I read a post this week from a brilliant younger woman in the email industry, celebrating that email marketers are finally taking psychology seriously in their messaging.
My first reaction: “Yes! Finally!” My second reaction: slightly more complicated.
I love seeing smart women in this industry doing well, taking up space, questioning norms, and challenging the tired old best practices that have been recycled for far too long.
But it did make me pause. Because I remember when these conversations were not mainstream.
I started talking, writing and training about psychology in email marketing long before it became a popular conference topic. Back then, in 2009, it was treated as interesting, perhaps even clever, but not essential. Something for a breakout session. Not a keynote-worthy presentation.
I remember when testing was something brands did because they thought they should, not because they truly understood how to learn from it.
I remember when we talked about email strategy more often than we practised it.
And I remember when just being a woman on an international email marketing stage felt like an achievement in itself. There were just so few of us.
We did not wait for permission, but we had to fight for space
When I first started speaking internationally, I was one of only a handful of women regularly seen on those stages. Even fewer of us were self-employed, building our own businesses, reputations, and authority without a company name to open the door for us.
When an employer puts you forward, you still have to do the work, to know your subject, to stand on the stage and deliver.
But you face a different kind of challenge when you are the business. You are the brand. The credibility must come from you because there is no large company validating your place in the room.
Back then, keynotes felt like another world. Most of us were just grateful to get on the agenda. Look at the industry now!
Women are leading the agenda, not just appearing on stage. We are delivering keynotes, shaping conversations, challenging weak thinking, and pushing the industry into areas that once sat on the edge of the mainstream. That is real progress.
And, I am convinced, it is why we are shifting the conversation into once-overlooked areas, such as the psychology of successful email marketing.
Psychology was not always welcome in the email conversation
In the early days, much of the industry focused on the mechanics. Get the automation built. Segment the list. Improve the subject line. Add the button. Send more email. Make it faster. Make it cheaper. Make it measurable.
All useful, of course. I am not dismissing the basics.
But I never understood why we spent so much time talking about platforms, campaigns, and tactics, and so little time talking about people.
Because that is what email marketing is: the decision you ask people to make, beyond reading the message itself. It is the moment they are in when they receive it. It is the motivation, hesitation, bias, expectation, trust, friction, and emotion sitting underneath the click.
That is why I started bringing psychology and behavioural science into email marketing and formulated my phrase “Let’s bring marketing back into email marketing’.. Not as a gimmick or a clever trick to make people do things they did not want to do. But because understanding how people think, feel, decide, avoid decisions, justify decisions, and respond to relevance makes us better marketers. More helpful marketers. More customer-centric marketers.
Not customer-centric in the way brands often use the phrase, where they say they are customer-centric and then send the same sales email to everyone regardless of need, context, behaviour, or timing. Customer-centric, not!
The Holistic approach came from frustration
I grew tired of seeing email treated only as a production channel.
A campaign goes in. A campaign comes out. Someone checks the open rate. Someone else asks whether we can send another one tomorrow. Wrong.
Email is a commercial, customer, behavioural, creative, technical, and strategic channel. All of these elements affect performance. None lives in isolation.
That is why I kept talking about the need to connect strategy, data, creative, technology, testing, automation, deliverability, and customer experience. Not because it sounded good in a framework. Because that is how email actually works.
A brilliant subject line will not save a poor proposition. A beautiful design will not fix weak segmentation. A clever automation will not help if the timing is wrong. And a strong test result will not mean much if the hypothesis was shallow, the sample was too small, or the winning metric had nothing to do with the commercial outcome that actually mattered.
I have been saying versions of this for nearly 20 years. At times, it felt as though the industry listened politely, nodded along, and then went straight back to business as usual.
Today, things have shifted. Not everywhere. Not perfectly. Not as quickly as I would have liked, because I am impatient. But they have shifted. And I believe one reason is because email marketers are more open to new ideas, in part because they are more diverse.
Testing has finally grown up
Testing is one of the areas where I have seen the biggest change.
