For three reasons:
- Because I really like Vlan et Ping podcasts by Grégory Pouyso I naturally signed up for its Hop! newsletter.
- Because I really enjoyed writing this email.
- Because I was surprised to receive a reactivation email when I think I regularly read the Hop! newsletter.
Editorial staff
This time, let's look at the problem the other way round. Often, in an inactive reactivation email, the main button is "I unsubscribe". Here, they unsubscribe by default and the call to action is "I remain subscribed". I find this logical and more transparent for readers.
The timing
However, I was very surprised to receive a reactivation email from Hop! I seem to read the newsletter quite regularly. So I checked to see if this was the case. And indeed, I regularly read Hop! newsletters. The last one I read was on 17/11, so I can't say that my address is inactive.
Why did I receive this reactivation email?
The trigger for this email should be the "open" indicator. Email opening is only counted if the images are loaded. I read Hop newsletters via Infomaniak webmail, which doesn't load images by default. I don't need to download the images, as the newsletter, produced via the Kessel newsletter toolis mainly textual. I read it without loading the images, which suits me just fine.
Did I click on Hop! newsletters? I wouldn't know. Maybe you didn't. The newsletter is long, and Gregory writes it like a blog article, developing his ideas right to the end. There's no teasing to entice people to click. In fact, when he writes, you can tell he's not thinking about performance indicators. He puts the quality of his content and his readers first.
Conclusion
From a marketing point of view, Gregory risks losing readers who, like me, read his e-mails without loading the images and are therefore not counted as active. This example highlights the inherent imprecision of emailing: the open indicator is unreliable, since reading an email doesn't always correspond to technically opening it. We could propose click-through as an alternative to open, but this solution remains imperfect. A newsletter like Gregory's can be long - we read it for inspiration without necessarily clicking. As a podcast creator, he's right to prioritize content over metrics, and to be content with the standard features of newsletter tools, rather than giving in, like the rest of us marketers, to the obsession with metrics and performance.