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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.

(And why following “best practice” is often the fastest way to underperform)

If you work in email marketing or marketing and do email, chances are you’ve been given a familiar set of instructions:

• Shorter subject lines perform better
• Personalisation increases engagement
• Send at the optimal time
• Keep emails concise
• Segment your list 

This advice is repeated so often it feels like fact. It shows up in ESP documentation, conference talks, blog posts, and internal playbooks. And on the surface, it all sounds reasonable, right?! 

But no thank you...most email advice fails the moment it meets a real inbox.

Not because the tactics are always wrong, but because the assumptions behind them are. Most email advice is built for an environment that doesn’t exist.

The inbox is not a place people go to browse

The single biggest flaw in modern email advice is the mental model it’s based on. Much of the industry behaves as if the inbox is a browsing environment - similar to a website, a social feed, or a content platform. A place where people arrive curious, open-minded, and ready to explore.

That is not how inboxes are used. The inbox is a task-based environment. People open it to complete something, not to discover something. They are responding, checking, clearing, searching, confirming, or trying to reduce the cognitive load of unread messages.

This is true in B2B and B2C. It’s true for ecommerce customers, subscribers, executives, founders, and casual consumers alike.

When someone opens their inbox, they are usually:

• trying to get through messages efficiently
• scanning for relevance signals
• deciding what can be ignored safely
• acting on something they already expect

They are not leaning back, browsing content, or looking to be persuaded.

This distinction matters because human behaviour changes dramatically in task mode.

In task mode:

• attention is narrow, not expansive
• tolerance for friction is extremely low
• pattern recognition is high
• novelty is often ignored
• relevance is prioritised over creativity

Most email advice ignores this entirely and optimises as if attention is abundant and voluntary. It isn’t.

Why “best practice” breaks down in real inboxes

“Best practice” only works when conditions are stable and consistent. Email conditions are neither.

Different people check email for different reasons, at different times, on different devices, with different levels of mental energy. They have different histories with your brand, different expectations, and different motivations for signing up in the first place.

When advice ignores context, it becomes brittle. This is why you can follow every recognised best practice and still see flat engagement, falling clicks, or declining deliverability.

Let’s look at a few examples.

“Keep emails short”

Short emails can work well -when the reader already trusts you, understands why you’re emailing, and knows exactly what the message is about.

They fail when the reader needs context, clarity, or reassurance. They fail when the value isn’t obvious yet, or when the relationship is still forming.

Length is not the real variable here. Cognitive effort is.

A long email that is clearly structured, well signposted, and aligned to the reader’s intent often performs better than a short email that forces the reader to work to understand what’s going on.

People don’t avoid long emails. They avoid emails that feel like work.

“One clear CTA above the fold”

This advice assumes the reader is in a decision-making mindset. Often, they’re not.

Many inbox moments are about orientation rather than action. The reader may be:

• learning something for the first time
• reminding themselves who you are
• deciding whether to trust you
• saving information for later
• mentally filing you as “useful” or “ignore”

Forcing every email to behave like a conversion moment ignores how attention and intent actually develop over time.

Sometimes the most valuable outcome of an email is recognition, not a click.

“Personalisation drives engagement”

Personalisation only works when it is meaningful, accurate, and well-timed. Using someone’s first name is not personalisation. Referencing the wrong behaviour or making incorrect assumptions about intent is actively harmful.

Bad personalisation creates friction because it signals false familiarity. It tells the reader you think you understand them - when you don’t.

In a task-based environment like the inbox, trust is fragile. Once broken, engagement drops long before people unsubscribe.

Why email advice doesn’t translate between brands

One of the most damaging habits in email marketing is copying what “worked” elsewhere.

Templates, layouts, content structures, and tactics are lifted from other brands with the assumption that success is transferable. It rarely is.

Email performance is shaped by:

• How and why people opted in
• What was promised at sign-up
• How frequently the brand emails
• How the brand has behaved historically
• What else is landing in the inbox
• The competitive environment
• Sender reputation and deliverability
• Audience tolerance for noise

Two brands can send visually identical emails and see wildly different outcomes — not because one design is better, but because the conditions are different.

When advice strips away context, it encourages teams to optimise execution instead of understanding environment. That’s how you end up with “great emails” that don’t perform.

Optimisation without understanding is a dead end

Most email advice is optimisation-led.

• Optimise subject lines
• Optimise send times
• Optimise layouts
• Optimise CTAs

But optimisation assumes the system already works. If inbox placement is unstable, optimising subject lines is irrelevant.

If expectations are misaligned, optimising CTAs won’t help. If relevance is missing, optimising design just helps people ignore you faster.

This is why many teams feel stuck in a loop of constant testing with diminishing returns. They are adjusting surface-level elements while the underlying conditions remain broken.

Engagement is not something you “fix” inside an email. It is something that emerges when the surrounding ecosystem is healthy.

The inbox runs on recognition, not persuasion

Another flawed assumption behind most email advice is that emails succeed by persuading people. In reality, emails succeed by being recognised as relevant quickly. In the inbox, people don’t analyse. They pattern-match.

