Email is the most misunderstood channel – unlock behavioural insights from email

Yes, email is the most misunderstood marketing channel in your digital stack

Email isn’t just a communication channel. It’s your richest source of behavioural insights from email—a built-in testing lab, a conversion engine, and an audience microscope, all in one dashboard.

Email can be a powerful audience microscope and your most controllable growth lever … if you use it properly. And that’s a big “if!” Because it requires new ways of thinking about and recognizing email’s role in your marketing program.

Too many brands still use email just to push out messages and rake in incremental sales. Why? The obvious answers are because how they use email is easy. It’s the way they learned how to do email. It’s all they have time to do.

All reasonable explanations. But they’re just symptoms of a bigger problem. Marketers often overlook email’s true power: the ability to gain behavioural insights from email that can reshape your entire marketing strategy

Or, maybe they do. Maybe they know exactly what happens when they send out a well-organized campaign and see the results pour in. They know what email, and only email, can tell them about their customers and what spurs them to act.

Their problem often is higher up in the marketing food chain with team leaders or executives who never got down in the trenches with email and see no need to support it with budget or personnel.

It’s time to flip the script

If you know me, you know I get frustrated when marketers or their higher-ups see email only for its tactical ability to make money.

Most email training treats it as just a tool—failing to highlight the treasure trove of behavioural insights from email that can inform messaging, content, and targeting across all channels. It neglects email’s strategic value. We’re just now beginning to correct this with educational sessions at professional conferences and my soon-to-launch Holistic Email Academy, which aims to reframe training by starting with strategy before moving into tactics.

My goal is to help marketers understand what happens when they place email at the strategic centre of the marketing program to achieve greater audience insights, build loyalty and create the strong connections that will win the battle of the overcrowded inbox.

Still, email is the afterthought on many marketing teams – the last piece of the puzzle and that often gets handed off to junior team members. It’s the “easy” button you push when you need to drive additional sales or when you have a hot promotion. How many of you have heard “We’re not going to achieve our monthly target! Send another email!”

So let’s change the narrative. Let’s take some time to understand why email needs a seat at the table when you hammer out your overarching marketing strategy. It’s not the last job on the list.

Email is the OG digital push channel

Not apps. Not SMS. Not web notifications. Permission-based mail was doing push before any of these saw their first lines of code.

Once you gain permission, you don’t have to wait for customers to find you through search or scrolling. You can initiate the conversation! That’s a lot of power, and you must use it responsibly (but that’s a column for another time).

Email also pioneered these developments that are so woven into the fabric of modern digital marketing that we don’t remember what marketing was like before:

• Direct digital relationships
• Personalized content on a major scale
• Performance attribution in 1:1 marketing

3 ways to harness behavioural insights from email for greater marketing impact

Email is a built-in target audience of your customers. Did you ever think of it that way? Once you do, you can see the possibilities of using that audience as your very own testing lab. These are your best customers, the ones who think highly enough of your brand to share a bit of personal information in exchange for a direct digital connection

Email testing is free of the drawbacks that hamper testing in other channels, such as search, website, and social media:

• You already have a built-in audience, so you don’t have to reach out to strangers or wait for people to find out.
• You can begin to see results almost right away. Although you must give your email tests enough time to compile statistically significant findings, this can take less time to achieve than website, social, or search testing because of the sample size.
• Because you are researching your actual customers, team members on other channels can use your research as a springboard to learn whether they also apply.

Here are three uses for email beyond sending promotions:

1. Behavioural testing lab

Email is the ideal environment for uncovering behavioural insights from email through thoughtful testing. What kinds of content or messaging motivate your customers to act?

Classic A/B split testing is the easiest way to begin testing, but my Holistic Testing Methodology can capture more nuanced differences without resorting to multivariate testing.

Which promotions lead to long-term loyalty? Look at your web traffic rate on the day you send out an email campaign. I predict you will see a boost in organic search, paid search and direct.

Just seeing your email in the inbox can nudge customers into checking out your site, even if the open and click rates don’t set the world on fire. That’s why I say email was the original nudge engine before nudging had a name.

Further, what do customers do when they land on your email landing page? What other pages do they visit? How long do they stay on your site? How does that compare to customers who find you through search?

All of these questions, which you should be able to answer quickly if you have a good web analytics program, can show you how email drives action beyond opens, clicks, and conversions.

This is how you extract powerful behavioural insights from email to influence not only your email programme but your wider digital strategy.

2. Content diagnostic tool

Email helps you isolate what prompts customer action—and inaction. These behavioural insights from email give you a clearer picture of what motivates your audience. It can also illustrate what they don’t respond to, which can be just as valuable.

Isolating content areas to see whether sender names, subject line variations, kinds of content (e.g., long versus short copy or promotions with or without supporting copy), buyer persona, and copy and image placement are just a few of the ways you can use email activity to measure motivation in and beyond email.

3. Customer relationship-builder for sustainability and loyalty

Email can drive immediate conversions, like sales. That’s one of its powers. And that’s where many people stop, when thinking about email. But you don’t build strong, long-lasting customer relationships with a barrage of 20%-off promotions.

When you combine personalization with email automation, lifecycle-focused email messages, and continuous optimization, you turn email from a one-note promotion channel into a long-term conversion ecosystem.

This model builds relationships, leverages behavioral data. It uses lifecycle touchpoints to guide the customer through an evolving path from awareness to advocacy. It encompasses the full subscriber journey, including engagement, education, nurture, conversion, retention, and reactivation.

The process begins before you send the first email, with a benefits-based opt-in invitation. It builds sustainability with a coordinated series of messages that respond to customer signals all along their journey with your brand. If you send only “Buy now” messages, you’re missing out on this rich vein of content. 

Rediscover the channel you thought you knew

Above all, let’s remember that email can be your best and least-expensive tool for retaining customers. While many marketing truths have been upended over the years, it’s still true that retention is far less costly than acquisition!

I hope that by now you’ve discovered how powerful behavioural insights from email can be—and how they can reshape your entire approach to marketing.

Take a few minutes – maybe on your next break – to think of two or three ways you can reposition your email content, journeys, personas and other resources and make email a business driver, not just the last promotional tool on your campaign checklist.

Email is the most powerful, flexible, and misunderstood marketing channel in your stack. It’s time to rediscover its potential!