Category: Email Marketing

The preheader is the line of text that appears next to your subject line in the inbox and many people either ignore it or leave it to chance. That’s a shame, because it’s the second thing subscribers read before deciding whether to open, and it works best when written as a pair with the subject line, not bolted on at the end.

This article covers what it is, how long it should be, and how to write one that actually pulls its weight in your email marketing campaigns.

What is an email preheader?

An email preheader is a short line of text that email clients display in the inbox alongside the subject line, before the recipient opens the email. In most email clients, it appears in lighter gray text directly after or below the subject line in the inbox view. 

You’ll also see it called email preview text or snippet text. The two terms refer to the same thing: “preheader” describes where it lives in the email’s code, while “preview text” describes what the subscriber sees in the inbox.

Here is where the preheader text sits alongside the other parts of an email: from the subject line down to the footer.

Three things show in the inbox before a subscriber opens any email: the sender name, the subject line, and the preheader. That’s the full picture a subscriber has when deciding whether to open. Yet the preheader is the one most senders give the least thought to.

How to set your email preheader

Setting your email preheader takes less than a minute: it’s a single field you fill in before sending.

Technically, the preheader lives in your email’s HTML. It’s a piece of text at the top of the code that email clients read and display as preview text. If you’re working with raw HTML templates, that’s where you’d add it. If you’re using SiteGround Email Marketing, there’s a dedicated field for it right in the campaign editor; no code involved.

To set your email preheader, simply:

1. Open your campaign and go to the Content step.
2. Find the Preheader box and type your text directly, or use the built-in AI generator to get three options in seconds.

Preheader vs. subject line: how they work together

The subject line and preheader are read as a pair. Most people scan both in under two seconds before deciding to open, ignore, or delete. That means the two lines function as a single unit of copy — not as two separate decisions.

Subject lines tend to carry the hook: the topic, the offer, the reason to care. The preheader’s job is to complete the picture. It can add detail, create context, deepen curiosity, or reinforce urgency. What it shouldn’t do is repeat the subject line.

Here’s the difference in practice:

Subject line	Preheader (weak)	Preheader (strong)
Your October newsletter is here	Read your October newsletter	3 things to do with your site before the holiday rush
We have a deal for you	Special offer inside	30% off hosting — ends Sunday at midnight
You’re almost out of time	Time is running out	Your free trial ends in 48 hours. Here’s what happens next.
New from SiteGround Academy	New article published	How to clean your email list without losing good subscribers

When both lines work together, they give a more complete reason to open. When they don’t, you’re leaving one of your two inbox lines doing nothing, which is a pretty easy fix once you know what to look for.

What happens when you leave the preheader blank?

When no preheader is set, the email client fills that space with the first readable text it finds in your email’s HTML. That’s rarely what you’d choose. Depending on how your email is built, it typically pulls in phrases like:

• “View this email in your browser”
• “Having trouble viewing this email? Click here”
• “Unsubscribe | Privacy policy”
• Navigation links like “Shop,” “About Us,” or “My Account”
• Image alt text meant for screen readers, like “Header logo”

None of those give a subscriber any reason to open. They just take up the space where a useful line could have been. The preheader costs one sentence, so it’s worth writing it.

How long should an email preheader be?

Aim for 40–100 characters. That’s the range that works across most email clients and devices without getting cut off. The exact amount that shows, though, depends on the email client, the device, and how long your subject line is — a longer subject line leaves less room for the preheader, a shorter one gives it more space.

Character limits by email client

The table below shows approximate visible character counts for common email clients. These are not hard limits; they’re the ranges where text typically gets cut off in standard inbox views.

Email client	Approximate visible characters
Gmail (desktop)	~100 characters
Apple Mail (desktop)	Up to 140 characters
Outlook (desktop)	~50–75 characters (varies by version)
Gmail (mobile)	~40–70 characters
Apple Mail (iOS)	~90–110 characters
Android (various)	~40–60 characters

Mobile vs. desktop: what actually shows

Mobile shows less: usually 40–55 characters, as you can see in the table above. Desktop clients like Gmail and Apple Mail show significantly more.

The practical rule: write for mobile first. Put the most important information in the first 40–50 characters, and treat anything after that as a bonus for desktop readers. 

