send to fewer people

### Why it works

- Your unengaged contacts are not neutral, they are a cost. Mailbox providers decide where to put your email based on how people respond to you. A large block of people who never respond tells them your mail is unwanted, and they apply that conclusion to everybody, including the people who would have bought.
- Which means the same action does two jobs. Cutting the unengaged improves the signal providers receive, so more of your email reaches the inbox. And it concentrates your sending on people who convert. Better placement and better results, from one decision.
- The revenue almost never falls. Because the people you stopped mailing were not buying. In most tests, total revenue holds or rises while sends, complaints and unsubscribes all drop.

### What to do

1. Build an engagement recency view. Active in 30, 90, 180 and 365 days, and beyond. Most organisations have never built one, and everything else depends on it.
2. Stop mailing anybody who has never engaged with anything. Not lapsed. Never active, across their entire time on your list. That group has no commercial value and carries most of your risk.
3. Then build exclusions into every send. Open complaint, recent purchase, mid-conversation with sales, already registered, already said no. Ask who should never receive this before you ask who should.

### What to stop

Reporting list size as a success measure. Replace it with reachable audience and active audience, and report the drop as a correction to a number that was always overstated rather than as a loss.

 

## Key takeaway:

*You are not reaching fewer people. You are sending to fewer people, so that more of them arrive.*

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## Free Email Marketing Health Check

### Audit your entire ecosystem in under 30 minutes

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# Two: Replace the calendar with signals

Most email strategies and functions decide what to send by looking at a content calendar somebody built in January. The alternative is to let what people do decide what happens next.

### Why it works

- Timing beats targeting. A plain email arriving on the day somebody needs it outperforms a beautiful one arriving on a Tuesday because Tuesday was free in the calendar.
- Attention is allocated, not captured. People in their inbox are already concentrating on whatever they came in to do. You cannot grab attention, you can only match what they are already looking for, which requires knowing what that is.
- And you already hold the signals. Almost every business I audit has more intent data than it uses, sitting unread in a system nobody has connected to the sending platform.

 

### What to do

1. Inventory your signals. Explicit, what they told you. Behavioural, what they showed you. Contextual, the moment they are in. Negative, where they are telling you not now.
2. Pick three and build something for each. Not thirty. Three triggers running properly beats a journey map nobody finished.
3. And give the negative signals equal weight. Suppression triggered by a complaint or a recent purchase is as valuable as any send, and considerably cheaper to build.

### What to stop

Sending something because it is that time of the month. If the only reason a campaign exists is that the slot was in the calendar, it is a withdrawal from your reputation and your audience's patience.

 

# Three: Lead with the feeling, prove it with the feature

With the right people receiving the right thing at the right moment, what it says becomes the constraint. And almost all marketing copy is written at the wrong height.

### Why it works

- People decide on feeling and justify with logic. In an inbox there is no time for anything else. A feeling decides whether your email is for them, and reasoning turns up afterwards to check the feeling was right.
- Anything you sell can be described at four heights. The feature, what it is. The benefit, what it does. The outcome, what changes. And the feeling, what it means for them. Most emails open at the first and never climb.
- And nothing is lost by reordering it. The specification still appears. It moves down, becoming the proof under the claim rather than the thing asked to earn attention.

### What to do

1. Take one triggered email and write out what the person is feeling at the moment it fires. Not what you want to tell them. What is going on for them, before they see anything from you.
2. Rewrite the subject line and first line from that. Leaving the rest of the email alone, so you can see what the change did on its own.
3. And move the specification underneath it. Same content, different order, and the order is most of the result.

### What to stop

Treating the abandoned basket as a reminder. Nobody forgot. They were not sure, and an email that answers the doubt beats one that announces they left something behind, every time.

 

# Four: Make it readable in two seconds, by a person and by a machine

Two separate readers now matter, and the work that serves one serves the other, which makes this the cheapest of the five.

### Why it works

- Nearly all the decisions happen at a glance. Under two seconds. From name, subject line, first line, maybe the top image. Everything you built below that is being seen by a fraction of a fraction.
- And something now reads your email before the human does. Summaries, assistants and increasingly voice. A model that cannot read your email cannot represent you, and it cannot read anything baked into an image.
- Which makes the all-image email a liability four times over. Accessibility, image blocking, filtering and machine retrieval. Four arguments where there used to be one.

### What to do

1. Read your last campaign with the images turned off. Whatever disappears is what an assistant cannot tell your customer, and it is usually the date or the price.
2. Put every important fact in text. Dates, times, references, amounts, next steps.
3. Use real structure. Headings, lists, labelled fields, alt text. The accessibility work and the machine-readability work are the same work, done once.
4. And write subject lines that describe the contents. Somebody searching for their booking reference will never find an email called We Cannot Wait To See You.

### What to stop

Judging an email on how it looks in a design review. It is being read on a phone, with one thumb, in three seconds, possibly as a summary generated by something else.

 

# Five: Measure across a quarter, not a send

Last, because measuring the wrong things will quietly undo the first four. Every one of them makes a campaign report look worse before it makes the business look better.

