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Every issue of this newsletter gives you the exact systems, strategies, and principles I’ve used to generate 8 figures (almost entirely) with email marketing. So you can build your own systems that will carry you through the next algorithm change or recession. This is what actually works.

There is a moment every email marketer eventually has, usually late at night, while staring at a screen that has gone slightly blurry from too many hours of looking at it, where they ask a question that sounds simple and turns out to be deeply uncomfortable.

Who is actually reading this?

I had that moment a couple of years ago in my home office in Toronto, when I was digging through my CRM, looking at a segment my system had flagged as highly engaged.

Hundreds of subscribers. Consistent open rates. Strong engagement scores. The platform was essentially handing me a gold star and saying: these people love you.

There was one problem. Almost none of them had clicked a link in months.

I know what you're thinking, because I thought the same thing. They open the email, they read it, and they just don't click. Fine. That happens.

Some readers are browsers, not buyers. I've accepted that. And yet when you look at hundreds of "highly engaged" subscribers opening consistently and clicking almost never, at some point the math starts to feel wrong.

Here's the thing: the math is wrong. Just not in the way you'd expect.

What I've confirmed, after digging into this with several email marketing friends who were seeing the same patterns, is that a meaningful chunk of those "openers" are not actually opening anything. They're showing up as opens in your system because of how email tracking works, and how it has been progressively broken over the last couple of years.

Apple, for instance, now processes emails in a way that can register an open even when the subscriber never touched the message. (I don't know the precise technical mechanics of how that happens. I just know the end result: my open rate numbers have become partially fictional, and yours probably have too.)

That is disorienting enough on its own. But here's the part that really got my attention.

Before we go any further…

You've heard it a thousand times: build an email list and the money will follow.

So you set up the funnel and write the emails. You buy the traffic or try to run free traffic, and watch the autoresponder bills stack up month after month.

All while you wait for the money to show up -

Except it never does…

You're spending more than you're making, and eventually you run out of runway and quit.

The problem is the model itself. You're told to build first and earn later, but "later" never comes when you're bleeding money on tools and traffic with zero return.

My buddy John Thornhill has been flipping that model on its head for over 15 years. He's a 9x ClickBank Platinum Award winner who figured out how to get paid WHILE building his email list instead of hoping it pays off someday.

He made $214,186.36 building a 17,081-person email list using a simple done-for-you funnel that collects commissions from day one.

And he did that all without creating any products, writing sales pages, or dealing with support tickets.

This Thursday, John and I are hosting a live training where he'll show you exactly how this system works and how you can use the same done-for-you funnel to start collecting commissions while you build.

Now, as I was saying…

The people your system has labeled as non-openers, the subscribers sitting in that cold, ignored segment that most marketers either stop mailing or delete entirely, a lot of those people are actually opening your emails. Opening and clicking. They're just not being tracked as doing it.

Think about that for a second. The subscribers you've written off may be your most engaged readers. And the subscribers your platform keeps showing you as a success story may be the ones you're sending to a wall.

I've gotten a lot more careful about what I do with list segments since figuring this out. For a while, I was the guy who would look at a non-opener segment after ninety days, feel vaguely disappointed in them, and start planning a re-engagement campaign or a purge. I get it if that's where you are right now. That was the obvious move, and every piece of conventional list hygiene advice pointed exactly in that direction.

Most email list advice points you in that direction. Clean your list. Remove the deadweight. Protect your deliverability.

The advice is reasonable on its own. Deliverability matters enormously. Acting on tracking data that has become unreliable is a different problem entirely.

You think you're cleaning deadweight. You're potentially removing people who've been reading everything you write.

You see, what I watch for now instead of open rates is what happens over time in my CRM. I can pull it up from anywhere, a café in the morning, a hotel lobby between flights, and find people who have been on my list for three years, four years, sometimes longer, who finally clicked something last Tuesday. Bought a product they've been circling for eighteen months. Responded to an email about a topic I hadn't touched in two years.

Every single one of those sales started with someone I could easily have written off.

What made them click, after all that time? I genuinely don't know, and I've stopped trying to figure it out. It's not my job to know when a subscriber is ready. It's my job to be there when they are.

Different angle. Different offer. Different tone. Different topic.

Different framing of the same idea they've seen from me fifteen times before. At some point, one of those fifteen versions lands at exactly the right moment, and something shifts.

You're chipping away at stone. You don't always see the progress. But every email is a chip.

I had a subscriber on my list for four years. Four years of emails, some he opened, some he didn't, or at least some his email client told me he opened and some it told me he didn't.

Who knows what actually happened. There were months where I looked at his record and felt, honestly, nothing. The way you stop really seeing a name when it's just been there forever.

What I know is that on a Friday afternoon in November, he bought a high-ticket program. I went back through the history and found no dramatic buildup, no sequence of opens leading to the purchase. He just decided he was ready, and I happened to mail him something that week that said the right thing at the right time.

That is not a story about a clever funnel. That is a story about staying in the game long enough to be there when someone decides to buy.

So what do you actually do with a segment that shows all openers and no clicks, or all non-openers and no apparent engagement?

You keep mailing them. All of them. You do not send individual pleading emails. You do not run elaborate re-engagement sequences designed to force them to prove they're alive.

You mail them with the same frequency and quality you mail everyone else, and you keep rotating the angles, the topics, the tone, the offers.

Three percent of them respond to this angle. Five percent to a different one. One percent to an offer you almost didn't promote. Ten percent to a topic you nearly skipped.

Over enough time, you chip away until you've gotten everyone you could have gotten. The ones who were never going to buy, nothing would have changed that. The ones who were going to buy eventually, staying consistent is the only thing that guarantees you're still in their inbox when they eventually arrive.

The tracking is broken. The behavior is real. Keep mailing.

P.S. If you enjoy these ideas, you’ll love the deeper conversations we have on the List Building Lifestyle podcast.