For a long time, like most marketers, I focused on optimising the visible parts. Subject lines. Layout. Button colour. Send time. Things you can adjust quickly, measure immediately, and point to in a report.
Those things matter. But I kept noticing something that didn’t fit. Two emails could look almost identical and perform completely differently. Same structure, same offer, same list. One works, the other doesn’t.
The difference wasn’t in the email. It was in the buyer’s head.
Email marketing exists to trigger decisions. That sounds obvious until you start asking what actually triggers them.
One useful model is the idea that we operate in two modes of thinking: one fast and intuitive, the other slower and more deliberate. In email, the fast mode is what gets you opened. It reacts to relevance, to clarity, to a sense of something worth attention. It doesn’t analyse, it decides. The slower mode evaluates: it checks risk, compares alternatives, looks for justification. That’s usually what shows up closer to conversion, especially when the purchase isn’t trivial.
The mistake isn’t relying on one mode over the other. It’s mis-timing them. Forcing heavy evaluation too early kills momentum. Never providing rational support creates doubt at exactly the moment it matters most.
You see the same problem in testing. Most A/B tests produce one-off winners without building lasting insight. If you test two subject lines without a behavioural hypothesis, you learn which one performed better that time, not why. Without understanding the decision driver underneath the result, you can’t apply it with confidence to the next campaign. Over time, you collect tactics. You don’t build understanding.
Testing becomes useful when it’s anchored in behaviour: when you’re testing a bias, a motivation, a perception of risk. That’s when patterns start appearing across campaigns, and strategy starts to compound instead of resetting every quarter.
Loss aversion is a good example. “Don’t miss out” often outperforms a straightforward benefit reminder, and I’ve seen identical offers framed as “Save £50” versus “Avoid losing £50” produce meaningfully different results. Anchoring shapes how pricing is evaluated, even when the numbers don’t change. These aren’t tricks. They’re predictable features of how people evaluate decisions.
The buyer you’re not writing for
Once you understand the mechanics of decision-making, a second problem becomes harder to ignore. Most campaigns are written for one type of buyer. Usually the type the marketer themselves leans toward.
It’s not intentional. You write in the way you think. You emphasise what you care about: speed, outcomes, detail, reassurance. The issue is that your audience isn’t wired the same way.
Two people can read the same email, with the same offer and the same structure, and respond very differently. Not because one is right and the other is wrong, but because they’re evaluating the decision differently.
Some buyers move quickly. If something feels clear and low-friction, they’ll act. Others focus on improvement: they want progress, advantage, measurable gain. Others slow down and look for structure, evidence, reasoning. Others weigh the relationship as part of the decision; trust has to come first.
Most campaigns speak clearly to one of these. The others hesitate or disengage, and the results are inconsistent because the audience is.
This becomes more apparent when AI enters the picture. GenAI can generate fluent copy in seconds, but fluency and relevance are different things. Without psychological direction, it defaults to something broadly persuasive: safe language, general benefits, nothing particularly wrong but nothing particularly aligned either. The thinking behind the prompt matters more than the prompt itself. When you combine buyer psychology with AI deliberately, the same offer can be framed for someone who wants speed, someone who wants proof, someone who wants competitive advantage, or someone who needs reassurance before they’ll commit. Personalisation becomes something deeper than inserting a first name.
Triggered isn’t the same as personalised
There’s an assumption baked into most automation strategies that’s worth examining. When an email is triggered by behaviour (a sign-up, an abandoned cart, a lapsed purchase), we tend to treat that as personalisation. The email went out because of something the subscriber did. That feels tailored.
And it is, up to a point. The timing is personalised. The trigger is personalised. But the copy? Usually not. It was written once, from a single perspective, and it goes to everyone who hits that trigger regardless of how differently they think or decide.
The behaviour that fires the email tells you what someone did, or didn’t do. It doesn’t tell you how they evaluate decisions, what motivates them to act, or what’s likely to make them hesitate. Two subscribers can hit the same trigger at the same moment with completely different reasons, different risk tolerances, and different things they need to see before they’ll move forward.
Most welcome sequences, nurture flows, and re-engagement campaigns are written as if those differences don’t exist. They default to one voice and hope it lands broadly enough.
The insight, and it took me a while to land on it properly, is that you don’t need four versions of every email. A single email, written with enough range, can speak to all four types of buyer within it. The buyer who wants outcomes finds that language. The one who responds to energy and momentum finds that. The one who needs warmth finds warmth. The one who needs structure and proof finds structure and proof. Same trigger. Same email. More of your audience feels like it was written for them.
The welcome sequence is the most obvious place to start, because the stakes are high and the defaults are low. Most welcome emails follow the same template: here’s what you signed up for, here’s a discount, here’s a call to action. Functional. Rarely resonant. A welcome email that only delivers one version of the message is already losing part of the audience it just earned.
The gap between knowing and applying
There’s a pattern I’ve noticed in how marketers engage with psychological frameworks. They find loss aversion interesting. They nod at the idea of buyer types. They get the concept. Then they go back to writing the same emails.
Naming a concept isn’t the same as applying it. You can know loss aversion exists and still mistime it. You can know there are different buyer types and still produce copy that only speaks to one (usually the type you are). The gap between understanding and doing is real, and it’s where most frameworks stop being useful in practice.
That’s the gap these two courses are built to close.
The Buyer’s Mind course (free, CPD accredited) covers the mechanics of decision-making in email marketing. It’s built on dual system theory, but it’s not a psychology lecture. It works through what fast and deliberate thinking actually mean for an email: what triggers each mode, how to sequence emotional and rational content deliberately, and what happens when you get the sequencing wrong.
There’s a distinction the course makes that most marketers miss: the difference between intentional and accidental deliberate thinking. Intentional is fine, because you want buyers evaluating carefully when the decision warrants it. Accidental, triggered by confusion, vagueness, or unnecessary friction, is where campaigns lose people. Most marketers cause it without realising they’re doing it.
Buyer Modalities & GenAI course (£90, CPD accredited) picks up where the first course leaves off. Once you understand how decisions form, the next question is who’s forming them. Roughly 40 to 45% of any audience are methodical: they need structure, evidence, and logic before they act. Around 25 to 35% are spontaneous, emotional, fast-moving, responsive to feeling and momentum. A smaller group are humanistic; they’re buying with their hearts and need warmth and trust first. The competitive minority want an edge, not just a deal.
The course works through how to write for all four within a single message. Not four emails, not heavy segmentation infrastructure, but layered copy that gives each type of buyer something to hold onto. It covers how to prompt AI with psychological direction rather than generic instructions, how to build a reusable prompt library, and how to embed this thinking into automations: welcome flows, nurture sequences, conversion emails, re-engagement campaigns.
The framework has been tested in real campaigns. One A/B/C test using modality-layered messaging delivered a 5% uplift in click-through rates and a 17% uplift in the conversion action that actually mattered. Not from a redesign. Not from a new platform. From changing how the copy speaks to the people reading it.
The two courses work as a pair. One covers the mechanics of how decisions form. The other covers why different people form them differently. Together, they give you a working model of your audience that you can apply to copy, testing, and campaign structure, and keep applying, because unlike a specific tactic, it doesn’t expire with the campaign.
Jonathan Pay 