Eva wrote it on Tuesday afternoons. Eva was the head of marketing, although in the company they were four people and titles were taken lightly. She had been writing the newsletter for two years. It went out on Wednesdays at nine in the morning, to three thousand four hundred and twenty-two subscribers. For two years she had used the same structure: a subject line in capitals, a big image, three blocks of text and an orange button at the bottom that said "SEE MORE".
The open rate was sixteen percent. Clicks on the orange button, two percent of those who opened. That meant, in round numbers, that sixty-five people clicked the orange button per send. Of those sixty-five, one bought something. Sometimes two. Sometimes none.
—The industry works like that —Eva would say.
She had read it on a blog. She said it every time the manager, in the monthly meeting, looked at the numbers and frowned.
—It's the industry benchmark. Sixteen percent is normal.
The manager nodded. He had no argument to contradict her. Eva knew about this. He didn't.
What was inside the list
The list had been growing for two years. Every time someone placed an order on the website, they went into the list. Every time someone filled in the PDF catalogue download form, they went in. Every time someone went to the industry fair and left a business card at the stand, someone put it into an Excel sheet and, at the end of the month, it was imported.
Nobody had ever looked at who was inside.
Eva treated the three thousand four hundred as if they were all the same. She sent them the same thing. The same Tuesday. At the same time. With the same subject line in capitals.
Inside there was everything. There were clients who had bought three times in the last six months. There were clients who had bought once, eighteen months ago, and never again. There were people who had downloaded the PDF catalogue in 2022, who now worked in another sector, and who hadn't unsubscribed because they couldn't be bothered to find the link. There were business cards from people who no longer remembered being at that fair. There were four hundred and twenty bounced emails still on the list, sent every Wednesday, even though none of the four hundred and twenty arrived anywhere.
There were also, at the bottom, two hundred subscribers who opened the newsletter almost every week. Who clicked. Who replied. Who were real, committed, loyal customers. The newsletter worked with them. Not because of the newsletter. In spite of it.
The conversation with the new guy
The new guy started in September. He was quiet for two months. In November, in a meeting, he said:
—Can I look at the list?
Eva gave him access. The young man took three days. He came back with a printed sheet.
—Eva, do you know that forty percent of the list hasn't opened an email in more than twelve months?
—Well, that always happens. People are saturated.
—And that twelve percent are bounced emails. They don't arrive. The servers reject them.
Eva looked at the paper.
—And the rest?
—The rest splits into four groups. There's a group of two hundred people who open almost everything. Another group of six hundred who open only when the subject line talks about discounts. Another group of nine hundred who open only when we talk about technical news. And another group of a thousand who open from time to time, with no clear pattern.
—And where does this come from?
—From the data. We've been collecting it for two years. Nobody had looked at it.
Eva didn't say anything. She looked out of the window. Then she looked at the paper again.
—And what do you do with this?
—Start sending different things to different people.
What happened next
It wasn't fast. It took three months to build the system. It took another three months to change the way the newsletters were written. Eva, who had spent two years writing the same thing for everyone, had to learn to write four different things, in four tones, for four groups. She found it hard. She didn't like it. She said so several times.
But the numbers changed. The overall open rate went up to thirty-two percent in six months. Clicks went to six. Sales attributable to email doubled. Not because more was sent. The opposite: less was sent. But sent to the right people about the right things.
Eva, at the year-end meeting, presented the results. The manager, this time, didn't frown. He smiled.
—What about the industry benchmark?
Eva took a second to answer.
—The industry benchmark is the average of everyone who treats their list like a list. When you stop treating it like that, you stop belonging to the benchmark.
The new guy, at the back, said nothing. He wrote Eva's sentence down in a notebook. He thought it was a good sentence.
What the data was hiding
The data wasn't new. It had been going into the system for two years. Every open, every click, every purchase, every catalogue download: it was all being saved. The company paid for the email marketing tool. The tool offered reports. Eva looked at the reports at first, the first few months. Then she stopped looking. Not because she was lazy, but because the reports told her what she already knew: sixteen percent opens, two percent clicks. The conclusion was always the same. And because the conclusion was always the same, she stopped looking.
The new guy didn't look at the reports. He looked at the data. Reports summarise. Data describes. The summary of sixteen percent hid the fact that there was a five percent who opened everything and a seventy percent who opened nothing.
To see it you don't need artificial intelligence. You need to sit down and look. And, before that, someone who knows what to look for.
The manager, one night
The manager, that night, poured himself a glass of wine and sat on the sofa. He thought about the two years of newsletters, the Wednesdays at nine in the morning, the orange button. He thought about how cheap the change had been: a new guy, three months, no new tool, no investment. Just looking.
He also thought about what other data the company had been accumulating for years without anyone looking at it. The orders. The complaints. The technical support calls. Client payment terms. Returned products. How many decisions were being made at the company by gut feel, when the data to make them better was right there, stored, in silence, waiting for someone.
That night he wrote one thing in a notebook:
What we've been storing for years — who looks at it?
It was a question for himself. He read it again the next day, in the office, and underlined it.
Reports summarise. Data describes.
Most small companies have tools that collect data. Few have someone who sits down to look at it. A 16% open rate report is exactly as useless as a 32% one: both are averages. Averages hide.
Segmenting isn't an advanced technique. It's choosing to stop treating different people as if they were the same. To do it you don't need artificial intelligence: you need the data — which you already have — and someone who knows what to look for.
What data has your company been storing for years that nobody has sat down to open?
If your company has a CRM, an ecommerce, email marketing, or a dashboard of anything, there's data waiting. What's missing isn't technology: it's the gaze. Let's look at it together.
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