This is Week 5 of my rebuild-in-public series. Quick recap for anyone who’s just arrived, Week 1, I de-indexed 1,300 pages from my website to save my SEO. Week 2, my email open rate collapsed to 11% and before you assume I did something wrong, I didn’t. 

What I did do was reopen my newsletter after a period away, and walk straight into an industry-wide authentication change that had quietly come into effect in the months I’d been gone. Google and Yahoo had changed the rules for bulk senders back in February 2024. By the time I came back to sending regularly, this wasn’t breaking news. It was just news to me. I spent that week sorting out DNS records at midnight, drinking something I shouldn’t have been drinking at that hour, and having a very serious internal debate about whether I’d have been better off becoming a florist.  Week 3 was unglamorous technical SEO work. Week 4 was a content audit and rescue operation for 1,219 pages Google had visited and quietly rejected.

This week I want to come back to the email story. Not just because the numbers have moved, though they have, but because I’ve been thinking a lot about where most people put their energy when it comes to email marketing and I think the vast majority of us have it backwards.

I also need to be honest with you upfront, this has not been my most productive week. Israel is currently in the middle of another escalation with Iran, and if you’ve read my recent post about keeping your business running when your brain has officially left the building, you’ll know that I try not to pretend that context doesn’t exist. It does. Some weeks the work is harder than it looks from the outside, and this was one of them. My plan was to do substantially more. I’m sharing what I actually did, not the version I intended to do.

What I can tell you is that the email work is producing results I’m really proud of. And the lessons from it are worth sharing properly because most of what I’ve seen written about improving open rates misses what I think is the most important part of the picture.

First, the thing nobody talks about enough

There is an almost universal obsession in marketing circles with growing your email list. More subscribers. Higher opt-in rates. Better lead magnets. Every week there’s a new thread somewhere about the best strategy for acquiring new contacts, the best tools, the best offers, the best places to promote your list.

And look, none of that is wrong. Growing your list matters. You should be doing it. Fresh subscribers keep your audience alive and your numbers growing, and from a commercial perspective, sponsors and partners do look at list size.

But the thing that gets almost no airtime is what happens if, instead of obsessing over new subscribers, you spent that same energy converting the audience you already have?

Let me show you what I mean.

Say you have a list of 10,000 subscribers with a 15% open rate. That’s 1,500 people opening your emails each week. Now say you run a lead generation campaign and add 500 new subscribers. If those new people have average engagement, your opens go up by maybe 75. You’re at 1,575 opens.

Now say instead you spend that same time improving your open rate by 2 percentage points, from 15% to 17%. On the same list of 10,000, that’s 1,700 opens. Better result. Existing audience. No new subscribers required.

And the compounding effect multiplies. A 2% improvement in open rate, applied to click-through rate, applied to the action you want people to take, that gap compounds at every stage. The difference between a 1.5% click rate and a 2.5% click rate on a list of 10,000 is 100 clicks versus 250 clicks. That’s not a small gap. That’s the difference between a campaign that barely moves the needle and one that genuinely does something.

I’m not saying don’t grow your list. I’m saying, the list you already have is an asset you are probably significantly underusing. And the return on improving engagement is often faster and higher than the return on acquisition.

For my rebuild, I’m currently segmenting my audience and sending to my most engaged subscribers first while I warm up my sending reputation. Each week I add more people back in as the domain reputation strengthens. So right now I’m working from a warmer, more responsive base and what I’ve found in doing that has changed how I think about email strategy.

Where I started and where I am now

Week 2, my open rate had crashed to 11%. The reasons were a combination of things:, wrong DNS authentication setup, sending before my DKIM records had fully propagated, blasting my full list too quickly after switching to a verified sending domain, and a domain inbox that was nearly full and about to start causing bounces. Each of these individually would have been manageable. Together, they were a perfect storm.

I documented the full technical fix in Week 2. The short version, I sorted out SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and return-path records. I set up Google Postmaster Tools to monitor my domain reputation. I segmented down to engaged subscribers only. And I changed how I was writing my emails.

That last part is what this blog post is really about. Because the technical fix was the foundation, but the engagement improvement came from the content itself.

Where I am now, my open rate has hit 70.46% on my most engaged segment, with a 6.72% click-through rate on that same send. My domain reputation in Google Postmaster Tools has stabilised at a healthy level. And my unsubscribe rate? Practically nothing, 0.53% on that send, which given the volume of people now actually opening and reading is about as clean as it gets.

70% is not a number I planned. It really surprised me. But looking at what I changed, it makes complete sense and it’s what I want to walk you through.

