Stop Sending Newsletters Nobody Reads

A brand came to us sending a weekly newsletter to 85K subscribers. Open rate: 18%. Click rate: 0.9%. They wanted us to "fix the subject lines."

We looked at the data. 52K of those subscribers had not opened or clicked a single email in six months. They were sending to ghosts.

The real problem

Sending to disengaged subscribers does not have zero cost. It has a negative cost. Every email sent to someone who ignores it tells Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook that your emails are not wanted. That damages your sender reputation, which pushes your emails further into spam for the people who do want them.

You are paying (most ESPs charge by list size) to make your emails perform worse.

The fix

Step one: Define "engaged." We use clicked in the last 90 days or purchased in the last 180 days. Opens do not count because of MPP.

Step two: Segment your list into engaged and disengaged. Send your newsletter to the engaged segment only.

Step three: Run a re-engagement flow for the disengaged segment. Three emails over two weeks. "We noticed you have not been reading. Here is what you missed. Want to stay?" Give them a clear opt-back-in.

Step four: Anyone who does not re-engage gets suppressed. Not deleted. Suppressed. They stay in your database but stop receiving campaigns.

What happened with this brand

After the cleanup, the active list dropped to 33K. Open rate went from 18% to 41%. Click rate went from 0.9% to 4.2%. Revenue per send tripled.

The newsletter was not bad. The audience was wrong. Once they sent to people who wanted it, the same content performed three times better.

The sending frequency question

While you are at it, audit your frequency. We see a lot of brands defaulting to "weekly" without testing. For some brands, twice a week outperforms weekly because engaged subscribers want more. For others, biweekly outperforms weekly because the content does not warrant that frequency.

Test it. Send 50% of your engaged list at your normal frequency and 50% at a different frequency. Measure by revenue per subscriber over 30 days, not open rate.