In a short clip on Crushing Marketing Hubris, I was asked for a bit of advice for marketers. The answer came down to this: don't let ego decide what will work. Try things, measure them, and let the data argue with you. That sounds obvious until you've been in the room a few hundred times — because in email and SMS, experience often breeds a specific kind of blind spot: the conviction that you already know how the test will end.
Call it marketing hubris: the voice that says “We don't need to try that — I've seen it fail before,” or “That A/B test isn't worth running; I know the control will win.” The uncomfortable truth is that hubris tends to grow with tenure, not shrink. The more campaigns you've shipped, the easier it is to pattern-match too fast — and to skip the experiment that would have proved you wrong.
Where hubris shows up in retention marketing
Email and SMS sit at the intersection of creative, data, and operations. That makes them a magnet for strong opinions. A few places we see hubris cause real damage:
- Tests that never ship. The team “knows” the plain-text version won't beat the designed template, or that a shorter subject line can't outperform the promotional one — so the variant never gets a fair shot.
- Segmentation assumptions. “That cohort won't convert” becomes a reason not to build the journey — instead of a hypothesis you validate with a small holdout or phased rollout.
- Champion stagnation. A winning flow or subject-line formula stays in place for quarters because it “already works,” while the list, offer mix, and inbox landscape have all moved on.
- Dismissal of “unsexy” ideas. Small copy changes, send-time shifts, or frequency tests get deprioritised — until someone else runs them and the lift shows up in reporting you can't ignore.
None of this means experience doesn't matter. It means experience is a starting point, not a substitute for evidence — especially in channels where small lifts compound across millions of sends.
The goal isn't to pretend you don't have judgment. It's to hold that judgment lightly enough that you'll still run the test — and accept it when the result isn't what you predicted.
What to do instead: experimentation as discipline
The antidote to hubris isn't naïveté; it's structured experimentation. A few practices that keep teams honest:
- Write the hypothesis before you see the results. One sentence: what you believe will happen and why. It makes hindsight bias harder to smuggle in after the fact.
- Prioritise tests you “don't believe in.” If everyone agrees the variant will lose, that's exactly the test worth running — as long as it's safe for deliverability and brand.
- Re-run old winners. What crushed it last year may be average today. Champions should earn their keep on a schedule, not by default.
- Pair creative bets with measurement. SMS, new automations, and high-visibility campaigns need clear success metrics up front — not a narrative built after the numbers land.
At Essence of Email we spend every day inside this tension: deep pattern recognition from hundreds of brands, and a stubborn insistence on letting the data cut through the noise. The brands that grow fastest are usually the ones where leaders model that same humility — not by pretending they don't have opinions, but by testing them.
A question to take back to your next planning meeting
Before your team skips another test or shelves another idea, ask: Are we not doing this because the evidence says it won't work — or because it would bruise our story about how smart we are? If it's the second, dial back the hubris, queue the experiment, and get back to split testing.
If you want help building a testing roadmap that fits your stack and your volume — or a second pair of eyes on what you're already running — get in touch. We're always up for a conversation that starts with “we thought we knew, but…”