Published January 29, 2026
1
The Magnetic Inbox is not a product. It is a system — one that only makes sense when seen from all sides at once. Brands, consumers, advertisers, and the platform itself experience it differently, yet they are bound together by the same moments, the same interactions, the same signals rippling through the ecosystem.
To understand how pull replaces push, how reacquisition gives way to relationships, and how email quietly becomes something else entirely, we need to see the same system through four different voices. This is that story — told first by the person at the receiving end of it all.
**
Arun — The Consumer
“I never thought I’d look forward to marketing emails.”
I didn’t set out to change how I use email. It just… happened.
I’m 34, live in Mumbai, work in product management at a fintech. Like most people I know, my inbox used to be a graveyard. Promotions I never opened. OTPs. Receipts. The occasional newsletter I felt guilty unsubscribing from because I’d signed up in a burst of optimism six months earlier.
Email was background noise. Useful, but forgettable.
That changed sometime last year, when a few brands I actually liked started sending something different. Not offers. Not announcements. Something to do.
The three things I see most often are a Quiz, a WePredict card, or a Daily Fork — different formats, same rhythm: engage now, resolve later.
Now I subscribe to NeoMails from about eight or nine brands — my coffee roaster, a fitness app, two fashion labels, a financial news publisher, a skincare company, and a few others. I receive about three a day, spread across morning, afternoon, and evening — and I open all three. Not out of obligation. Out of something closer to habit.
Let me walk you through yesterday.
**
7:42am — First NeoMail: BrewCraft (Coffee)
I’m still in bed, half-awake, phone in hand. The subject line reads:
µ.1,847 | Your Daily Coffee IQ
That number — 1,847 — is my Mu balance. I’ve been accumulating it for months across all the NeoMails I receive. I don’t treat it like money exactly. It’s more like… energy. Something you spend to participate, something that grows when you show up. Right now I’m 153 Mu away from a free bag of BrewCraft’s single-origin Ethiopian. That’s maybe four or five days of engagement. I’ll get there — though honestly, I’m not chasing it. It’s more a marker of showing up than a reward I’m hunting.
I tap open.
First thing I see: my streak. Fourteen days. A small badge glows next to it. Oddly satisfying.
Then the Magnet — today it’s a WePredict card. The question: “Will NIFTY close up or down today?” Nothing to do with coffee — and that’s intentional. The Magnets don’t belong to the brand; the BrandBlocks do. They’re just… reasons to engage. I tap “Up” and stake 20 Mu. I’ll find out tomorrow if I was right.
Below that, the BrandBlocks — this is where BrewCraft shows up as a brand. There’s a short story about Maria, the farmer behind their new Colombian roast. Her family has grown coffee for three generations. I skim it — genuinely interesting. Then a product carousel: three beans I haven’t tried, curated based on my past orders. Ethiopian Yirgacheffe. Colombian Supremo. Sumatra Mandheling. I swipe through, not buying, just browsing. No pressure.
At the bottom, an ActionAd — something from a financial services brand. “Check your insurance gaps in 60 seconds.” I notice it but don’t click. Not yet.
Finally, my Mu Ledger. Today’s earnings: +15µ. Total balance: 1,862µ. The progress bar inches closer to that free bag.
**
12:34pm — Second NeoMail: FitLoop (Fitness App)
Lunchtime. I’m at my desk, eating a sandwich, scrolling through emails. The FitLoop NeoMail arrives like clockwork — always at 12:34. The subject line:
µ.1,862 | Noon Quiz — Test Your Nutrition IQ
The Magnet today is a Quiz — three quick questions about protein intake, hydration, and recovery. I get two right, miss one about creatine timing. Results show instantly: I’m in the top 23% of respondents today. Small competitive hit. Eight Mu earned.
The BrandBlocks: a “Workout of the Day” — today it’s a 15-minute mobility routine. I bookmark it for later. Below that, a progress tracker showing my activity this week (embarrassingly low) and a nudge: “You’re 2 workouts away from your weekly goal.”
There’s an ActionAd here too — the same insurance brand from this morning. This time I actually read it. It’s offering a short survey: “5 questions to find your coverage gaps. No phone number required.”
I tap through. Five questions. Takes maybe 30 seconds. At the end, it shows me I’m probably underinsured for critical illness. No hard sell. Just information. I save the link.
That’s new behaviour for me. A year ago, I would have ignored anything that looked like insurance advertising. But this felt different — it arrived inside something I already trusted. It didn’t interrupt what I was doing; it was part of it.
Total time: about 70 seconds.