For years, many brands treated A/B testing as a quick campaign trick. Test two subject lines. Pick the one with the most opens. Declare a winner. Move on. And yes, sometimes that is better than nothing. But not much better.
Because if you’re just testing small tactical changes without a hypothesis, without a meaningful success metric, without enough data, and without a plan for what you will do with the learning, you are not really testing. You are guessing with a spreadsheet.
That is why I developed and taught the Holistic Testing Methodology. I want marketers to stop treating tests as isolated campaign decisions and to use them as a structured way to understand customers, improve programmes, and build long-term learning.
For a long time, I saw little appetite for that. Testing was considered useful, but not strategic. Interesting, but not transformational. Something to do when there was time.
Now, I see far more marketers questioning weak winners, short test windows, poor methodology, and simplistic best practices. About time, too.
The path is no longer lonely
For a long time, the path felt narrow. Only a few of us walked it. Sometimes, it felt as though we were having the same conversations over and over again with people who were not ready to hear them.
Psychology matters. Strategy matters. Testing is more than a subject line shoot-out. We must question best practices. Email is a channel for understanding and influencing customer behaviour.
None of this feels radical now. But it was. And that is why I find this moment so interesting.
Fringe ideas are moving into the mainstream conversation. Topics that I once had to explain and defend are now being presented on stages or discussed in posts by a new generation of smart, confident marketers who are taking them further.
That could feel uncomfortable if I chose to look at it that way. I don’t.
Because ideas truly matter only when they spread. If psychology in email marketing lives only in my articles, my presentations, my training, or my consultancy work, then I would have failed.
If the Holistic approach remained something only I talked about, then it would be a philosophy, not a movement.
If better testing stayed in a handful of conference sessions and client workshops, then too many brands would still make decisions based on flimsy evidence and call it insight.
The point was never to stand at the front forever. The point is to make the path easier for the people walking it now.
Progress does not belong to one person
This is where trailblazing can be misunderstood.
I was early to the conversation about psychology in email marketing. But that doesn’t mean I own it forever. I don’t want to, either. The same is true for everyone who breaks an old mould.
If the idea is good enough, useful enough, and necessary enough, other people will pick it up. They will adapt it. They will add their own experience to it. They will explain it in ways you would not have explained it. They will bring it to audiences you might never reach. That is progress.
Of course, credit matters. History matters. Remember who pushed certain conversations forward before they were popular, especially the women, independents, consultants, and practitioners who did not always have big platforms and budgets behind them.
But there is a difference between wanting history to be remembered and expecting the future to ask for your permission. I do not want that.
I want more women leading the conversation. I want more marketers questioning lazy best practices. I want more people talking about psychology, behavioural science, customer motivation, and better testing.
Beyond that, I want email marketers to feel confident enough to challenge the way things have always been done. Strategy must stop being treated as something to write in a deck after you decide the plan. The industry must keep evolving.
The industry has changed, and that is worth celebrating
When I look at email marketing today, I see an industry that is far more curious now.
It’s still flawed. Still obsessed with tactics at times. Still too willing to chase shiny things. Still guilty of dressing up old habits in new terminology.
We are marketers. We do love a shiny thing.
But I see more appetite for depth now. More appetite for psychology and proper testing. More willingness to question whether a best practice is actually best or just familiar.
Women are more visible in that conversation now. This matters because visibility changes what people believe is possible. It matters because younger women can see themselves on those stages in a way many of us could not.
When the same voices dominate an industry for too long, the thinking narrows.
Email marketing cannot afford narrow thinking. It needs people who question and push. People who connect the dots. People who understand that customers are not data points, automations are not strategies, and best practices are not laws.
So, when I see younger women speaking about psychology, challenging norms, and pushing the industry forward, I feel proud. A little reflective, perhaps, and aware of how long some of these conversations have taken to become normal. But mostly proud.
Because the trail is no longer lonely. The path has widened. More people are walking it. More voices are joining the conversation. More marketers are taking the ideas further than any one person could.
That, surely, is the whole bloody point.