They look at:

• who it’s from
• whether it fits what they expect from that sender
• whether it feels useful right now
  

This happens in milliseconds.

When an email aligns with memory, expectation, and context, it gets opened or mentally stored as “worth coming back to". When it doesn’t, it’s ignored, often without conscious thought.

This is why consistency often outperforms cleverness, and why relevance beats novelty in the inbox.

Why most email advice fails

Most email advice fails because it:

• assumes browsing behaviour instead of task behaviour
• ignores cognitive load and attention fatigue
• treats optimisation as strategy
• removes context from execution
• overvalues tactics and undervalues conditions

Email doesn’t exist in isolation but it exists inside human routines, mental states, inbox competition, and long-term relationships. Until advice starts from how people actually use email, rather than how tools report on it, marketers will keep being told to fix the wrong things.

The question is not “how do we get more engagement?”

The real question is: “Are we creating the conditions that make engagement possible in the inbox?”

That’s where email strategy actually begins! 

People expect what they’ve been trained to expect in their inbox

(And that expectation shapes attention before you’ve even earned the open)

One of the most overlooked forces in email performance is expectation, not just what someone expects from you, but what they expect from the inbox itself. Work inboxes and consumer inboxes are not neutral spaces. They are highly conditioned environments. People have been trained, over years, to anticipate certain types of messages, tones, and intentions the moment they scan sender names and subject lines.

And the brain doesn’t wait politely to find out if it’s wrong.

It predicts.

In a work inbox, people expect:

• requests
• updates
• meeting logistics
• internal noise
• sales emails disguised as “quick ideas”
• follow-ups they didn’t ask for

In a consumer inbox, people expect:

• promotions
• discounts
• product launche
• seasonal pushes
• “last chance” urgency
• noise disguised as value

This matters because expectation shapes attention before content ever gets a chance.

When the brain believes it already knows what an email is, it doesn’t open it to evaluate. It filters it. This is predictive coding in action: the brain conserves energy by assuming an outcome based on a pattern.

• If it looks like sales, it’s treated like sales
• If it sounds like noise, it’s ignored like noise
• If it feels familiar in an uninteresting way, it disappears

This is why inboxes feel so hostile to marketers, not because people hate email, but because people have learned what most emails are.

Predictability is not the same as consistency

This is where a lot of teams get stuck. They hear that consistency builds trust (which is true), but mistake that for doing the same thing repeatedly in the same way.

Consistency is about reliability.
Predictability is about sameness.

Predictability without value trains the brain to stop paying attention.

When every email:

• asks for something
• pushes an offer
• escalates urgency
• sounds vaguely similar
• follows the same formula

…the brain starts skipping steps. It doesn’t need to open to know what it is. It’s already categorised.

This is why simply “doing more” rarely fixes engagement. You’re reinforcing the pattern people are already filtering out.

Being unexpected doesn’t mean being gimmicky

At this point, many marketers hear “do something unexpected” and panic or your bosses are too scared to change or optimise or adapt email. They imagine clickbait subject lines, tone shifts that don’t fit the brand, or novelty for novelty’s sake. That’s not what works, and it often backfires.

Being unexpected in the inbox is not about surprise. It’s about pattern interruption through relevance or value.

Unexpected can look like:

• teaching instead of selling
• acknowledging reality instead of pretending urgency
• naming the problem people are actually experiencing
• sending something genuinely useful when everyone else is pushing
• slowing down when everyone else is shouting

In a sales-heavy inbox, value becomes the interruption.

In a noisy inbox, clarity becomes the interruption.

In a push-driven environment, restraint becomes the interruption.

The brain pays attention when something violates expectation in a safe way, when it signals “this might be different” rather than “this is louder”.

Why value-led emails stand out in sales-saturated inboxes

This is where your strongest work shows up. When inboxes are flooded with promotional language, people are not craving more persuasion. They’re craving:

• orientation
• usefulness
• relief from pressure
• help making sense of something

An email that genuinely helps someone think, decide, or understand, without immediately asking for something in return, cuts through precisely because it doesn’t behave like most emails.

This is especially powerful in B2B, where inboxes are relentlessly transactional. But it applies just as strongly in B2C and ecommerce during peak promotional periods. Value-led emails don’t always get clicked immediately.

But they:

• rebuild trust
• retrain expectation
• reopen attention over time
• change how future emails are perceived

And that shift compounds.

Once someone learns “emails from this sender are worth opening”, engagement improves across everything - not just the one email that did the work.

Attention is shaped before the open, not inside it

This is the part most email advice misses entirely. By the time someone is deciding whether to open, they’ve already:

• predicted intent
• evaluated effort
• assessed trust
• compared you to everything else in their inbox

Design, copy, and CTAs only matter after you’ve passed that filter. If your emails consistently meet expectations in an unhelpful way, no optimisation inside the email will matter.

If you want attention, you have to change the expectation, not just the execution. And that starts by understanding what the inbox has trained people to believe… then choosing, deliberately, when and how to break that pattern with something genuinely worth their time.

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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.