What I changed (and why it worked)

Change 1.  I made my newsletter worth clicking

The format stayed the same, it’s still a newsletter, still covering multiple things, still driving traffic back to my website. What changed was the intention behind every single element of it.

Before, I was writing content. Now I write hooks. Every section in the newsletter exists to create enough curiosity that the reader has to click to resolve it. Look at the example above, 25 ideas you won’t find anywhere else. One of them generated 6 sales calls in 10 days. A couple made me nervous to publish. That’s not a description. That’s an open loop. The only way to close it is to click.

The goal of every newsletter

I send now is to drive traffic back to my website. Not to inform. Not to summarise. To make the reader feel like they’re missing something if they don’t click. Massive value lives at the destination, the newsletter is the reason to go there.

And when someone clicks, Gmail notices. Clicks are engagement signals. Engagement signals improve deliverability. Better deliverability means more opens next time. The whole thing compounds, but only if the content is genuinely worth clicking for.

Change 2.  I added a P.S. to every email and made it the same one every time

This one sounds almost too simple to mention. It isn’t.

The P.S. is one of the most read parts of any email. People skim. They scroll to the bottom. They read the P.S. before they’ve even decided whether the rest of the email is worth their time. It’s prime real estate that most people leave completely empty.

My P.S. is always the same, a link to partner or advertise on the newsletter. Every single send. And it performs consistently well, it’s one of my most clicked links every week.

Now, I’ll be honest with you, I don’t think everyone clicking that link is genuinely in the market to sponsor a newsletter. But it doesn’t matter. People are nosy. It’s the same reason you’ll happily click through a house listing for a property three times your budget in a country you’ve never visited. You’re not buying. You’re snooping. And a snoop click counts just as much as a serious one.  It still tells Gmail that people are interacting with your emails. It still helps your deliverability.

The fact that it also occasionally generates actual sponsorship enquiries is a bonus. But the click itself is doing useful work regardless of the intention behind it.

Change 3. The only thing I ever asked readers to do was reply

Every piece of advice about email CTAs tells you to drive clicks. Buy this. Read this. Sign up for this. And I do drive clicks that’s the whole point of the newsletter. But the one direct ask I make of my readers is simply to reply.

This is deliberate, and the reason is technical as much as it is relational. When someone replies to your email, it sends a powerful signal to inbox providers that this is a real two-way conversation. Not marketing. Not broadcast. An actual human exchange. Gmail sees that signal and it improves how your emails are treated, better inbox placement, better deliverability, better open rates on your next send.

So every email ends with a specific, easy question. Not let me know your thoughts something they can answer in one sentence. The lower the barrier to reply, the more replies you get. And every reply is quietly doing work in the background, telling the algorithm that your list is engaged, your content is wanted, and your emails belong in the inbox.

Change 4.  I wrote subject lines for opens, not for description

There is a category of email subject line that is technically accurate, clearly describes the contents, and performs terribly. It looks something like: 5 Tips for Improving Your Content Strategy. Or My Thoughts on the Algorithm Update. Or This Month’s Marketing Roundup.

These subject lines fail because they answer the question before the reader opens the email. There’s no tension. No reason to open it right now rather than later or not at all.

The subject lines that work are the ones that create a genuine gap between what the reader knows and what they want to know. Not fake urgency or clickbait, a real question that can only be answered by opening.

I studied the emails in my own inbox that I’d opened from people I didn’t have a habit of reading. What made me open them? Almost always one of three things, they made a claim I didn’t quite believe and needed to see the evidence for; they promised something specific and useful I needed right now; or they were so counterintuitive I had to see the argument.

I’m de-indexing 1,300 pages from my website works as a subject line because it’s counterintuitive, most people’s instinct is to add pages, not remove them. My open rate crashed to 11% and I didn’t even do anything wrong works because it’s specific, relatable, and there’s a clear story implied that the reader wants the ending to.

I rewrote every planned subject line with one question, does this create a gap? Does the reader need to open the email to resolve it? If I can answer the question from the subject line alone, it’s the wrong subject line.

Change 5.  I wrote the copy to generate clicks, not sales

This was the most deliberate strategic decision of the whole process and it produced results I wasn’t entirely expecting.

Most marketing email is implicitly trying to sell something. A product, a service, a course, an idea. Even emails that aren’t directly selling often have a flavour of persuasion to them. And readers sense this, even when they can’t articulate it, and they disengage.

For this period of the rebuild, I made a conscious decision, every email I send is purely about value and engagement. Not selling anything. Not even subtly. The only goal is to give the reader something useful and create a reason to click whether that’s a full post, a tool, or a reply.

