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.
Email design has become one of the most over discussed and under understood parts of email marketing.
Scroll through LinkedIn, browse inspiration galleries, or sit in on a few ecommerce optimisation calls, and you’ll hear the same refrains over and over again: the design needs to be better, the email needs to look more premium, the layout needs to feel more modern, the buttons need to pop.
Design has become the default explanation for underperforming emails. When engagement drops, when clicks slow down, when campaigns don’t land the way we hoped, the instinct is almost always to look at how the email looks, rather than how it works.
But the reality is this: email design problems are rarely design problems. They are psychology problems.
To understand why emails succeed or fail, you have to stop thinking like a marketer and start thinking like a human opening an inbox while tired, distracted, busy, and trying to get something done.
This is not a blog about trends, templates, or what looks good right now. It’s about how the human brain processes emails, how eyes actually move across an inbox message, and why concepts like hierarchy, cognitive load, and expectation alignment matter far more than aesthetics ever will.
One of the biggest mistakes marketers make is assuming the inbox is a browsing environment. It isn’t (but it's not to say this doesn't happen - it's just not the primary goal when someone opens their inbox- we don't go into browse).
People do not open their inbox to explore. They don’t open it to be inspired. They don’t open it to “see what brands are up to today”. They open it because they are trying to complete a task, find something specific, respond to something urgent, or clear mental clutter.
You go in your inboxes to check.
The inbox is a functional environment, not an experiential one. This matters because attention behaves very differently in functional spaces. In environments designed for tasks, the brain is efficiency-driven. It is constantly filtering, prioritising, and discarding information that does not immediately signal relevance or usefulness.
When an email lands in the inbox, it is not competing on creativity. It is competing on clarity. The subconscious question being asked is not “does this look nice?”, but “is this for me, and do I need to deal with it right now?”
Email design that ignores this fundamental truth often creates friction without realising it.
By the time an email is opened, a decision has already been made. That decision was influenced by pre-open signals: the sender name, the subject line, the preheader, and the recipient’s existing relationship with the brand. All of these elements combine to create an expectation in the reader’s mind. The moment the email opens, the brain immediately looks for confirmation.
This is the most fragile moment in the entire email experience.
The reader is asking, often unconsciously: Is this what I thought it would be? Did I open the right thing? Was this worth my attention?
This is where the concept of bridging becomes critical.
Bridging is the connection between the promise made before the open and the experience delivered after it. When that bridge is clear and immediate, the brain relaxes. When it’s missing or delayed, friction sets in.
This is why repeating your subject line verbatim as the email header often fails. The reader already saw it. Repetition doesn’t add clarity - it delays resolution.
What they want next is meaning, context, or outcome. They want to know what to do with the information they’ve just opened. Good email design resolves the promise quickly. Poor design forces the reader to search for it.
The inbox is already a high cognitive load environment. People open emails while juggling meetings, notifications, deadlines, personal messages, and decision fatigue. The mental bandwidth available to process any single message is limited.
Cognitive load increases when an email asks the brain to work harder than necessary. This happens when there are too many competing visual elements, when everything looks equally important, when structure is unclear, or when the reader has to decode the message instead of absorbing it.
From the marketer’s perspective, these emails often look “rich” or “full”. From the reader’s perspective, they feel heavy. The brain does not articulate this as a design problem. It simply categorises the email as effortful and moves on.
Design that works in the inbox reduces effort. It does not demand attention - it makes attention easier to give.
When someone opens an email, their eyes do not read it line by line. They scan for anchors.
These anchors, what I refer to as hooks, are visual points that give the eyes somewhere to land and tell the brain where to go next. A strong hook sequence creates momentum. A weak one creates drift.
In well-designed emails, the eye tends to move through a predictable pattern: first to the primary message or value, then to supporting context or proof, and finally to the next action. This doesn’t mean everyone clicks. It means they understand.
This is what good design does: it guides attention instead of fighting for it.
Floating happens when there is no clear visual hierarchy. When nothing stands out as more important than anything else, the eye wanders. This is common in highly designed ecommerce emails where multiple banners, colours, badges, and CTAs all compete at once. It’s also common in long, text-heavy B2B emails where large uninterrupted paragraphs create visual fatigue.
In both cases, the result is the same: the brain disengages not because the content is bad, but because the experience is tiring.
If the eye cannot hook onto meaning, the brain will not stay long enough to find it.
There is another psychological factor at play that rarely gets discussed in email marketing: predictive coding.
The human brain is constantly trying to predict what will happen next in order to conserve energy. When it recognises familiar patterns, it shortcuts the process.
In the inbox, this means that when emails begin to look and feel the same, the brain starts categorising them before they are opened. “This looks like a promo.” “This looks like a newsletter.” “I know what this is.”
Ironically, this means that following design trends too closely can reduce attention rather than increase it.
Consistency builds trust. Sameness builds indifference. Design that blindly copies what “works” elsewhere without considering context, audience, and intent often accelerates disengagement. The email becomes predictable, and predictable things are easy to ignore.
Design is often treated as a conversion lever, but that framing sets it up to fail.
Email design does not create conversions; it creates comprehension. It helps people understand what the message is about, why it matters to them, and what they can do next. It reduces ambiguity, effort, and uncertainty. It supports memory and recognition over time.
When design does its job well, engagement becomes more likely - not guaranteed, but possible.
When the conditions are wrong, poor deliverability, misaligned expectations, irrelevant messaging, design simply makes the failure more visible.
Design is not the strategy!
There are three layers to email experience: how it looks, how it functions, and how it feels to interact with.
Most teams spend the majority of their time on the first layer and assume the others will follow.
They don’t.
A beautiful email that is confusing will underperform a simple email that is clear. An on-brand layout that hides the point will lose to a plain one that resolves the promise quickly.
Hierarchy is what connects aesthetics, function, and experience. It tells the brain what matters most and in what order.
Without hierarchy, design competes with itself. The headline fights the CTA. The imagery fights the message. The reader has to decide what to pay attention to — and when the brain has to decide, it often decides not to.
One final misconception worth addressing is the idea that attention only counts if someone opens or clicks.
That’s not how the inbox works. People often register sender names, subject lines, and brand presence without opening. They form mental associations. They remember who is useful, who is noisy, and who feels trustworthy.
Design that supports clarity and consistency contributes to this memory effect, even when engagement is passive. This is why reducing cognitive load, maintaining recognisable patterns, and respecting the inbox environment has long-term value beyond any single campaign metric.
If you want better performance from your emails, stop asking how to make them look better and start asking how to make them easier to process.
Design that works with human behaviour doesn’t shout, it doesn’t overload and it doesn’t demand.
It guides, resolves, and respects the reader’s mental state. That’s not a creative challenge, it's a psychological one.
And once you start designing for how the inbox actually works, everything else becomes simpler.
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.