More email opens, more unsubscribes: what do you do?

Question

A newsletter team tests increasing send frequency from three emails a week to daily. The primary metric, total weekly opens, is up a significant +15%. But a guardrail, the unsubscribe rate, is up a significant +0.5 percentage points per week, and the spam-complaint rate rose slightly.

Should the team roll out daily sends, and how should they treat the guardrail regression?

Accepted Answer

Why the guardrail matters. Total opens is the near-term win, but the unsubscribe rate protects the long-term health of the list, which is the asset that generates all future opens. Sending more emails almost always raises short-term opens simply because there are more emails to open; the question is what it does to the audience over time. The trade-off is a stock-versus-flow problem. Each extra unsubscribe is a permanent loss: that person will not open any future email. So a +15% short-term open lift financed by a +0.5 point weekly unsubscribe rate can be a bad trade, because the higher churn…

More email opens, more unsubscribes: what do you do?

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