12/2025

How to Get More Email Opens and Clicks

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If you’re here, you’ve probably asked (or been asked) one of the following:

“Should we change the subject line?”
“Is the design the problem?”
“Should we try a different CTA?”
“Maybe it’s the time of day we’re sending?”
“How do we get more people to open and click our emails?”

These questions make sense on the surface, they’re the questions marketers have been conditioned to ask.
But they’re also the wrong questions, because engagement doesn’t happen inside the email!

It isn’t a reaction you can manufacture with a button colour or a clever emoji. It doesn’t magically improve when you write a better headline or switch to a different layout.

Engagement isn’t an action, engagement is a condition.
And unless you improve the conditions, your emails will never perform.

The right question, the one that you be asking is this:

“How do we improve the conditions that make engagement possible?”

This is the mindset shift that separates teams who endlessly tinker with campaigns from teams who build email ecosystems that work.

Let’s break it down properly.

1. You’re trying to fix the wrong problem

Most marketers don’t have an “engagement” problem, they have a systems and conditions problem.

You inherited email! You inherited the idea that email is: pull a list → write an email → hit send → hope.
And now engagement feels like something you chase, instead of something you design for.

The issue isn’t your subject line (you don't need to split test it this time), it’s not your send time. and it’s rarely the design.

It’s everything surrounding the email: the foundations, expectations, data, trust, cadence, deliverability, and the overall environment in which your email appears.

Until you fix those, engagement will stay flat or drop.

2. The real reasons engagement is low

There are many reasons engagement suffers, but here are the real drivers — the ones that matter far more than creative tweaks.

Inbox placement (your unseen engagement killer)

If your emails aren’t reliably reaching the inbox, people cannot engage with them.
Most marketers don’t realise they have inbox placement issues because ESPs don’t report on it. They’ll show you open rates, but they won’t tell you whether 40% of your Outlook audience quietly received your email in spam.

Before you optimise anything, you must establish whether people are actually seeing your emails.If they aren’t, no subject line in the world can save you.

Expectation setting (the promise you made at sign-up)

Every subscriber arrives with a perception of what you’ll send, how often, and why. If you never defined this, or worse, if you defined it and then broke it, engagement falls fast.

If someone signed up for helpful insights and suddenly receives sales pushes, that disconnect damages trust. If someone wanted one discount code and is suddenly receiving three emails a week, they disengage immediately.

Expectation is the psychological contract.
Break the contract and engagement drops.

How they opted in (intent dictates behaviour)

A subscriber who intentionally signs up for a newsletter behaves completely differently from someone who ticks a box at checkout or downloads a resource.

Intentional opt-ins come with anticipation, curiosity and voluntary engagement.

Consequential opt-ins come with no emotional or behavioural commitment.

If you treat both groups the same, your engagement metrics will always be misleading. And your emails will always feel irrelevant to at least half your audience.

Relevance (the biggest driver of engagement you’re not measuring)

When engagement is low, the root cause is almost always relevance, not creativity.

If your message doesn’t reflect:

who they are
why they signed up
what they’re experiencing
where they are in their journey
what they care about today

…then you haven’t earned the open, let alone the click.

Engagement improves when the email feels like it was written for them, not for “the list”.

Habit and cadence (engagement is learned behaviour)

You cannot build engagement on inconsistency.

If your cadence is erratic, unpredictable, or reactive, subscribers can’t build a habit with you.

People open what they expect, and when they trust you will deliver something of value at the right time.

A scattered email schedule creates confusion. Confusion creates disengagement.

Trust and invisible permission (the part of email no one talks about)

Invisible permission is the unwritten agreement between you and your audience.
You promise usefulness, clarity and relevance, they promise attention.

The moment your emails stop feeling useful, predictable or respectful, that permission breaks. You lose it long before people unsubscribe.

Lost permission = lost engagement.

List churn (the problem almost nobody accounts for)

You lose engagement every day because your list is constantly churning — quietly and invisibly.

People change jobs.
People change email habits.
People lose interest.
People get overwhelmed.

If you’re measuring performance against total list size, you’re basing your expectations on a number that does not reflect your actual reachable audience.

Healthy email programmes factor churn into reporting and planning.

Journey cohesion (or, why you can’t treat email like a series of one-offs)

If your welcome flow contradicts your newsletters, or your campaigns overlap your automations, or someone gets a sales push while they’re in an active customer service issue… engagement will tank.

Humans do not experience your emails as separate things. They experience one relationship with your business.

If the experience feels chaotic, trust evaporates and so does engagement.

Content alignment to segmentation (your message must match your audience)

If you send the same email to everyone, you are optimising for no one.

Every audience has different needs, levels of awareness, motivations and contexts. If your segmentation doesn’t reflect that, your content will never land properly.

Data and audience insight (you cannot engage an audience you don’t understand)

Most marketers don’t have a data problem, they have a data application problem.

Without motivation data, contextual signals, behaviour patterns or meaningful tagging, your emails cannot become more relevant over time.

And if your emails don’t evolve, neither does your engagement.

Lack of internal support (engagement dies when leadership insists on “send it to everyone”)

If you’re fighting constant pressure to do full-list sends, your engagement is being undermined from above.

