Posted by
Sam Beddall
This article shares the high-level takeaways from a webinar run by our CEO and Founder, Matthew Stibbe. To catch every pearl of wisdom, watch the full webinar here (gated content).
Most marketing teams are not short on effort when it comes to emails. Campaign calendars are full. Newsletters are going out. Subject lines are being tested. Segments are being built, rebuilt and worried over. Somewhere, someone is probably asking why nobody signs up to the newsletter, whether Tuesday morning is still the best time to send and whether the button should be blue or orange.
All of that activity can feel like progress. But activity is not the same as progress, and speed is not the same as direction. You can work very hard doing the wrong thing.
That is the problem at the heart of email marketing optimisation. The goal is not simply to send more emails, polish the template or squeeze another percentage point out of your open rate. The goal is to make email do more commercially meaningful work for the business. That means improving relevance, sharpening the message, fixing structural issues, testing the right things and building a culture of continuous improvement.
In this article, we share why email still matters, where marketers often go wrong and how to make your email marketing more useful, more strategic and more effective.
Why email still matters
For a long time, email was treated as a distribution mechanism. You wrote a blog post, published it on the website, shared it on social and sent it to the mailing list. Job done.
But email has become more important than that. Organic social reach is harder than it used to be. Search is evolving as zero-click results and AI answers reshape how people find information. Content marketing is crowded because everyone and their dog now has a blog. In that environment, email remains one of the few ways to build a direct relationship with an audience.
Email is one of the few remaining channels that has not been entirely swallowed by algorithmic gatekeeping. If someone permits you to appear in their inbox, that is valuable. It is also easy to waste.
There is an enormous difference between emails people want to receive and emails they merely tolerate. Some emails are useful enough that people pay for them. Others are irrelevant, repetitive and deleted without a second thought. If marketers want better results from email, the standard cannot be ‘we sent it.’ The standard has to be ‘was this worth receiving?’
The trap of optimising the wrong thing
Email platforms give marketers a lot of data. In HubSpot, for example, you can see who opened an email, when they opened it, what they clicked, whether it bounced and how the email performed against benchmarks. That data is useful, but it can also create a false sense of certainty.
The danger is that marketers optimise what is easiest to measure rather than what matters most. Open rates, click-through rates and delivery rates are important, but they rarely tell the whole story. They tell you what happened, not necessarily why it happened.
Here’s a tip: optimise the algorithm rather than the code. In other words, do not spend all your time hand-polishing a tiny part of the system if the bigger system is wrong.
In email marketing, that means a better subject line might help, but it will not fix poor targeting. A cleaner template might help, but it will not compensate for an irrelevant message. Sending at a different time might help, but it will not solve the problem if the audience never wanted the email in the first place.
The bigger questions are strategic. Who are you sending to? Why should they care? What stage of the buyer journey are they in? What problem are you helping them solve? What should they do next?
Relevance is the real driver of engagement
If an email does not feel relevant to the recipient, they will not open it, read it, click it or remember it because the email does not seem to have anything to do with them.
This is where many marketing emails go wrong. They talk about the company’s stuff, in the company’s language, from the company’s point of view. Product updates, internal news, event announcements and generic newsletters may matter to the sender, but that does not mean they matter to the recipient.
The better starting point is: show me you know me. Talk about the customer’s world, their problems, their needs and their language. Make it obvious why this email is landing in their inbox today.
That does not mean product emails never work. If someone is actively waiting for a particular product, service or update, that email can be extremely valuable. The point is that relevance lives in the mind of the recipient, not the marketing calendar.
Segmentation is how you make relevance practical
If relevance is the goal, segmentation is how you operationalise it. Sending the same message to everyone in your database is rarely the best route to useful communication.
Good segmentation can be based on firmographic data, such as company size, sector or location. It can be based on behavioural data, such as what someone has read, downloaded, attended or clicked. It can use lifecycle stage, intent data or previous engagement. Increasingly, tools such as HubSpot, Apollo, Breeze Intelligence and AI-powered workflows make it easier to enrich, classify and understand contacts at scale.
But the tool is not the starting point. The starting point is the question: in an ideal world, how would we like to classify the people in our database?
That is a more useful question than ‘what fields do we already have?’ or ‘what can the platform do out of the box?’ Start with the business problem and the desired outcome. Then work backwards to the data, workflows and tools that make it possible.
Segmentation is a strategic decision about what differences matter. If two groups have different priorities, different objections, different levels of awareness or different reasons to buy, they probably should not receive identical emails.
You might not be sending enough
A lot of marketers are understandably nervous about email frequency. Once an email is sent, it cannot be recalled. Nobody wants to be the person who sends the wrong message to the wrong list, or the brand that irritates its database into unsubscribing.
