"The money is in the list." That's the first thing any marketer tells you. Build an email list. Nurture it. Send them value. Then sell them.
We built a list of 50,000 subscribers. We sent them a "Weekly Digest" every Tuesday at 10 AM. We curated links, wrote editorials, and shared product updates.
And slowly, painfully, we watched the metrics die.
In 2020, we had a 35% open rate. By 2025, it was 12%. The Click-Through Rate (CTR) was 0.8%. We were shouting into the void. We realized that the era of the "General Purpose Newsletter" is over. We stopped sending it.
The Inbox Crisis
The average professional receives 120 emails a day. Their inbox is a war zone.
When your "Value Add" newsletter arrives between a P1 Jira Notification and an urgent message from the CEO, you are not a welcome guest. You are a distraction. You are clutter.
People subscribed to us in 2022 because they wanted to solve a specific problem. In 2026, they have solved that problem, but we are still emailing them about it. We became the zombie subscription they were too lazy to unsubscribe from, so they just archived us without reading.
This "Archive" signal destroyed our sender reputation. Gmail and Outlook saw that 88% of our emails were unopened, so they started moving us to the Promotions tab, then the Spam folder.
Content Marketing vs. Email Marketing
We confused "Distribution" with "Connection."
We thought that pushing content into their inbox guaranteed attention. It doesn't.
We decided to pivot. We stopped the push. We focused on the pull.
The "Just in Time" Strategy
Instead of a weekly newsletter, we moved to transactional, context-aware emails triggered by user behavior.
The Old Way:
Tuesday Blast: "Hey everyone! Here is a guide on how to use our API." (Sent to 10k people who aren't even developers).
The New Way:
Trigger: User visits the API Documentation page 3 times in 2 days.
Email: "Hey, saw you're looking at the docs. Here is a Postman collection to get you started faster."
The difference was night and day. These "Smart Emails" had open rates of 65% and CTRs of 15%. Why? Because they were relevant right now.
Moving Value to Social & Community
We realized that people consume "news" and "insights" on social platforms (LinkedIn, X, Reddit) or in communities (Discord), not in email.
We took the 20 hours a week we spent on the newsletter and repurposed it:
- LinkedIn Engineering Blog: We posted the editorials directly as LinkedIn Articles. They got 10x the views and comments.
- Discord AMAs: We hosted live Q&A sessions. Real interaction, not just broadcasting.
- YouTube Tutorials: Video is higher bandwidth than text.
We stopped trying to own the audience in a database and started trying to serve the audience where they already lived.
The Unsubscribe "Purge"
Before we fully killed the newsletter, we did something scary. We sent an email with the subject line: "Should you unsubscribe?"
We told them: "If you haven't opened our emails in 3 months, we are going to remove you from the list in 48 hours. Click here to stay."
We deleted 28,000 subscribers overnight.
Our Marketing Manager almost cried. "We lost half the list!"
But the remaining 22,000 were die-hards. Our metrics skyrocketed. Our domain reputation healed. And our server costs for the email provider dropped by 50%.
Conclusion
The "Weekly Newsletter" is a vestige of a slower internet. It assumes your audience sits around waiting for you to curate the world for them.
They don't. They have algorithms for that.
If you have something urgent to say (Product Launch, Security Update), send an email. If you have general thoughts, put it on a blog or social media. Respect the inbox.
We stopped spamming "value" and started providing utility. And our customers thanked us for the silence.
Written by XQA Team
Our team of experts delivers insights on technology, business, and design. We are dedicated to helping you build better products and scale your business.