Hey Reader,

When someone asks me to look at their email marketing, they rarely know what’s wrong. They just know something is. Open rates went down, sales from email went quiet, or they opened their own account and thought, it’s a bit scary in here.

Once I’m in, it’s almost always one of four things. Over the last few months I’ve seen all four, more than once.

People sign up and then hear nothing. The freebie arrives, and then it goes quiet. Or there is a welcome sequence, but it never adds the tag at the end, so new subscribers never reach the newsletter at all.

Nobody can find the way in. The emails are good, but hardly anyone new joins. A book with no route to the author’s list. A big following on social media with nowhere for those people to go. Or no sign-up form at all, so people only end up on the list through workarounds.

Forms and automations quietly stopped. Nothing looks wrong, so nobody checks. A pop-up pointing to a form nobody uses anymore. An automation that waits for a tag instead of adding one, so everyone sits at that step forever. A cleanup automation that was supposed to run and never did.

The list is big, but half of it never opens. I recently looked at a list where more than half the subscribers had never opened a single email. You pay for every one of them, and they make it harder for your emails to reach the people who do want them.

None of these announce themselves. Kit won’t send you a warning saying people have been stuck at step three since spring. So it helps to know which one you’re most likely to have.

And no, I’m not pointing fingers. Earlier this year, the clicks on my own newsletter dropped, and it took me a while to work out why. The leaky faucet at the plumber’s house, right?

I’m curious, Reader. Which of these sounds most like your email marketing right now? One click is enough; there’s nothing to fill in.

Most email marketing isn’t broken in a big, dramatic way. It’s a small leak nobody noticed, and you can only fix it once you know it’s there.

Warmest wishes Natalie

A little extra​
I’ve been testing WebinarKit, a webinar tool that connects to Kit (not made by Kit, despite the name). They gave me free access to try it, and I’m writing up what I liked and what I didn’t, including the bits that made me cringe.