That caution is sensible, but it can go too far. In Matthew’s view, many organisations are probably not sending enough emails. They hesitate, over-polish, reduce frequency and treat every send as if it will make or break the relationship.
The real issue is not frequency on its own. If people care about the content, they will tolerate, and often welcome, regular communication. If they do not care, even one email can feel like too many.
There is also a practical point here: people miss things. They are busy, away, in meetings or scanning a crowded inbox. When Articulate sends promotional emails for webinars, the second email often generates as many registrations as the first. That does not mean everyone needed persuading twice. It often means the first email simply did not land at the right moment.
Consistency matters because attention is fragile. If your emails are useful and properly targeted, showing up regularly helps you stay remembered. If they are irrelevant, showing up more often just compounds the problem.
Clear subject lines beat clever ones
Subject lines still matter, but their job is often misunderstood. The subject line is not the place to be cryptic, cute or excessively clever. It is the place to make a clear promise.
People are scanning their inboxes quickly. They need to know what they will get if they open the email. That means being specific, useful and honest. A good subject line helps the right people decide to open and helps the wrong people decide that this particular email is not for them.
You are not trying to trick people into opening. You are trying to build trust over time. If the subject line promises one thing and the email delivers another, you may win the open and lose the relationship.
The same principle applies to the opening of the email. Too many emails waste the first few seconds with a large logo, a generic greeting or a ‘welcome to our monthly newsletter’ introduction. But those first lines are precious. They should tell the reader why the email matters and what they will get from reading it.
Think of it like an article. The headline earns the first glance. The standfirst earns the next one. The opening sentence earns the next. Email has to do the same job, only faster.
One email, one job
Another common problem is overload. A company has five things to say and only one email slot, so the newsletter becomes a carousel of competing priorities: a blog post, a product update, an event invitation, a customer story, a hiring announcement and a message from the CEO.
That may feel efficient internally, but it creates work for the reader. They have to scan, interpret and decide what matters. Most will not bother.
Email works best when it has a clear structure and a focused purpose. One theme. One main message. One obvious next step.
There are exceptions. Some editorial newsletters are designed to curate multiple items. Some informational emails are meant to be read in full, like an article. But even then, there should be a clear organising idea. The reader should not feel as if they have been handed a miscellaneous pile of updates and asked to make sense of it themselves.
The more you ask an email to do, the less likely it is to do any one thing well.
Build a culture of continuous improvement
There is no single intervention that will transform email performance forever. Once the basics are in place — deliverability, list quality, useful content, clear structure — improvement comes from accumulated learning.
That means testing, reviewing and refining over time. It means looking not only at individual email metrics, but at patterns across segments, themes, offers and stages of the buyer journey. It means asking which audiences engage, which topics move people forward and which emails contribute to meaningful outcomes.
It also means accepting that what works now may not work in six months. Audiences change. Markets change. Inbox behaviour changes. Your own positioning, proposition and priorities change.
An email programme should learn as it goes. That requires a rhythm of continuous improvement rather than occasional panic when performance dips.
Email should reflect the customer experience
Marketing should be a precursor to the customer experience. The way you communicate before someone buys should reflect what it feels like to work with you afterwards.
That means your email marketing should align with your sales process, your tone of voice, your positioning and your customer experience. The language should be consistent. The promises should be consistent. The level of usefulness should be consistent.
It should not feel like a bait and switch, where marketing is polished and helpful but the sales or customer experience feels entirely different.
Email has a role across the whole buyer journey. At the top of the funnel, it can educate and build trust. In the middle, it can help people compare options and clarify priorities. During the sales process, it can support decision-making. After purchase, it can deepen the relationship and help customers get more value.
Real buyers do not move neatly down a funnel. They pause, loop back, change priorities and re-engage later. Good email marketing respects that reality rather than assuming every recipient is ready for a product pitch.
The real work of email optimisation
Email marketing optimisation is not about finding the perfect send time or writing the world’s most irresistible subject line. Those things can help, but they are not the main event.
The real work is understanding your audience well enough to send something worth receiving. It is making strategic decisions about targeting, relevance, structure, timing and next steps. It is resisting the urge to optimise tiny tactical details while the bigger system remains unclear.
A good email programme builds trust in small increments. Every useful email makes the next one more likely to be opened. Every irrelevant one does the opposite.
So, before you test another subject line, ask a bigger question: is this email genuinely useful to the person receiving it?
If the answer is yes, you have something to optimise. If the answer is no, optimisation is not the problem.
Want an objective, external look at how well your email marketing is working? Book a free, 30-minute marketing strategy session with one of our consultants.