I read a post this week from a brilliant younger woman in the email industry, celebrating that email marketers are finally taking psychology seriously in their messaging.
My first reaction: “Yes! Finally!” My second reaction: slightly more complicated.
I love seeing smart women in this industry doing well, taking up space, questioning norms, and challenging the tired old best practices that have been recycled for far too long.
But it did make me pause. Because I remember when these conversations were not mainstream.
I started talking, writing and training about psychology in email marketing long before it became a popular conference topic. Back then, in 2009, it was treated as interesting, perhaps even clever, but not essential. Something for a breakout session. Not a keynote-worthy presentation.
I remember when testing was something brands did because they thought they should, not because they truly understood how to learn from it.
I remember when we talked about email strategy more often than we practised it.
And I remember when just being a woman on an international email marketing stage felt like an achievement in itself. There were just so few of us.
We did not wait for permission, but we had to fight for space
When I first started speaking internationally, I was one of only a handful of women regularly seen on those stages. Even fewer of us were self-employed, building our own businesses, reputations, and authority without a company name to open the door for us.
When an employer puts you forward, you still have to do the work, to know your subject, to stand on the stage and deliver.
But you face a different kind of challenge when you are the business. You are the brand. The credibility must come from you because there is no large company validating your place in the room.
Back then, keynotes felt like another world. Most of us were just grateful to get on the agenda. Look at the industry now!
Women are leading the agenda, not just appearing on stage. We are delivering keynotes, shaping conversations, challenging weak thinking, and pushing the industry into areas that once sat on the edge of the mainstream. That is real progress.
And, I am convinced, it is why we are shifting the conversation into once-overlooked areas, such as the psychology of successful email marketing.
Psychology was not always welcome in the email conversation
In the early days, much of the industry focused on the mechanics. Get the automation built. Segment the list. Improve the subject line. Add the button. Send more email. Make it faster. Make it cheaper. Make it measurable.
All useful, of course. I am not dismissing the basics.
But I never understood why we spent so much time talking about platforms, campaigns, and tactics, and so little time talking about people.
Because that is what email marketing is: the decision you ask people to make, beyond reading the message itself. It is the moment they are in when they receive it. It is the motivation, hesitation, bias, expectation, trust, friction, and emotion sitting underneath the click.
That is why I started bringing psychology and behavioural science into email marketing and formulated my phrase “Let’s bring marketing back into email marketing’.. Not as a gimmick or a clever trick to make people do things they did not want to do. But because understanding how people think, feel, decide, avoid decisions, justify decisions, and respond to relevance makes us better marketers. More helpful marketers. More customer-centric marketers.
Not customer-centric in the way brands often use the phrase, where they say they are customer-centric and then send the same sales email to everyone regardless of need, context, behaviour, or timing. Customer-centric, not!
The Holistic approach came from frustration
I grew tired of seeing email treated only as a production channel.
A campaign goes in. A campaign comes out. Someone checks the open rate. Someone else asks whether we can send another one tomorrow. Wrong.
Email is a commercial, customer, behavioural, creative, technical, and strategic channel. All of these elements affect performance. None lives in isolation.
That is why I kept talking about the need to connect strategy, data, creative, technology, testing, automation, deliverability, and customer experience. Not because it sounded good in a framework. Because that is how email actually works.
A brilliant subject line will not save a poor proposition. A beautiful design will not fix weak segmentation. A clever automation will not help if the timing is wrong. And a strong test result will not mean much if the hypothesis was shallow, the sample was too small, or the winning metric had nothing to do with the commercial outcome that actually mattered.
I have been saying versions of this for nearly 20 years. At times, it felt as though the industry listened politely, nodded along, and then went straight back to business as usual.
Today, things have shifted. Not everywhere. Not perfectly. Not as quickly as I would have liked, because I am impatient. But they have shifted. And I believe one reason is because email marketers are more open to new ideas, in part because they are more diverse.
Testing has finally grown up
Testing is one of the areas where I have seen the biggest change.