### Why it works

- Open rate stopped meaning anything. It is a blend of humans, machines, notification clearing and people opening to delete, reported as one number.
- Clicks are falling for reasons unrelated to quality. A click asks somebody to abandon their task, leave the inbox, load a page and then do something. And an email that answered the question without a click did its job, then looked like a failure in your report.
- Email's contribution lands somewhere else. People search for you later, mention you to a colleague, come back through another route. Last-click attribution systematically underrates the channel, which is a flaw in the report rather than in the channel.

### What to do

1. Report by provider, as a trend. Gmail, Microsoft, Yahoo and the rest assess you separately. Problems start with one of them and the average hides it for weeks.
2. Add engagement by opt-in source. The fastest way to find the one acquisition route dragging everything else down.
3. Track revenue and conversions across a quarter. Against sends, not against opens. Emails per conversion should fall as you work through the five, which is the headline you want.
4. And watch complaints weekly, as a trend. The earliest warning you get, and the one nobody looks at until something breaks.

### What to stop

Comparing this month to last month on open rate and calling it performance. Pick four numbers, report them every month without changing the definitions, and judge the direction.

 

# And what I would ignore

## Things that get discussed far more than they deserve

- Send time optimisation. Largely irrelevant now that Gmail ranks the Promotions tab by relevance rather than by time. Being a sender somebody engages with beats arriving at a clever hour.
- Subject line emoji and punctuation tests. Real for about a fortnight each, then everybody copies it and the effect is gone. Novelty is a depreciating asset.
- Redesigning the template. A rebuild feels like progress and almost never moves the number. The content, the audience and the timing are doing the work.
- Changing platform. Occasionally necessary, rarely the cause. Most businesses who migrate to fix performance arrive with the same list, the same calendar and the same problem.
- And personalisation tokens. Putting somebody's name in the subject line stopped working when every brand did it and nothing inside the email was ever about them.

# The order

## Why doing them in sequence matters

A B2B referral is not a shared discount code. It is an introduction, and the ask is a favour with professional risk attached to it.

- One makes everything else visible. Until you stop mailing the unengaged, your averages are being distorted and you cannot read the effect of any other change.
- Two is where the uplift is. Right moment beats everything, and it is only buildable once you know who is worth sending to.
- Three multiplies two. Good copy at the wrong moment is wasted. Good copy at the right moment is the whole game.
- Four protects all three. An email that cannot be read in two seconds, or at all by an assistant, loses whatever the first three earned.
- And five tells you whether any of it worked. Done first, it measures the old programme. Done last, it measures the new one.

 

## A quick win:

*Before any of it, count the people on your list who have never engaged with anything, across their entire time with you.*

*That single number usually makes the case for the whole quarter, and it takes about ten minutes to produce.*

## The conclusion

Nothing on this list is clever. Send to people who want it, at the moment they want it, saying something that matters to them, in a format that can be read, and measure it over long enough to see the truth.

Which is why it works, and why it keeps not being done. Every one of the five involves doing less, and doing less is difficult to get approved in an organisation that measures activity.

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## Bring it to your team

I run this as a working session: your data, your last ten campaigns, and a prioritised plan for the next quarter by the end of the day. Most of the value is in deciding what to stop.

[Enquire about a workshop →](https://weareastral.co.uk/work-with-beth?hsLang=en)

### Further reading from The Vault:

- [How to Get Stakeholders to Stop Asking You to Send to Everyone](https://weareastral.co.uk/thevault/how-to-get-stakeholders-to-stop-asking-you-to-send-to-everyone.-the-business-case-for-sending-less-in-language-that-is-not-about-email)
- [Email Exclusions and Sending Hierarchy](https://weareastral.co.uk/thevault/email-exclusions-and-sending-hierarchy.-how-to-decide-which-email-wins-when-three-of-them-could-go)
- [Your Subscribers Do Not Decide With Logic, They Justify With It](https://weareastral.co.uk/thevault/your-subscribers-do-not-decide-with-logic-they-justify-with-it.-the-emotions-behind-every-email-you-send)
- [Nobody Goes Into Their Inbox to Read Your Email](https://weareastral.co.uk/thevault/nobody-goes-into-their-inbox-to-read-your-email.-what-12-years-of-watching-inbox-behaviour-has-taught-me-about-attention)
- [Stop Reporting on Opens and Clicks. What to Measure Instead](https://weareastral.co.uk/thevault/stop-reporting-on-opens-and-clicks.-heres-what-to-measure-instead)
- [Gmail for Email Marketers: Every Feature That Decides Whether You Land](https://weareastral.co.uk/thevault/gmail-for-email-marketers-every-feature-that-decides-whether-your-email-lands-gets-read-or-gets-unsubscribed-from)

## Like this blog? You'll love RE:markable

 RE:markable is the weekly email about emails. Dropping the latest email marketing news, updates, insights, free resources, upcoming masterclasses, webinars, and of course, a little inbox mischief.

 Subscribe to RE:markable

 

## Email, CRM and HubSpot Support

I help marketers and businesses **globally** improve, design and fix their email, CRM, and HubSpot ecosystems, from strategy through to execution.

**My services include:**

- Email marketing strategy, audits, training, workshops, and consultancy
- CRM strategy and enablement
- Full HubSpot implementations, optimisation and onboarding through my agency

If you’re looking for experienced external support (and lots of enjoyment along the way), this is where to start.

[Work with Beth](https://weareastral.co.uk/work-with-beth)

 

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