A preheader that reads “30% off all plans — upgrade before Sunday” works at any length. One that reads “We’re really excited to share this week’s special offer with you — 30% off” loses mobile readers before they get to the point.

How to write a preheader that pairs with your subject line

Write both the subject line and preheader at the same time, as a two-line unit. 

Email preheader best practices

There are a few ways to structure the relationship:

• The subject sets the topic, the preheader delivers the detail
  Subject: Your site speed report is ready
  Preheader: 3 pages are slowing you down — here’s what to fix first
• The subject creates curiosity, the preheader rewards it
  Subject: We need to talk about your email list
  Preheader: You might be sending to people who aren’t there anymore
• The subject states the offer, the preheader adds urgency or context
  Subject: 25% off — this week only
  Preheader: Applies to all annual plans. Ends Friday at 11:59 PM.
• The subject and preheader complete a single sentence
  Subject: This one change
  Preheader: …increased open rates by 7% in our test. Here’s what we did.

If you read both lines and the preheader feels redundant, rewrite it.

If writing both from scratch every send feels like too much, SiteGround Email Marketing has an AI tool built into the campaign editor that generates subject line and preheader options for you. Use your email content or just describe what you’re sending in a few words. It’ll come back with three options to choose from. Not happy with any of them? Hit regenerate. It takes about ten seconds.

What to avoid in your email preheader

A few patterns that consistently underperform:

• Repeating the subject line: If both lines say the same thing, you’ve halved your persuasion without reducing your word count.
• Leaving it blank: The fallback text almost never helps. Set a preheader on every campaign, without exception.
• Generic filler: “Check out our latest newsletter” or “Don’t miss this” says nothing specific. Specific details outperform vague teasers.
• Starting with the company name: The sender field already shows who it’s from. The preheader should do something the sender name can’t.
• CTAs as preheaders: “Click here to save 20%” is an instruction before the subscriber has any reason to act. Earn the click first.

The hidden preheader technique

If you’re working with custom HTML email templates, the hidden preheader technique is worth knowing about. It prevents unwanted email body copy from appearing in the inbox preview by adding invisible characters after your preheader text — transparent filler that takes up space so the email client stops pulling in body text to fill the gap.

With a standard preheader, the text sits visibly at the top of the email body — readers see it in the inbox preview and again when they open the email. A hidden preheader shows only in the inbox preview, invisible once the email is open.

It’s particularly useful for:

• Design-heavy emails where the first visible text is a headline or image alt text
• Transactional emails where the body opens with structural copy
• Any campaign where the first body sentence doesn’t complement the preheader

This is a more advanced use case and usually only relevant if you’re working with custom HTML email templates.

Put your preheader to work

The preheader is a small thing that’s easy to overlook and just as easy to get right. Write it alongside your subject line, keep it under 100 characters, and make sure it adds something the subject line doesn’t already say. That’s most of the work done.

If you’re sending with SiteGround Email Marketing, the preheader field is right there in the campaign editor. And if you’d rather let AI take a first pass, the built-in generator will give you three options in seconds.

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Frequently asked questions about email preheader

If your open rates are dropping and you’re not sure why, the answer is usually in your sent folder. One content type, sent on repeat, trains subscribers to stop paying attention. This guide covers the six types of email marketing content that fix that, and a simple framework for putting them together so your email marketing actually gets somewhere.

What is email marketing content? 

Email marketing content is the message inside your email: what you actually say to your subscribers and why. It can serve different purposes: introducing your brand, teaching something useful, sharing a story, promoting an offer, or bringing inactive subscribers back. Together, these different content types cover the full customer journey, from the moment someone joins your list to the point they become a loyal buyer.

Why your content mix matters more than your send frequency 

Sending frequency gets a lot of attention in email marketing, but what you send matters more than how often you send it. When every message is a promotion, subscribers learn to treat your emails as noise. They stop opening, stop clicking, and eventually stop caring.

A varied content mix changes that dynamic. When subscribers get something useful or interesting between offers (a tip, a story, a resource) they stay engaged. And email engagement matters beyond the relationship: inbox providers evaluate senders based on spam complaint rates and overall subscriber behavior. 