For years, many brands treated A/B testing as a quick campaign trick. Test two subject lines. Pick the one with the most opens. Declare a winner. Move on. And yes, sometimes that is better than nothing. But not much better.
Because if you’re just testing small tactical changes without a hypothesis, without a meaningful success metric, without enough data, and without a plan for what you will do with the learning, you are not really testing. You are guessing with a spreadsheet.
That is why I developed and taught the Holistic Testing Methodology. I want marketers to stop treating tests as isolated campaign decisions and to use them as a structured way to understand customers, improve programmes, and build long-term learning.
For a long time, I saw little appetite for that. Testing was considered useful, but not strategic. Interesting, but not transformational. Something to do when there was time.
Now, I see far more marketers questioning weak winners, short test windows, poor methodology, and simplistic best practices. About time, too.
The path is no longer lonely
For a long time, the path felt narrow. Only a few of us walked it. Sometimes, it felt as though we were having the same conversations over and over again with people who were not ready to hear them.
Psychology matters. Strategy matters. Testing is more than a subject line shoot-out. We must question best practices. Email is a channel for understanding and influencing customer behaviour.
None of this feels radical now. But it was. And that is why I find this moment so interesting.
Fringe ideas are moving into the mainstream conversation. Topics that I once had to explain and defend are now being presented on stages or discussed in posts by a new generation of smart, confident marketers who are taking them further.
That could feel uncomfortable if I chose to look at it that way. I don’t.
Because ideas truly matter only when they spread. If psychology in email marketing lives only in my articles, my presentations, my training, or my consultancy work, then I would have failed.
If the Holistic approach remained something only I talked about, then it would be a philosophy, not a movement.
If better testing stayed in a handful of conference sessions and client workshops, then too many brands would still make decisions based on flimsy evidence and call it insight.
The point was never to stand at the front forever. The point is to make the path easier for the people walking it now.
Progress does not belong to one person
This is where trailblazing can be misunderstood.
I was early to the conversation about psychology in email marketing. But that doesn’t mean I own it forever. I don’t want to, either. The same is true for everyone who breaks an old mould.
If the idea is good enough, useful enough, and necessary enough, other people will pick it up. They will adapt it. They will add their own experience to it. They will explain it in ways you would not have explained it. They will bring it to audiences you might never reach. That is progress.
Of course, credit matters. History matters. Remember who pushed certain conversations forward before they were popular, especially the women, independents, consultants, and practitioners who did not always have big platforms and budgets behind them.
But there is a difference between wanting history to be remembered and expecting the future to ask for your permission. I do not want that.
I want more women leading the conversation. I want more marketers questioning lazy best practices. I want more people talking about psychology, behavioural science, customer motivation, and better testing.
Beyond that, I want email marketers to feel confident enough to challenge the way things have always been done. Strategy must stop being treated as something to write in a deck after you decide the plan. The industry must keep evolving.
The industry has changed, and that is worth celebrating
When I look at email marketing today, I see an industry that is far more curious now.
It’s still flawed. Still obsessed with tactics at times. Still too willing to chase shiny things. Still guilty of dressing up old habits in new terminology.
We are marketers. We do love a shiny thing.
But I see more appetite for depth now. More appetite for psychology and proper testing. More willingness to question whether a best practice is actually best or just familiar.
Women are more visible in that conversation now. This matters because visibility changes what people believe is possible. It matters because younger women can see themselves on those stages in a way many of us could not.
When the same voices dominate an industry for too long, the thinking narrows.
Email marketing cannot afford narrow thinking. It needs people who question and push. People who connect the dots. People who understand that customers are not data points, automations are not strategies, and best practices are not laws.
So, when I see younger women speaking about psychology, challenging norms, and pushing the industry forward, I feel proud. A little reflective, perhaps, and aware of how long some of these conversations have taken to become normal. But mostly proud.
Because the trail is no longer lonely. The path has widened. More people are walking it. More voices are joining the conversation. More marketers are taking the ideas further than any one person could.
That, surely, is the whole bloody point.
