Do This, NOT That: Marketing Tips with Jay Schwedelson

SPECIAL GUEST!! Louisa Evans, PhD 🧪 The Scientist's Secret to Smarter Email Marketing | Ep. 574

October 9, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

The Scientist Who Cut Email Volume by 23% and Still Lifted Revenue 31%

Louisa Evans, PhD, spent years studying drug design and pharmacology at Oxford before she ever sent a marketing email. Now she's the head of customer loyalty and retention at Hornby Hobbies—the iconic UK brand behind model trains, Airfix kits, and collectible cars—and she's achieved something that sounds contradictory: she increased revenue per email by 31% while sending 23% fewer emails and lowering unsubscribe rates. Her secret isn't more data or better copy. It's borrowing a concept from pharmacology called the dose-response curve and applying it to customer behavior.

The Dose-Response Curve That Changed Her Marketing

In pharmacology, the dose-response curve describes how a drug's effect changes with dosage. Give a small stimulus, get a small response. Increase the stimulus, more subjects respond—until you hit saturation. Evans saw the same pattern in email marketing. "You give someone a stimulus, or you give your population a stimulus, and some of them come back. If it's a stronger stimulus, more of them come back," she says. "I've seen these graphs before."

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What you'll learn

1 (01:17) **From Biophysics to Marketing: The Dose-Response Curve** - Louisa explains how her PhD in drug design and pharmacology directly maps to marketing through the concept of a dose-response curve.
2 (03:37) **The Lorenz Curve: A Quick-Win Chart for Your Entire Customer Base** - Louisa introduces a finance-borrowed chart that creates order from overwhelming customer data.
3 (05:35) **Applying the Curve to a Legacy Hobby Brand** - The practical application of the Lorenz curve for Hornby's unique customer lifecycle, where new products take 2-3 years to develop.
4 (08:52) **AI is an Idea Overload Machine: The Jeff Bezos Problem** - Louisa argues that AI's biggest risk for marketers is generating an unstoppable flood of ideas that creates backlog and team sludge.
5 (11:17) **The Future: Agentic CRM with Next-Best-Action at Scale** - Louisa outlines her vision for how AI will actually transform CRM by automating model-based decision making.
6 (13:43) **Cautious Optimism: You Still Need Good Data Scientists** - A grounded take on AI's immediate practical limits and the necessity of human expertise.
7 (14:52) **Priming the Pump for Holiday Season: One-Time vs. Repeat Buyers** - Louisa breaks down her strategy for the critical Christmas season, which is a cultural responsibility for the Hornby brand.

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Show Notes

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Connect with Louisa Evans on LinkedIn.

See how Hornby Hobbies uses Bloomreach: Hornby Hobbies Achieves Fast ROI With Bloomreach

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Most marketers sit on a mountain of customer data and still guess who to email next. Louisa Evans uses Bloomreach to run a loyalty program built on the same math she once used to design drugs. She's already testing what happens when AI plugs straight into the CDP and picks the next best action for every customer. Jay Schwedelson gets a look at where agentic CRM is headed and why the right setup matters more than a flood of AI ideas.

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Best Moments:

(03:57) A Lorenz curve borrowed from finance turns millions of data