The effect on click-through rates was significant. When readers aren’t braced for a pitch, they engage differently. They read more carefully. They click more readily. They reply.

And there’s a commercial logic here that isn’t immediately obvious. A reader who clicks is demonstrating active interest. A reader who replies has converted from passive consumer to active participant. That relationship is worth more to the long-term value of the list than a reluctant sale to someone who didn’t quite trust you yet. The click and the reply compound over time. The hard sell doesn’t.

Change 6. I wrote for one reader, not everyone

When I was writing for my full list which spans different experience levels, industries, and goals I was unconsciously hedging everything. Including caveats. Writing for the person who might not understand rather than the person who was living the same situation as me. The result was emails that were inoffensive and forgettable.

When I started writing for my engaged segment, which I know much better, I stopped hedging. I wrote like I was writing to a colleague. I assumed context. I made stronger claims. I shared things I’d genuinely found useful rather than things I thought I was supposed to share.

The response was immediate. People replied saying it felt different. More like them. More useful. One person said it was the first email from me in months she’d actually read all the way through.

That’s not a compliment about my writing. That’s a signal about the gap between what I was producing and what my audience wanted. Those aren’t the same thing, and for a long time I’d been confusing them.

A note on unsubscribes

My unsubscribe rate has stayed low throughout this process, which I’m pleased about. But I want to address unsubscribes here anyway, because it’s something that trips a lot of people up when they start improving their engagement and the fear of it stops them making changes they should make.

When you improve your open rate, you also improve your visibility to people who had been passive. Subscribers who hadn’t opened an email in months suddenly open one because the subject line caught them and then they remember they never really engaged with this list, and they unsubscribe. That can feel alarming when you’re watching the numbers. It isn’t.

An unsubscribe from someone who was never going to engage is better for your list health, your deliverability, and your metrics than keeping a dormant subscriber who drags your open rate down every time you send. A smaller, more engaged list is worth more than a larger, less engaged one. This is true commercially, advertisers care about engagement rates, not just headcount and it’s true functionally, because every send to disengaged subscribers chips away at your reputation with inbox providers.

If your unsubscribes go up when you improve your content quality, you’re doing it right. Don’t panic. Let them go.

A confession about the copy

I should be upfront about something here, because it’s relevant and also mildly embarrassing.

I ran a content and PR agency for years. I’ve written email copy for everyone from large brands to solo entrepreneurs. I know what makes someone open an email. I know what makes them click. I’ve studied copy and content for long enough that most of it is instinct at this point.

And yet, for years I was sending my own newsletter on autopilot. Rushing it out. Doing the minimum. Treating it like a chore to get off my list rather than an asset worth investing in. Common sense, it turns out, is not always common practice. Especially when you’re busy, and the newsletter is just one of seventeen things that need to happen before the end of the week.

What changed is that I became genuinely obsessed with the numbers. Once I could see the open rate and click rate moving in response to specific decisions I was making, I couldn’t stop.  The newsletter stopped being something I sent and became something I lost sleep over. In a good way. Mostly. I take significantly more time on each send now than I ever did when this was supposed to be part of my job.

The irony is not lost on me. Sometimes the cobbler’s children really do have the worst shoes.

If you’re struggling with your own email copy, subject lines that aren’t opening, newsletters that aren’t clicking it’s worth knowing this is something I work on with clients. You can find me here.

How to improve your own open and click-through rates, the full framework

Here’s what I’d do starting from scratch, on any list, at any size.

Step 1. Segment before you change anything

Before you touch a single subject line or rewrite a word of copy, segment your list by engagement. Most email platforms let you filter by opens or clicks in the last 30, 60, or 90 days. Create a segment of engaged subscribers, people who’ve opened or clicked at least once in the last 90 days.

This does two things. It gives you a more accurate baseline, because sending to your full list including inactive subscribers always depresses your open rate. And it protects your sending reputation while you experiment, because you’re starting with people who already want to hear from you.

Once your engagement is strong on your warm segment, gradually add more subscribers back in. Don’t rush this. Each week, extend the window slightly or add a tranche of less-active subscribers and watch what happens to your rates. If they hold, continue. If they dip, slow down.

Step 2. Audit your last 10 subject lines

Look at your last 10 subject lines and ask one question of each, does this create a gap that can only be resolved by opening the email? If the subject line describes what’s inside, it’s closing the gap before the reader opens. Rewrite these with one of three frameworks:

• The counterintuitive claim. Something that seems wrong and makes the reader need to see the argument. (Why I stopped posting daily and my engagement went up.)
• The specific useful promise. Something precise and immediately applicable. Not tips for LinkedIn but the exact post format that got me 40,000 impressions last week.
• The open loop. A beginning without an obvious ending. (I made a mistake with my email list. Here’s what I’m doing about it.)