Sending to everyone is rarely a strategic choice, it’s a fear response.

And fear-led email is engagement’s worst enemy!!

3. Why people actually stop opening your emails

There are three categories here: your fault, the inbox environment’s fault, and no one’s fault. Each requires a different response.

A) When it is your fault (and it’s usually subtle)

Disengagement is rarely caused by one big catastrophic email. It’s usually micro-friction moments:

They received an irrelevant email they weren’t expecting
The tone felt off
The message felt pushy
They purchased something and then immediately received a discount
They signed up for one thing but received something entirely different
The cadence suddenly increased
An automation fired incorrectly or duplicated another message

These moments seem tiny, but they damage trust quickly. And once trust dips, engagement follows. I always say the small details matter the most!

B) When it’s the inbox environment (everyone else’s fault)

Your engagement suffers because:

the inbox is saturated
competitors are emailing more aggressively
seasonal noise is overwhelming (hello Black Friday)
people are drowning in admin
inbox fatigue is real

Your audience is battling dozens of brands at the same time, your email is judged alongside all of them.

Sometimes engagement drops not because you did anything wrong, but because the inbox is loud and chaotic.

C) When it’s simply their behaviour (no one’s fault)

Some people “engage” without opening and some people just won't open again - and that's FINE.

Some people:

They see your name in the inbox.
They clock your subject line.
They mentally note your presence.
Then they directly visit your website or take the next action somewhere else.

Email works even when open rates say it didn’t!

This is why you must track:

website visits
content consumption
account activity
brand or business searches
purchase or enquiry or engagement behaviour

No-open does not equal no-value. Read more about this here.

4. Some people were never going to open again

Not everyone signs up with the intention to engage.

Some wanted:

a code
a download
a webinar
a free resource
a one-off insight

You are expecting long-term engagement from short-term behaviour! That’s not a performance issue, that’s a misalignment of expectations.

And it absolutely must be factored into reporting.

5. How to rebuild the conditions for engagement

Now we move from diagnosis to prescription. Here’s how you create an environment where engagement becomes natural.

Fix your deliverability first (non-negotiable)

If your domain reputation is poor or you’re landing in spam, nothing else matters.

Before you optimise campaigns, you must:

test inbox placement
audit your sending domain
review your engagement patterns
segment by mailbox provider
understand your risk areas

If deliverability is your blind spot:

→ Join my Deliverability Masterclass to learn how deliverability actually works
→ Or book a Deliverability Audit if you want me to diagnose your inbox placement and build a step-by-step fix plan

Understand why people signed up

Behaviour is shaped by motivation.

Use:

progressive profiling
meaningful opt-in data
context of entry
intentional vs consequential segmentation
motivational questions (“What best describes why you’re here?”)

If you don’t understand motivation, every email is a guess.

Build journey-led experiences, not disconnected campaigns

Campaigns don’t build relationships, journeys do.

Every subscriber should flow through a structured arc:

Welcome
Onboarding
Orientation
Early value
Habit building
Relevant offers
Re-engagement
Relationship maintenance

When journeys reflect real human behaviour, engagement increases naturally.

Read the room (use exclusions strategically)

One of the most underused engagement levers is protective exclusions.

This includes excluding:

new subscribers (orientation first)
at-risk or cooling audiences
Outlook remediation segments
anyone in a sales cycle
anyone in a customer-service conflict
seasonal customers
low-engagement cohorts during heavy promotions

Engagement improves when you stop forcing the wrong message on the wrong people at the wrong time.

Redesign your cadence and habit loops

Consistency builds trust and trust builds habit and habit builds engagement.

If your cadence is rather chaotic, unpredictable or volume-driven rather than audience-led, engagement will always be inconsistent.

Cadence must be deliberate, respectful and expectation-aligned.

Measure the right things

Engagement is a lagging indicator.
You cannot improve it directly.

Fix the leading indicators instead:

inbox placement
trust
relevance
segmentation
motivation alignment
journey consistency
data quality
expectation setting

When you fix these foundations, engagement rises without force.

6. The mindset shift

The biggest shift you can make is this:

Stop trying to fix the email!!! Start fixing the environment the email lives in.

Engagement isn’t created inside the campaign editor. It’s created in the foundations, expectations, behaviours and experiences you build around your email programme.

When you improve the conditions, engagement becomes the natural outcome, not the prize you’re chasing.

If your email engagement is flat - let me help you

If this blog has hit a nerve, it’s because you know your engagement problem isn’t really about subject lines.
It’s about structure, strategy, trust, data and deliverability.

This is exactly the work I do every day with B2B and B2C teams.

Here’s how I can help you:

✔ Deliverability Audit — find out where your emails are actually landing and why
✔ Email Ecosystem Audit — evaluate your strategy, systems, data, journeys and segmentation
✔ PPPP™ Email Framework Masterclasses — learn how to build a high-performing email ecosystem
✔ 1:1 strategic support or consultancy— ongoing guidance to rebuild your email conditions properly
✔ Custom warmup, segmentation and data strategies tailored to your business

👉 Book a free consultation with me

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