**
6:48pm — Third NeoMail: ThreadCraft (Fashion)
Evening. I’m on the couch, half-watching TV, decompressing from work. The ThreadCraft NeoMail arrives:
µ.1,887 | Daily Fork — Which Look Wins?
The Magnet is a Daily Fork — two outfit options side by side. “Which works better for a Friday client meeting?” I tap the navy blazer look. Instant result: 62% of people agreed with me. Validation. Eight Mu earned.
The BrandBlocks: a carousel of new arrivals, filtered to my size and style preferences. A linen shirt I actually like. A pair of chinos on sale. Then a short feature: “How to Transition One Jacket from Office to Evening.” Useful. I read the whole thing.
The ActionAd in this one asks if I want to subscribe to a media brand’s newly started AI NeoLetter. I’m curious about AI news — I tap Yes and I’m done.
Total time: about 50 seconds.
**
What’s changed.
A year ago, I had 94 unread promotional emails. I checked once a week, mostly to delete. The inbox was something to clear, not something to visit.
Now I check three times a day — morning, lunch, evening. Not because I’m compulsive. Because there’s usually something worth 60 seconds. A prediction to make. A quiz to complete. A streak to protect. A Mu balance inching upward.
The psychology is hard to resist. The streaks create small commitments. The Mu balance creates visible progress. The predictions create anticipation — I want to know if I was right. The Forks make me feel like my opinion matters. These are tiny hooks, but they compound.
And here’s the strange part: the inbox feels calmer. Not because I get fewer emails — I probably get more. But because the emails I’ve opted into actually respect my time. They don’t shout. They don’t manufacture urgency. They give me something small, and they leave.
**
What I’ve realised.
I used to think email was broken. Now I think most email is just badly designed.
The brands that send me NeoMails have figured out something simple: if you want me to show up every day, you have to give me a reason that isn’t “buy now.” A reason that takes 60 seconds. A reason that feels like a fair exchange.
The Magnets pull me in. The BrandBlocks keep me informed. The Mu rewards me for showing up. The whole thing fits into dead moments of my day — while the kettle boils, while I eat lunch, while I decompress on the couch.
And here’s the real shift: when I am ready to buy coffee, or new clothes, or finally sort out my insurance — I already know which brands I’ll go to.
Not because they shouted the loudest. Because they showed up quietly, every day, and gave me something worth opening.
**
Next: Maya, the CMO who stopped paying to buy customers back — and didn’t quite believe it would work until it did.
2
Maya — The Brand Marketer
“I stopped paying to buy back customers I already owned.”
I used to think email was a solved channel.
I’ve been a CMO long enough to remember when email was the workhorse of growth — cheap, measurable, reliable. Then, slowly, it stopped working. Not dramatically. Quietly. Open rates slid. Clicks dried up. Revenue attribution became fuzzy. And every quarter, performance marketing took a larger share of my budget to make up the gap.
I’m the CMO at ThreadCraft, a mid-sized D2C fashion brand. By the time we started looking seriously at NeoMails, my numbers looked like this: email open rates hovering around 9%, CRM contributing less than 7% of revenue, and close to 40% of my marketing spend going into reacquisition on Meta and Google. We were paying ₹300-400 to win back customers whose email addresses we already had.
We tried everything you’re supposed to try. Better segmentation. Smarter subject lines. AI-written copy. More “personalisation.” It all felt like rearranging furniture in a room that was slowly emptying out.
Email hadn’t become bad. It had become ignored.
**
The silent churn.
Every quarter, I watched our “engaged subscribers” shrink — not because people unsubscribed, but because they just… stopped. They were still on the list. They just weren’t there anymore.
Our response? Send more. Bigger discounts. Louder subject lines. If 9% are opening, send to more people. But all we did was accelerate fatigue. The customers who were still engaged started tuning out too.
I remember a campaign last year — 30% off everything, our biggest sale of the season. Open rate: 7.4%. Lower than average. That was the moment I realised: we weren’t fighting for attention. We were training people to ignore us.
**
The heretical idea.
The first thing that made me uneasy about NeoMails was the word daily. Daily emails are how you get unsubscribes. Every marketer knows that. Or at least, every marketer trained in the old model knows that.
But we were stuck. Reacquisition costs were rising. Retention was plateauing. And email, which should have been our cheapest lever, was effectively dead weight.
So we agreed to a pilot — small, controlled, and frankly, sceptical. We picked 50,000 customers who hadn’t opened an email in 90+ days. The “dead” segment. If we burned them, we burned nothing.
The pilot ran for eight weeks.
NeoCore capped frequency at three NeoMails per customer per day, rotating across brands — so we weren’t blasting, we were participating in a shared system.