According to Validity’s 2026 Email Deliverability Benchmark Report, keeping spam complaint rates below 0.1% is now the desired threshold. A list that only hears from you when you’re selling is more likely to generate spam complaints and a damaged sender reputation takes dedicated effort to recover, not just time.

Give different emails different jobs and keep reading to see what those jobs look like.

6 types of email marketing content and what each one does

Before reading about the six content types, do this one thing: pull up your last 10 sent emails and sort them into two piles: 

1. Emails that asked for something 
2. Emails that gave something

Count each pile. If you have seven promotional emails and three of everything else, that ratio is your problem, not your open rates, not your subject lines, not your send time. Write the numbers down. Then keep reading, because the rest of this guide is about fixing them.

Here are the six content types that make up a balanced email mix: what each one does, and when to reach for it.

Welcome emails

A welcome email is the first message a subscriber receives after joining your list, and statistically, the one they’re most likely to open. Its role in the mix is to set the tone before any ask is made: who you are, what they can expect, and why staying subscribed is worth their while. Send it immediately after signup, every time, without exception. Everything else you send builds on the foundation this email either creates or fails to create.Not sure where to start with your welcome email? SiteGround Email Marketing comes with a gallery of ready-made templates (including welcome emails) so you’re not staring at a blank canvas wondering how to introduce yourself.

Educational content and how-to emails

Educational emails are the workhorses of a healthy content mix. Their job is to build the kind of authority that makes your promotional emails land better when you do send them. Think of every educational email as a deposit: you’re building a track record of usefulness that subscribers will draw on when deciding whether to trust your recommendations. They work best when they’re specific: one concrete problem, one clear answer rather than broad topic overviews that could have been written by anyone.

Newsletters

A newsletter job isn’t to teach or to sell — it’s to show up. Consistently, on a predictable schedule, with enough personality that subscribers recognize your voice the moment they open it. Think of it like that friend who checks in every few weeks. Not always with big news, but reliably there. That consistency is what keeps you familiar between purchase moments, and familiar is what makes people buy from you when you do have an offer.

Promotional emails

Promotional emails are the ones you’ve probably already been sending — a discount, a launch, a limited-time offer. They’re the most direct content type in the mix and the most effective at driving immediate action, but only when the relationship behind them is already warm. A list that hears from you exclusively through promotions stops treating them as offers and starts treating them as noise. The other five content types on this list exist, in part, to make this one work.

For example: “We’re launching our new skincare range this Friday” becomes “Your skin’s about to get an upgrade — our new range drops Friday.” Same information, completely different feeling.

Stories and behind-the-scenes

Behind-the-scenes emails are the easiest to skip when you’re busy; they don’t have an obvious ask, a clear conversion goal, or a deadline driving them. But they’re consistently the ones subscribers remember and respond to the most.

They don’t lead with a lesson or a pitch. They show the person behind the business through a real moment, a decision, a mistake. The teaching happens on the way, not as the point. For small businesses, this is a structural advantage: your story, your voice, your mistakes are yours alone. One honest email about a decision that nearly went wrong will do more for subscriber loyalty than ten polished newsletters.

Re-engagement emails

Every list has subscribers who’ve gone quiet: they signed up at some point, stopped engaging, and have been silently inflating your list size ever since. A re-engagement email’s job is simple: find out who can be won back and let go of the ones who can’t. Do it intentionally, every 90 days or so, before deliverability quietly suffers.

Skip “we’ve missed you.” It’s the subject line equivalent of a form letter. “Still interested?” or “Should we break up?” gets opened. And often gets a reply.

Cheat sheet: nail every email element to your content type

Now that you know what each type does, here’s how they should actually feel when you’re writing them, from subject line to closing line:

	Subject line	Body	CTA	Closing
Welcome	Delivers on the signup promise	Who you are, what you offer + one immediate piece of value	One soft next step (a link to a resource)	What’s coming next and when
Educational	Problem-first, no hype	One problem, one answer, one example	Optional link to go deeper	“Try this today”
Newsletter	Conversational, like a text from a friend	A few updates or resources tied to one theme or moment	Light, contextual	Consistent personal sign-off
Promotional	Outcome-focused, reason to act now	Offer in the first two sentences, outcome before price	One button, nothing competing with it	Restate the deadline or key benefit
Story / BTS	Honest, slightly unfinished-feeling	One specific moment + the tension behind it	Reply invitation or a soft link; not a hard sell	Leave it open — invite a response
Re-engagement	Direct and self-aware	Acknowledge the silence + one reason to stay	Stay or unsubscribe: both equally easy to find	“Either way, no hard feelings”

How to plan your email content mix

Knowing what each content type does is the easy part. The harder part is sitting down on a Monday morning and actually deciding what to send this week. These six steps take that decision off your plate, covering everything from where your subscribers are in the customer journey to what your metrics are telling you about your mix.

