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.
When your emails land in an inbox, you’re not fighting for attention; you’re fighting for relevance, mental availability, and permission.
Attention isn’t scarce but it’s selective.
And inbox behaviour has changed so dramatically over the last few years that most email marketers are operating with assumptions that no longer reflect how people actually process email.
In the era of “AI everywhere you look”, answers are instant, information is abundant, and inboxes are overflowing. Email is no longer the default learning space it used to be. People aren’t scrolling their inbox hoping to be inspired!
And yet, many marketers still behave as though attention is something they can capture by shouting louder, sending more, or tweaking the subject line one more time.
It doesn’t work like that, not anymore.
So here’s the question we’re exploring today:
Why do people disengage and how do you design for real attention, even if your emails aren’t opened?
Let’s get into the neuroscience, the psychology, and the behavioural reality of how attention works in an inbox.
People don’t give attention to the way marketers imagine they do. They don’t open email thoughtfully, t hey don’t evaluate everything consciously.
Most inbox behaviour is fast, automatic, heuristic, and subconscious. Here’s what the brain is doing the moment someone opens their inbox:
Inbox attention is neurological. You’re not competing for “eyes”, you’re competing for a place in someone’s mental model.
We don’t go to our inboxes for fun, and checking our emails isn’t a leisure activity.
And here’s something most marketers struggle to accept:
The inbox is a purpose-driven environment. Email is a functional environment, not a browsing environment.
We’ve subscribed to emails for a multitude of reasons: discount codes, trials, information-gathering, education, and entertainment.
Which means that when we’re opening our inbox, it’s to check, clear, respond, find information, or fix problems… rarely to browse or buy.
Unless you're actively searching for that promo code you saw last week! Or you remember that a brand sends you so many pushy promo's they'll defo be a code for when you needto buy.
Unfortunately, a lot of email marketers are hardwired to focus on the latter, which means that their emails are automatically being funnelled out.
People enter inbox mode in four ways:
But in B2B, there’s a fifth mode that changes everything:
Learning (or information-gathering) mode: Researching, comparing tools, gathering ideas, reading educational content, filling knowledge gaps, or preparing for internal conversations. This is where value-first content performs best - but only if your email respects the cognitive load people are already under.
When email marketers send emails assuming readers are in buying mode, they’re not aligned with real inbox psychology.
Your emails aren’t being ignored because people don’t care. They’re ignored because they aren’t meeting the reader where they are, and for their current state of mind.
Not all email sign-ups are created equal.
Most of us will, at some point (or many points), sign up for emails to get discounts, sign up for events, download gated content, or fill out an enquiry form.
This isn’t inherently bad, but it does mean that our sign-up was contingent on receiving something in the short term, making us prone to attention decay, as we never intended to build a long-term inbox relationship.
Which means that you have a rather sizeable portion of your subscribers creating false signals that wreak havoc on your metrics because they’re engaging once and then ghosting.
Before you know it, you’re dealing with rapid disengagement and negative reputation signals, which eventually flush your deliverability swiftly down the toilet.
Let me be clear, here: lack of interest isn’t about bad emails; it’s about misaligned expectations.
That’s why you want to prioritise intentional opt-ins - signing up for newsletters, educational flows, value-first sign-ups, because they sustain attention for longer, because the person not only expects your content, they genuinely want it.
Intentional = long-term attention
Consequential = one-time transaction
TL;DR: You can’t force attention from people who never opted in to give it, you can only earn it from those who chose to engage in the first place.
You can learn what to do with consequential opt-ins and how to grow their attention in this blog here.
Our brains are wired to hold onto incomplete tasks far longer than completed ones.
It’s a cognitive tension loop: when something feels “unfinished”, the mind keeps it active, waiting for resolution. Email marketers massively underestimate how powerful this is.
This is why multi-part content, series, and progressive narratives perform so well. When you create an open loop - a question, a cliffhanger, a promise of something coming next, you extend the lifespan of attention far beyond the moment of the send. You’re not relying on curiosity alone; you’re leveraging a neurological mechanism that nudges the reader back towards closure.
Story threads, multi-step journeys, guided sequences, even simple “Part 1 → Part 2 → Part 3” structures keep subscribers more engaged for longer because their brain remembers that something isn’t finished yet. Even if they don’t open every instalment, the thread of continuity builds familiarity and anticipation.
People want resolution, they’re wired for it and you can design for it intentionally.
One of the biggest mindset shifts email marketers need is this: an unopened email isn’t a failed email.
When someone scrolls past your message, their brain still registers multiple micro-signals:
they recognise your sender name
they recall previous experiences with your emails
they absorb your tone and positioning subconsciously
they register that you are consistently present
they categorise you as familiar, safe, or useful
Email isn’t only a conversion channel - it is a impact channel.
It shapes brand recall, builds mental availability and it reinforces positioning long before someone is ready to act.
This matters because in B2B, 95% of your audience isn’t ready to buy right now. They’re not supposed to click every email. They’re supposed to remember you until the moment they are ready and consistency trains that memory far more than sporadic “big” campaigns ever will.
When you redefine attention as “being remembered” rather than “being clicked”, everything about how you measure success changes. You stop chasing reactions and start designing relationships.
Email becomes a long-term asset, not a short-term performance contest!!
Lean into the science of attention!
Reclaiming attention isn’t about being louder, bolder, or more frequent. It’s about becoming aligned with the psychological, emotional, and contextual state your reader is actually in. When you honour that, engagement stops being something you chase and becomes something that emerges naturally.
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.