**
What happened.
Week one was modest. Open rates on the NeoMails: 24%. Way better than our 9% average. I assumed the novelty would fade.
Week eight: consistently north of 50%, peaking some days above 60%. The customers who opened once were opening again. And again. But here’s what stopped me cold — it wasn’t just opens. It was the same people opening repeatedly. Our Click Retention Rate, which had historically been around 18% quarter-over-quarter, hit 72% for the NeoMails cohort.
More than half the customers who engaged in week one were still engaging in week eight. With traditional campaigns, we’d have lost a majority of them.
**
What I didn’t expect.
I expected the Magnets to be gimmicks. Quizzes. Polls. Predictions. “Gamification” — a word that makes me cringe.
I was wrong.
The Magnets weren’t about entertainment. They were about rhythm. They gave customers a reason to open that had nothing to do with buying. A Daily Fork: “Which outfit works better for a Friday meeting?” A WePredict card: “Will cotton prices rise this week?” A quick style quiz.
None of it was about ThreadCraft specifically. The Magnets belonged to the system; our BrandBlocks carried our story. That felt counterintuitive at first. Why would I send content that isn’t about my brand?
But that’s exactly why it worked. The Magnets created the open. The BrandBlocks — our product carousels, our style tips, our brand stories — earned the attention after the customer was already there. Our role was to host, not hijack.
One customer — a guy in Mumbai, mid-thirties — opened 19 of 21 NeoMails over two months. He didn’t buy anything for the first month. Then he bought twice in week five. Then again in week seven. His lifetime value tripled, but more importantly, he never went dark. He was just… present. Regularly.
I started thinking about customers differently. Not as “purchasers” and “non-purchasers,” but as “present” and “absent.” NeoMails kept people present.
**
The ActionAds leap.
The idea of hosting ads from other brands inside our emails would have been unthinkable a year ago. But once we saw how customers interacted — the ads didn’t interrupt; they blended — the fear faded.
ActionAds from complementary brands — a premium coffee subscription, an insurance provider, a media brand’s AI newsletter — generated enough revenue to cover our entire NeoMails operation. The sending costs disappeared. The Mu rewards customers earned — for showing up, not buying — were funded by the ad revenue.
From a P&L perspective, that mattered. Email was no longer a “free but underperforming” channel. It became a self-funding one with upside.
And customers didn’t mind. The ActionAds were relevant, non-competitive, frictionless. One tap to subscribe to a newsletter. A short survey to check insurance coverage. Engagement rates of 25% — far higher than display ads, far less intrusive than retargeting.
**
The category break.
There was a moment, about a month after we expanded the pilot, when I realised this wasn’t incremental improvement.
I was reviewing our reacquisition spend for the quarter. Meta and Google costs were down 34%. Not because we’d cut budget, but because we needed less. The customers we used to lose and re-buy were still engaged. They hadn’t gone dark.
I pulled up the original pilot segment — the 50,000 “dead” customers. Thirty thousand were now active NeoMails engagers. Eight thousand had made a purchase in the last 90 days. We’d resurrected a quarter of a segment we’d written off as lost.
No discount. No retargeting. No auction. Just daily presence.
Email had stopped being a campaign channel and started behaving like a relationship surface.
**
What’s changed.
I don’t obsess over subject lines or send times the way I used to. I look at streaks. I look at how many customers are still “warm” after 30 days. I look at how many didn’t need to be reacquired at all.
The distinction we’d missed for years is now obvious: daily promotion is spam; daily interaction is habit. NeoMails aren’t asking for a purchase. They’re asking for a moment.
That difference changes everything.
We still run campaigns. We still do launches and sales and promotions. But they sit on top of something sturdier now. A daily presence. A reason to return.
And that’s the quiet shift I didn’t see coming: when customers are already opening your emails every day, you don’t have to shout when it’s time to sell.
**
Next: Ria, the advertiser who stopped chasing attention and started appearing inside it.
3
Ria — The Advertiser
“I stopped chasing attention — and started advertising inside it.”
I run growth and reactivation for a BFSI brand. Credit cards, insurance, long consideration cycles, low tolerance for noise.
For years, my job was simple to describe and painful to execute: reach customers who were almost interested, had shown some intent, but weren’t converting — without burning money on Google and Meta.
Retargeting was supposed to solve this. In reality, it became a reacquisition tax.
We paid auction prices to show ads to people who had already visited our site, already filled half a form, already existed in someone’s database somewhere. Attribution was fuzzy. Frequency was blunt. Costs kept rising. And every optimisation felt marginal.