The steps below follow the customer journey: from the moment someone joins your list to the point they become a loyal, engaged buyer.

1. Start with one goal per email

Before you pick a content type or open your email editor, decide on your email marketing goal: what do you want this email to do? Inform? Build trust? Drive a purchase? One email, one job.

This single habit is what separates a content strategy from a random send schedule. 

2. Match the content type to the relationship stage

Not everyone on your list needs the same email right now. Someone who signed up yesterday needs something different from someone who’s been opening every email for six months — and something very different from someone who hasn’t clicked anything in three.

Here’s how to match what you send to where they are.

Where they are	What to send	Why
Just joined your list	Welcome email, educational content	Build familiarity before making any ask
Opening emails but not buying yet	Newsletters, how-to emails, stories	Deliver consistent value, establish personality
Clicking, engaging, buying occasionally	Mix of value content and occasional offers	Keep trust high while converting it into revenue
Bought from you before	Behind-the-scenes, early access, rewards	Deepen the relationship with the people already sold on you
Haven’t opened in 90+ days	Re-engagement email	Find out who’s still interested before your deliverability suffers

3. Send the right email to the right part of your list

You don’t need complex segments to send more relevant emails. For a small business sending 2–4 emails a month, one split does most of the work. For instance, you can differentiate customers vs. non-customers using Groups in SiteGround Email Marketing.

• Existing customers: lead with loyalty, exclusivity, and product depth; they already trust you
• Non-customers: lead with education and value; they’re still deciding whether you’re worth their attention

That single split immediately makes every email feel more relevant to the person receiving it.

In SiteGround Email Marketing, you can organise your contacts into Groups and send separate campaigns to each one. If you’re running a WooCommerce store, the easiest way to build your customer segment is through the subscribe checkbox at checkout — anyone who buys and opts in can be assigned to a Customers Group from there. If you’re not on WooCommerce, a one-time CSV import of your existing customer list gets you set up. It’s not fully automated, but you only need to do it once.

Once you have your Groups set up, you’ll occasionally run into this: sometimes a subscriber will sit in more than one Group — a loyal customer who’s also gone quiet lately, or someone who bought once but never really engaged. Don’t overthink it. Educational emails and newsletters go to everyone regardless. 

For promotions, use your best judgement. Send to your most engaged Group first, then broaden if the offer is relevant to everyone. When in doubt, ask yourself what this person most needs to hear from you right now. That usually settles it.

4. Repurpose the content you already have

The most common reason small business owners fall off their content calendar isn’t lack of time — it’s running out of things to say. The fix is already sitting in your existing content.

Your blog posts, social media tips, podcast episodes, and videos are all email content waiting to happen:

• Pick one piece of existing content: a blog post, a tip you shared on Instagram, a question a customer asked last week
• Pull out one takeaway; not a summary, one specific immediately useful point
• Write 200–300 words around it: enough for subscribers to get value without clicking anywhere, then link to the original for anyone who wants more

A 1,500-word blog post yields one solid educational email. A five-tip Instagram carousel yields five. You don’t need a new idea every week — just a different format for one you already have.

5. Decide on your content ratio, not just your frequency

For most small businesses, 2–4 emails a month is a sustainable starting point. But how often you send matters less than what you send across those emails.

A simple rule of thumb (and one that’s been around long enough to have earned its place): the 80/20 rule. Roughly 80% of your emails should give subscribers something genuinely useful: education, a story, a newsletter, a resource. The remaining 20% can ask for something in return. In practice, for every promotional email you send, aim for two or three that aren’t selling anything.

