Newsletter Update

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Back in June, I acquired a newsletter from a friend that is no longer “in the game”

That email helped add about 15k subscribers to the Your Extra Paycheck newsletter which is awesome.

I figured I’d be able to use this to springboard a much “bigger” business driven by the newsletter, but… it didn’t.

Let me tell you what happened.

Let me preface this by saying, I still love the Newsletter game. Building a newsletter is still one of the best ways to keep a sustainable business.

But numbers aren’t everything.

The newsletter acquisition increased the size of the newsletter to over 40,000 subscribers.

Sounds awesome, right?

But I had a problem. I couldn’t get the open rates on the emails to get any higher than about 19%.

That isn’t “terrible,” but it isn’t good either.

I’d like to have an open rates at least 20 to 30%

Anyway, I kept going with the newsletter and struggled to get it higher for a few months and then something crazy happened.

The open rates dipped… BIG. It went from averaging 19% to dropping to more like 5%.

Over 40,000 emails and only a 5% open rate is not great at all.

So, I jumped into research mode to figure out what was wrong with the delivery of the emails.

Come to find out, Google (or Gmail) didn’t like that so many of my emails were not opening, and I started to downgrade my emails showing up in inboxes, mainly because I was sending so many and not getting a “good enough” open rate on them.

I didn’t even know that was a “thing”, but I tested it out to see what happened.

I splintered away the emails of people that were not opening and put them through a “reengagment” campaign.

This is a list of emails I send ONLY to the part of the email list that does not open or click emails.

I give them a last chance to engage with the email, and if they don’t do so in a few days, I proactively unsubscribe from the newsletter.

This HURT because pretty much all the emails I gained from the acquisition I had to unsubscribe.

So now the newsletter has just over 25k emails, which seems bad… 43k vs 25k, right?

But by doing that, the open rates on the newsletter have skyrocketed by more than 50%.

The open rates on the last few emails have been 37%, 35%, 35%, 34%, and 31%.

That is much better and a good sign of a healthier newsletter.

Well, it was a lot of heartache and research, but it was worth it!

Chat soon,
Chris Myles