I am currently heading back to London on the Eurostar after attending the Email Marketing Automation Summit at the Circa in Amsterdam – where the industry’s brightest minds gathered to talk about AI, personalisation, automations, and more.

Alongside Ellie Dane and Conor Wilson, I was there to represent ActionRocket and present the incredible interactive email created with BBC Studios for Walking with Dinosaurs. Our creative talk delved into making stand-out customer experiences. 

The new reality: consumers are overloaded

As I write this, I’m battling a spotty Wi-Fi connection and serious delays. I’m juggling rescheduling calls, communicating with clients, wrapping up projects, and writing this blog post. I am tired, irritated, and just want to get home. On top of all of this, I’ve received eighteen brand emails and three SMS messages – just in the last four hours. Have I engaged with any of these? No. Will I go back and look at them? Likely only the email about my dog’s upcoming food delivery.

Sitting here, overloaded, I'm reminded of an assumption many marketers make, including myself. We assume customers make rational decisions about the content they receive. In reality, consumers are navigating constant cognitive overload. Inboxes don't exist in isolation; they are competing with work, family, financial worries, and an endless stream of digital notifications. Ignoring an email is as much an active decision as opening one.

What struck me most at the summit was that the conversation went far beyond AI and tech automation. The deeper focus was human connection and the psychology behind how people interact with their inbox. There were plenty of insights from the event, but these are my five key takeaways.

Cognitive load is becoming the primary customer constraint

Throughout the day, consumers are constantly filtering information to preserve mental energy while not actively engaging with it. Whether it’s:

• Prioritising an email in a to-do folder
• Delaying decisions on purchases
• Saving content to enjoy later
• Ignoring non-essential information

Yet, many brands interpret this inactivity as failure. When engagement drops, the common response is to send more emails, increase personalisation, and scale communications. These follow-up emails range from abandoned basket reminders, preference updates, newsletters, promotions, sales, product launches, and so much more.

But how does that land with someone like me, stuck on a train in a horrid mood and with zero mental capacity, when I receive a reminder that the jeans I added to my ASOS basket three days ago are low in stock? The result is fatigue, frustration, and ultimately negative brand sentiment. I will not be buying the jeans right now. Please leave me alone.

The irony is that in trying harder to gain attention, brands often contribute to the very overload that causes disengagement.

“More personalisation” is giving way to "better judgement"

For years, marketers have been told that relevance is the answer. But relevance alone is no longer a differentiator. In some cases, over-personalisation can feel intrusive rather than helpful. Consumers increasingly recognise when brands know too much about them, and the experience can create discomfort rather than connection. The future isn't simply about more personalisation. It's about better judgment. Knowing when to communicate and how often can be more valuable than knowing what product someone viewed three days ago.

Sometimes silence creates more trust than another campaign send. CFOs, this one is for you. With the trusty help of ChatGPT on my journey, we have collaborated and produced a framework for marketing to tired brains.

REST:

• Respect cognitive load
• Earn attention, don't demand it
• Simplify every interaction
• Time communications intelligently

Email marketing should reduce effort rather than create more of it for our consumers. So before you send that next, last minute promo email, pause and think, is this earning attention? Save this framework for later!

Email design is shifting toward scannability and simplicity

To reduce cognitive load, we also need to consider how our consumers view our emails. The likelihood of them reading these from top to bottom with full focus is, I’m afraid to say, very thin. So we need to ensure that these moments of engagement are easily scannable. Designers should ensure emails are:

• Clear and intuitive
• Built with a strong content hierarchy
• Easy to scan
• Focused on a single action
• Respectful of attention

Most importantly, they practise content restraint. Just because we can include five messages doesn't mean we should. Every additional decision we ask a customer to make creates friction. Less is often more!

Reducing friction matters more than capturing attention

When the cognitive chaos of the day has worn off, people will return to their inboxes. They regularly return to:

• Search for a promo code
• Find inspiration
• Catch up on updates from our favourite brands
• Review to-do lists and saved content

Not every valuable email creates an immediate click, and some may not get opened at all. Simply being in the inbox at the right time with a subject line that genuinely resonates with the consumer will earn a place in memory and contribute to overall brand impact. This is where AI summaries will also begin to play a key role.

Long-term brand memory is more valuable than immediate engagement

Not every valuable email creates an immediate click, and some may not get opened at all. Simply being in the inbox at the right time with a subject line that genuinely resonates with the consumer will earn a place in memory and contribute to overall brand impact. This is where AI summaries will also begin to play a key role.

The answer isn't necessarily more. It comes down to:

• Being memorable
• Being unexpected
• Interrupting patterns

In a world of predictable marketing, unpredictability creates attention and grabs us in the moments that matter. The brands that stand out aren't always the loudest. They're the ones that create meaningful connections, and retain a place in our cognitively overloaded brain for later.

So, before sending another campaign, ask:

• Why do our emails exist?
• What customer problems are they solving?
• What personalisation is necessary, and what is too intrusive or unnecessary?
• How does this strategy support customer experience?
• (And perhaps most importantly) Are we improving the inbox, or adding to the overload?

Whether you’re a strategist, a designer, or a copywriter, the psychology of the inbox is everyone’s problem to solve. The future of email marketing isn't about generating more messages, it’ll be won by the ones who remember that at the end of every campaign is a real person who is tired, distracted, and deciding in a split second whether you’re worth their time. So create more meaningful campaigns because when attention is scarce, reducing cognitive load becomes one of the most valuable experiences a brand can deliver.

At ActionRocket, we help brands cut through the noise and stand out in the inbox by combining strategy, creative, and human insights. Want to know more? Just get in touch.