I ran a masterclass at Marketing Week's Festival of Marketing last week called Email marketing isn't what you think, and the line that got the biggest reaction was not a statistic. It was five words!
Nobody went in to read your email.
Every strategy deck I have ever been handed assumes a reader. Somebody sitting down, giving your campaign their attention, weighing the proposition. That person does not exist, has never existed, and building a programme around them is why so much good email underperforms.
What follows is the behaviour underneath the metrics. Not the psychology of copy, which is a separate problem, but what is physically happening to a human being in the seconds your email is alive on their screen.
Email became the world's to-do list decades ago, and researchers were documenting it as far back as 1996. The scale changed, the function did not.
The shape of it. Where is that invoice. Has the client replied. Is there a promo code for this brand. They arrive with a goal and a job to finish.
Mostly B2B. Often with an anxious edge underneath it, the quiet have I missed something that drives half of professional inbox checking.
Neither reason has anything to do with you. Your email is an interruption to a task, or a piece of furniture in a habit, and the sooner that stops feeling insulting the sooner your email gets better.
Once somebody is in the inbox they want out of it as fast as possible. Everything that happens in between is a three-way sort.
Does this need me now? Clients, the boss, the promo code, anything urgent, anything they forgot about and got reminded of. Dealt with immediately.
Can it wait? Flagged, left unread, I will come back to it. Mostly never.
Can it go? Deleted, archived, scrolled past. Most marketing email lives in this third bucket, and that is not a comment on quality.
Filtering is the default behaviour. Deleting is one swipe. Unsubscribing is a decision, a page load and a click. Behaviour follows the easiest path every time, so people bin rather than leave, and your list quietly fills with ghosts.
Open-to-delete is real and common. Open to clear the bold or the notification, check it is not important, bin it. An open in your report, a rejection in real life.
And a chunk of your opens are machines. Apple's privacy protection inflates them, and inbox AI may open mail to summarise it. Your open rate is a blend of software, notification clearing and a little bit of reading.
Same email, two completely different physical situations, and most programmes are written as though there is one generic recipient in a neutral room.
Everybody talks about capturing attention, and in the inbox the phrase is backwards. People in their inbox are already paying attention, it is just pointed at the thing they came in to do.
In 1999 Simons and Chabris asked people to count basketball passes in a video. Half of them missed a person in a gorilla suit walking straight through the middle of the shot. Not a subtle detail. A gorilla.
Attention is not received, it is allocated, and things only grab it automatically when they match what somebody is already set up to look for. Your email is the gorilla, and the counting is their to-do list.
First name tokens. The cue was there, nothing inside the email was about them, and the brain learned to ignore the cue.
Emojis, lowercase subject lines, fake Re: and Fwd: prefixes. Each one worked beautifully, then got copied, then stopped meaning anything.
Novelty is a depreciating asset. Every use spends a little of it. Anything that works because it is unusual stops working the moment it is not.
Glance. Under two seconds, often milliseconds. From name, maybe the subject line, maybe the first line or the top image. The vast majority of decisions about your email are made here.
Skim. Two to eight seconds. Headings, bold text, the first few words of each line, the button. Nothing else is being processed.
Read. Eight seconds and up. Most people never get here, newsletters excepted. Designing your email for this stage is designing for a minority of a minority.
Stop the task. Abandon whatever they came into the inbox to do.
Leave the inbox. A complete context switch, away from the thing they were halfway through.
Load a page. On a phone, possibly on bad signal, possibly standing up, with everything around them competing.
Then do something. Read, decide, fill in, buy. The thing you wanted all along, now four steps from where they started.
If the email is pointing at a blog, put a usable short version in the email. If it is pointing at an offer, make the offer legible without a click. People engage indirectly, through another channel, or by remembering you later, almost as readily as they click, and none of that shows up in a click report.
Every maturity model I have ever drawn has the same shape, and email is no different. Most businesses are at one or two. The money is in getting to three and four.
What surprises people is that none of that movement requires AI. It requires deciding what counts as a signal, deciding who should never receive something, and deciding to stop sending things nobody asked for on a calendar nobody agreed to.
You are also not as far behind as you think. The room at Festival of Marketing was full of experienced marketers at large organisations, and the hands that went up for level one and two were the overwhelming majority.
The landscape around the inbox has changed beyond recognition, and the inbox itself has not. Same brain, same to-do list, same one thumb, same desire to get out as quickly as possible.
Which is reassuring, because it means the work is knowable. Understand what somebody is doing when your email lands, match it, and accept that you are a guest in somebody else's five minutes rather than the host of your own.
Email is a science. It starts with the human, then the inbox, then the email, in that order, and almost everybody starts at the wrong end.
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