In this edition:

→  Humans are destined to stop opening your emails

→  How to find out your sender reputation (scroll to blogs)

→ Scrap the email re-engagement campaign (scroll to inbox drop)

→ Suppress them (scroll to end)

Ello, ello 

Happy Thursday (or whatever day it is right now). 

I recently went camping with my bestie for the FIRST time, and I loved it - touched grass and connected with nature 

It also got me FULL of ideas, so buckle up, this one's jam-packed...

P.S. I've saved your seat to my NEW masterclass below 

LIVE MASTERCLASS

Email Psychology Masterclass

Learn how human behaviour and psychology directly drive the results you get from email

We'll cover three core sections:

1. How people decide (and why the inbox makes it worse)

2. The five decisions your copy is influencing 

3. The audit and what you need to measure 

Humans are destined to stop opening your emails

And it's completely normal and fine...

Everyone on your list will eventually stop reading you. 

Interests move, jobs change, the problem you solved got solved, the don't care anymore, roughly a fifth to a quarter of a list goes stale every year, and almost none of it is about you.

So stop treating it as a failure.

You're not trying to keep everybody. You're trying to be worth keeping for the people who stay, and to keep bringing in people you're worth keeping for.

Which means list growth is maintenance, not expansion.

Even standing still needs replacement.

And the second job nobody thinks about:

When someone signs up for something they actually wanted, they go to their inbox to get it. They open. They click. Fast, because they're waiting for it.

That's the highest engagement moment of the whole relationship - positive signals, clustered, in a short window. Exactly what mailbox providers reward!!

A hundred people a month engaging hard with their first email does more for your reputation than ten thousand who never opened anything.

Growing your list has two jobs, and the second one is the valuable one.

Job one: replace what you lose. Obvious. It's why most people do it.

Job two: feed your deliverability.

So, read the full piece and know what you need to do. 

From the Vault

A blog a day keeps the spam filter away 

⌚ 3 min read:

→ How to find out your sender reputation

⌚ 6 min read:

→ Do you have a forced opt-in list?

⌚ 5 min read:

→ The state of email deliverability in 2026. And what I think happens in 2027

From the Queen’s Court

Voiceover video verdicts 

View the library

84 recorded video verdicts of real emails in the wild.

The Inbox Drop

Scrap the email re-engagement campaign

We ALL have that pot of people that:

"We have loads of people we need to tap into and re-engage" 

"There's so much opportunity sat there" 

Basically, this is bollocks (sorry but not sorry - you need to hear this)

If you run a re-engagement campaign you've just blasted your worst segment

The people in that sequence are, by definition, your least engaged contacts

Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo have been watching them not open or engage with your emails for months and have built a picture.

Then you send them three emails in quick succession. Low opens, because they don't open. Low clicks. LOADS of deletes without opening. Some bounces from dead addresses. And spam complaints, because an email arriving after a long silence feels unexpected (it's been proven people think they have unsubscribed!)

That's a negative deliverability event dressed up as list hygiene.

And it's triggered by a broken metric

The whole thing runs off non-opens, which we know is NOT reliable or an indicator of success 

So the segment you're targeting is full of people who've been misclassified

The maths AIN'T mathing...

Typical confirmed re-engagement rate: 3–8%.

So 92 to 97 people in every hundred either ignore you or unsubscribe or worse 

You ran a campaign for single-digit retention at the deliverability cost of mailing your worst segment.

What to do instead

→ Stop measuring engagement with opens. Use meaningful actions - website visits, downloads, event registrations, replies, purchases, pricing page views. Any of those in the last 6-12 months and they're not disengaged, whatever their open history says.

→ Build a rolling suppression strategy, not a campaign. 6-9 months of nothing: reduce frequency to your best sends only. 9-12 months: off campaigns, keep for highly targeted sends. 12 months: suppress.

→ If you must send something, send one email. Not a sequence. And it shouldn't ask if they want to stay - that makes them actively choose you at the moment they're least likely to. Just show up with something useful and let their behaviour answer.

The real point

Re-engagement campaigns are pumping water back into a leaking bucket instead of turning up the tap.

Lists lose 20–25% of engaged audience a year. That's normal. Recovering 5% of them costs you a deliverability event. Putting the same effort into acquisition adds people who are engaged from day one, with no reputation risk.

Stop trying to re-engage people who've already left. Start building relationships with people who haven't arrived yet.

Quick win for you

SUPPRESS THEM

Take the contacts with no meaningful action for more than 15 months (engagement is a weird thing; there is no fixed rule, but this will work for everyone) - no visit, no download, no reply, no purchase, no email click, NOTHING

Suppress them this week

Feels like losing reach; it isn't (they ain't coming back via email)

Every send to someone who won't engage is a negative signal, and mailbox providers apply that signal to your whole domain

Take them out and the same campaign, to a smaller list, lands in more inboxes

More inbox = more opens, clicks, leads, revenue, without writing a single new email

Most people find their engaged list was doing all the work anyway, and the rest was just drag.

Want to know if it worked?

That's the harder half - measuring placement rather than guessing at it.

It's what the Email Deliverability Certification covers: how inboxes decide, how to diagnose what's happening, and how to prove the change.

Or start with the free Deliverability Health Check

Email Strategy Masterclass

Register your interest

This masterclass happens if enough people put their hand up.

So: if you'd come to an Email Strategy Masterclass, tell me. If enough of you do, it's on.

And everyone who registers gets free access to the Email Strategy Builder - a tool I'm building that hands you all the building blocks to construct your own email strategy, based on my award-winning framework.

Stop trying to re-engage people who've already left.

See you soon,

Beth ✌️

I have ADHD (IFYKYK) so please excuse any typos and spelling errors in this email.

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