The part that bothered me most was philosophical: I was chasing people who were actively ignoring me.
**
The context shift.
Then I saw an ActionAd — not in a feed, not in a banner, but inside a NeoMail.
It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t urgent. It didn’t even look like an ad. It said: “Check your insurance gaps in 60 seconds. No phone number required.”
What caught my attention wasn’t the copy. It was the context.
This wasn’t someone scrolling aimlessly. This was someone who had already opened an email — not because they were sold to, but because they were playing, predicting, choosing. They were present.
That’s when the model clicked for me.
NeoMails weren’t another inventory source. They were a different state of mind.
**
The experiment.
We started small. A pilot across a handful of non-competing brands — fashion, fitness, a coffee subscription, a news publisher. We tested three ActionAd formats:
Lead-light surveys — five questions, no phone number, no agent follow-up. Completion rates: 28-38%. Cost per qualified lead: 50-60% lower than Meta. And the leads were cleaner — people who’d taken 30 seconds to answer questions, not people who’d clicked accidentally while scrolling.
NeoLetter subscriptions — opt-in to our “Financial Wellness” newsletter. Simple ActionAd: one tap, no form. Subscription rate: 12%. Not leads in the traditional sense, but permission. A foot in the door.
Soft intent checks — “Planning to review your insurance this year? Yes / No / Maybe.” Low friction, high signal. The “Maybe” responses became our nurture pool.
The results weren’t explosive. They were clean. Drop-offs were honest. People who weren’t interested simply didn’t engage. No accidental clicks. No forced funnels.
**
The Arun moment.
One campaign stands out.
A customer — mid-thirties, Mumbai — saw our survey ActionAd inside a fitness app’s NeoMail at lunchtime. Completed the five questions. Didn’t opt in immediately.
That evening, the same offer appeared again — this time inside a fashion brand’s NeoMail. This time, he tapped through and requested the detailed report. Two days later, he was on a call with our advisor. A week after that, he upgraded his health cover.
One customer. Two touchpoints. Both inside emails he was already opening for entirely different reasons.
The difference was trust. Not in us as a brand — but in the environment. We weren’t interrupting his day. We were participating in a ritual he’d already chosen.
**
What didn’t work.
Not every format performed.
Direct offers — “Get 20% off your first premium” — underperformed. Insurance isn’t an impulse purchase. Discounts felt out of place inside an email about coffee or fitness.
Long forms — anything requiring more than five fields — had terrible completion rates. The NeoMail environment is built for 60-second interactions. Ten data points broke the rhythm.
Generic creative — we initially used the same ad units we ran on Meta. They looked like ads. The ActionAds that worked felt native: simple copy, single ask, one-tap action.
The lesson: ActionAds aren’t a new placement for old creative. They’re a different format entirely.
**
What’s changed.
I still run Meta and Google campaigns. They’re not going away. But my budget allocation has shifted. Last quarter, 18% of my acquisition spend went to ActionAds. This quarter, it’s 27%.
More importantly, my mental model has shifted.
NeoNet isn’t about targeting people. It’s about entering relationships.
Traditional ads try to manufacture attention. ActionAds borrow attention that already exists — earned by someone else, maintained by the system. And because everything is deterministic — real emails, real engagement, real actions — the learning loop is tighter.
There are still limits. This isn’t for mass reach or brand blasts. It’s for consideration, reactivation, and trust-building. But those are exactly the hardest problems in BFSI.
BFSI lives in the gap between awareness and action — and that gap is exactly where NeoMails operates best.
I don’t think of ActionAds as ads anymore. I think of them as polite questions asked at the right moment.
And that’s a very different game.
**
Next: Kiran — the builder behind the system, watching all of this happen at once.
4
Kiran — The Platform CEO
“We’re not building more email. We’re trying to make the inbox livable again.”
When we started Neocore, the problem wasn’t technology. It was incentives.
Email failed not because it couldn’t do more — but because everyone involved was paid whether it worked or not. ESPs charged for volume. Brands optimised for campaigns. Adtech profited from churn.
No one was responsible for presence.
The original insight was simple: if customers drift quietly, and brands pay loudly to get them back, something is fundamentally broken.
NeoMails was our answer — but it only works as part of a system.
**
The orchestration problem.
Arun’s behaviour, Maya’s economics, Ria’s ROI — none of them make sense in isolation. The challenge is holding them together.
Every day, we’re balancing three forces:
Brands want engagement and sales. Left unchecked, they’d fill every NeoMail with product carousels and promotional offers.
