Email That Doesn't Bore People
Open rate has been a junk metric since Apple Mail Privacy Protection started prefetching images in 2021. Five years in, plenty of teams still report on it as if it means something. It doesn’t, and the leadership team can tell.
What follows is what I have seen actually move email-driven revenue at companies between $5M and $150M ARR.
Stop sending the newsletter
The weekly company newsletter is the single biggest source of list fatigue in B2B email. It is rarely the thing customers signed up for, and it is almost never optimized for the customer’s calendar.
Replace it with two things:
- Behavior-triggered sequences. Sent when something happened: a trial started, a feature was used, a renewal is 60 days out. Open and click rates on these run 3-5x the broadcast average for a reason.
- A genuinely interesting monthly piece from one person. Signed, opinionated, not a roundup. If nobody on the team wants to put their name on it, that is the answer about whether to send it.
Subject lines are the easy part
Teams spend 80% of their email-quality time A/B testing subject lines. Subject lines matter at the margin, but the larger gains are in the body: the first sentence, the structure, and whether the call to action is one thing or seven.
A useful constraint: every send has exactly one CTA. Two CTAs is zero CTAs in measured behavior. The reader picks neither.
The unsubscribe rate is a feature
A team obsessed with low unsubscribes is a team accumulating dead list weight. People who do not want to hear from you should leave. The healthiest lists I have seen run 0.5-1.5% unsubscribe per major send and have churn rates approaching what new acquisition produces. That is a stable equilibrium with engaged readers.
The dangerous metric is spam complaint rate. Above 0.3% on a regular basis and your sending IP reputation degrades; below 0.1% you are probably fine.
A test you can run this week
Take your last six broadcasts. Pull the subset of subscribers who opened zero of them. That is somewhere between 25% and 60% of your list, depending on age. Stop sending to them for 90 days. Watch what happens to your aggregate metrics, your sender reputation, and your sales team’s reaction to MQLs.
In the seven companies I have run this experiment with, deliverability improved, sales reply rates went up, and the revenue impact was either zero or positive. None of them resumed sending to the suppressed cohort.
What to measure instead of opens
- Click rate on actual links (not pixels)
- Reply rate on plain-text sends
- Revenue attributed within a 7-day window
- Net subscribers (new minus unsubscribed minus bounced) per send
None of these are perfect. All of them are more honest than open rate.