Then look at your historical open rate data and find your best-performing subject lines. What do they have in common? That pattern is your guide.

Step 3. Rewrite your emails from the reader’s perspective

Before you write each email, answer this question, what does my reader need to know, do, or think differently after reading this? Not what do I want to tell them. What do they need?

The answer to that question should be the email. One thing. The point that matters. Everything else is padding and padding is what readers skip.

Your opening line should create immediate interest or confirm the reader’s decision to open was worth it. Your body should deliver on the subject line’s promise without making the reader work for it. Your call to action should be specific and single. Not let me know your thoughts. Something like Reply and tell me the one thing you’d do differently. Or Click here to read the full breakdown.

One call to action per email. This feels constraining until you test it and find that your click rates go up, because the reader doesn’t have to choose between four different things you want them to do.

Step 4.  Make replies easy and ask for them deliberately

Gmail treats replies as a trust signal. When your subscribers reply to your emails, it tells Gmail you’re a real person having real conversations, not a bulk mailer. Ask for replies with specific questions that take 20 seconds to answer. The easier the reply, the more replies you’ll get. More replies improves deliverability, which means more emails land in the inbox, which means your open rate goes up without you having to do anything else.

It’s a compounding loop. Better content produces more engagement, more engagement improves deliverability, better deliverability means more opens, more opens tell you what your audience likes, which helps you write better content.

Step 5. Clean your inactive subscribers

Identify subscribers who have not opened a single email in the last six months. You have options, run a re-engagement sequence first, a short series of emails specifically designed to get a response from dormant subscribers and remove anyone who doesn’t respond. Or move them to a separate segment you send to less frequently.

Most people resist this because the subscriber number goes down and that feels like failure. It isn’t. A subscriber who hasn’t opened an email in six months is not a subscriber in any meaningful sense. They are weight on your list, dragging down your open rate, your deliverability, and your data. A re-engagement sequence is the right first step. If they don’t respond, let them go.

Step 6. Track the right metrics

Open rate matters. Click-through rate matters more. Reply rate is the strongest engagement signal of all. Unsubscribe rate tells you about list health. Spam complaint rate tells you about deliverability risk.

The metric most people ignore, click-to-open rate (CTOR) clicks divided by opens. This tells you whether your email copy is working independently of your subject line. A high open rate with a low CTOR means your subject lines are good but your body copy is losing people. A low open rate with a high CTOR means the people who are reading are engaged, you just need more of them to open. Knowing which problem you have changes the fix entirely.

Where the rebuild is now

The SEO work from Weeks 1 to 4 is progressing in the background. I’m now in the period of watching for movement rather than making major changes, and I’ll share a proper data check-in once there’s enough time elapsed to see meaningful signals. The noindex work deployed on 12 February, and the guidance is 6 to 8 weeks before meaningful movement in impressions and crawl behaviour. I’m in week 5. I’m watching.

The email recovery is the more active story right now. The technical foundation is solid. The content changes are working. The next phase is expanding the audience I’m sending to, gradually, adding tranches of less-engaged subscribers back into the mix as the domain reputation continues to strengthen.

I’ll be honest that this week was slower than I wanted it to be. The war makes everything harder to execute on. I wrote about this in detail in the post linked above here, the short version is that context matters, some weeks are harder than others, and the most important thing is to keep moving even when you’re moving slowly. One thing a day. It still works, even in the weeks when it’s the only thing that works.

The one thing to take away from this

If you’re spending most of your email marketing energy on growing your list, spend a week doing the opposite. Look at what your existing subscribers are responding to. Look at where you’re losing them. Look at what your best open rates and click rates have in common.

The list you already have, the people who already signed up, who already said yes is an asset. Treat it like one.

Growing the list matters. But converting the list you have, improving by even one or two percentage points, will almost always produce a faster return. And it makes the list better for every new subscriber who joins it.

That’s the experiment I’ve been running. The results are making me think I should have run it years ago.

Catch up on the full series:

• Week 1: I’m De-Indexing 1,300 Pages to Save My Website (And Why This Might Be Your Only Option Too)
• Week 2: My Open Rate Crashed to 11% and I Didn’t Even Do Anything Wrong
• Week 3: The Unglamorous SEO Work Nobody Talks About (But Everyone Needs to Do)
• Week 4: The Content Rescue Operation