Consumers want value without friction. They’ll engage with Magnets, accumulate Mu, tolerate BrandBlocks — but only if the experience stays light. The moment it feels like work, they’re gone.
Advertisers want leads and conversions. They’d love aggressive offers in every email. But if ActionAds become intrusive, consumers stop opening, and the whole system degrades.
If any one side is optimised too hard, the system collapses. Our job is not to please any one party — it’s to preserve the loop.
**
The 60-second constraint.
The discipline that makes it work is time.
Every NeoMail is designed to take no more than 60 seconds. That’s the budget. Roughly a third goes to the Magnet, a third to BrandBlocks, a small slice to ActionAds, and the rest to tracking progress in the Mu Ledger.
This constraint is religious for us. Brands push back — “Can we add a third BrandBlock?” Advertisers push back — “Can we have a longer form?” The answer is almost always no.
Because the moment a NeoMail takes 90 seconds, completion rates drop. When completion drops, habit breaks. When habit breaks, the system stops working.
**
The AI engine.
The hardest part wasn’t building Magnets. It was making them repeatable.
Quizzes, WePredict cards, Daily Forks — these aren’t content. They’re moves. Each one creates unfinished business. Each one respects time. And each one must work whether the brand is coffee, fashion, or finance.
AI helps — but not by being clever. We don’t optimise for novelty. We optimise for rhythm. Any Magnet that requires explanation, surprise, or learning how to play is rejected.
Our AI assists with Magnet creation — calibrated to category, difficulty level, and freshness. A customer might predict stock movements today, cricket match outcomes a few days later, and movie box office performance the following week. Different content, same mechanic.
The goal is familiar novelty — the same format, endlessly varied. That’s what sustains habit. Customers know what to expect, but they don’t know exactly what they’ll get.
**
Mu as memory.
Mu is the glue. Not as currency — but as memory.
It makes progress visible across brands, across days. It tells Arun: you’ve been here before. It gives Maya’s customers a reason to return that isn’t a discount. It funds itself through ActionAd revenue.
If earning outpaces burning significantly, customers are hoarding — redemption options aren’t compelling. If burning outpaces earning, rewards feel too cheap. Healthy velocity is roughly 1.2:1 earn-to-burn.
Mu isn’t about incentives. It’s about making attention remembered.
**
What we got wrong.
Early on, we let brands control too much of the NeoMail composition. They could choose which Magnets to include, how many BrandBlocks to add, where to place the ActionAd.
The result was chaos. Some NeoMails took two minutes. Others had three BrandBlocks and no Magnet. The experience was inconsistent, and engagement suffered.
The fix was standardisation. We created templates: Magnet first, then BrandBlocks, then ActionAd, then Mu Ledger. Brands could customise within the template, but they couldn’t break the structure.
The lesson: in a multi-sided system, too much flexibility destroys coherence. Constraints aren’t limitations. They’re what make the system legible.
**
What I watch daily.
Every morning, three numbers:
System-wide open rate. If it drops meaningfully for a few days in a row, something is wrong — stale Magnets, broken mechanics, or fatigue.
Mu velocity. Earn-to-burn ratio. Healthy is 1.2:1.
ActionAd engagement. Below 3%, the ads are becoming noise. Above 8%, the targeting is working.
These three numbers are my vital signs. Everything else ladders up to one question: Did we give people a reason to come back tomorrow?
**
Where this goes.
The goal isn’t to maximise email. It’s to minimise regret.
Every metric, every constraint, every “no” we say to brands and advertisers — it all serves one purpose: making sure that when someone opens a NeoMail, they don’t wish they hadn’t.
If Arun opens one NeoMail today, we’ve done our job. If he opens three, that’s a bonus. If he skips, we don’t punish him. We wait.
Because relationships don’t scale through force. They scale through patience.
That’s what the Magnetic Inbox is really about. Not pull versus push. Not ads versus email. But designing a system where everyone benefits by showing up — quietly, repeatedly, and by choice.
**
Four voices. One system. The same week.
Arun opens three NeoMails a day and doesn’t think of them as marketing. Maya watches her reacquisition spend shrink and wonders why she waited so long. Ria finds leads inside attention she didn’t have to chase. And Kiran holds the system together, balancing the forces that would pull it apart.
The Magnetic Inbox isn’t magic. It’s alignment — of incentives, of timing, of value exchanged. Brands earn the right to show up. Consumers get reasons to return. Advertisers appear inside trust they didn’t have to build. The platform enforces the constraints that keep everyone honest.
Email didn’t die. It was waiting to be redesigned.
Pull replaces push. Habit replaces decay. And the inbox, finally, becomes a place worth returning to.