A concrete monthly mix might look like this:

Week	Content type	Selling anything?	Example
Week 1	Educational email	No	“3 things that are hurting your skin barrier (and what to use instead)”
Week 2	Newsletter	No	A roundup of what you’ve been testing, a customer tip you loved, one thing coming up next month
Week 3	Promotional email	Yes	20% off your bestsellers, this week only
Week 4	Story / BTS	No	“We almost scrapped our bestselling moisturizer before launch”

6. Track what’s working and adjust

Good news: your subscribers tell you exactly what they want to read. You just have to know where to look. Every open, click, and unsubscribe is a vote. Аnd read across a month or two of sends, those votes add up to a pretty clear picture of what’s working in your content mix and what isn’t.

After each send, check three email metrics: 

• Open rate is your relationship health check. A gradual drop over time isn’t a subject line problem. It’s your list telling you they’ve stopped expecting something worth opening.

→ If the open rate is trending down, check your ratio: more than 25% promotional sends is usually the culprit.

• Click-through rate (CTR) is your content quality check. If people open but don’t click, the email didn’t deliver on what the subject line promised. For educational emails especially, a healthy CTR means the content was genuinely useful — not just opened and forgotten.

→ If your CTR is dropping, narrow your next educational email to one specific problem and make sure the subject line matches what’s actually inside.

• Unsubscribes are your most honest feedback. A spike after a promo means the value content around it wasn’t doing enough work. A spike after an educational email means the topic missed.

→ If unsubscribes spiked after a promo, count how many value emails went out in the four weeks before it. If the answer is one or fewer, that’s your answer.

These three numbers won’t tell you everything, but they’ll tell you enough to know what to adjust in your mix. For a full breakdown of what those numbers mean and what to do about them, see our email marketing ROI guide.

Now go send some email marketing content worth reading

If you’ve made it this far, you already know more about email content strategy than the majority of small business owners sending emails right now. The ones who treat their list like a billboard — show up when there’s something to sell, go dark the rest of the time — are leaving a lot on the table. Not just revenue, but the kind of subscriber relationships that make email actually enjoyable to do.

Pick one content type you’re not sending yet and write that email this week. Don’t wait for a full content calendar or a slower month — that month isn’t coming. Start with one email and build from there.

Your list is already there. They signed up because they thought you’d be worth hearing from. Go prove them right.

SiteGround Email Marketing gives you the templates, AI writing tools, and send infrastructure to put everything in this guide into practice, without needing a marketing team behind you.

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Frequently asked questions about email marketing content 

Automated email flows are sequences that send themselves. The three worth building first are a welcome flow, a lead nurture flow, and a re-engagement flow, covering the moments that matter most: someone joins your list, shows interest in something specific, or stops opening your emails.

This article covers the flow types worth building first, what triggers each one, how to time them, and how to set up your first automated email marketing campaigns.

What are automated email flows?

An automated email flow is a sequence of emails that fires automatically based on a trigger event. Every flow has three components: 

1. A trigger (what starts it)
2. A sequence (the emails that go out, in order), 
3. A goal (the action or outcome you want at the end). 

Once a flow is live, it runs in the background. A subscriber meets the trigger condition, enters the flow, and moves through the sequence without any manual input on your end.

That’s what makes flows fundamentally different from one-time email campaigns. Campaigns go out to a list at a set time: you write, schedule, and send. Flows run continuously, triggered by individual subscriber behavior. The table below shows the key differences:

Feature	Email campaign	Automated email flow
When it sends	On a date you choose	When a subscriber meets the trigger
Who it goes to	A list or segment, all at once	Subscribers who meet the trigger, one at a time as it happens
How often you build it	Every time you want to send	Once, then it runs on its own
Best for	Announcements, promotions, newsletters	Onboarding, nurturing, re-engagement, retention

Good to know: Timing and relevance are the two variables that determine whether an email gets read or ignored. In fact, 74% of people expect a welcome email immediately after subscribing, as reported by Invesp. And a welcome email sent in that window gets opened far more often than the same message sent three days later.

Immediacy drives engagement: that first email lands when the subscriber is at peak attention. 

The flows to set up first

Start with the flows that run on actions every subscriber takes. The three flows below trigger on the most common things subscribers do: join your list, lose interest, or signal they want something specific. Every business has those moments. These flows handle them automatically.

Welcome email flow

The welcome email flow is the single highest-impact sequence in email marketing for one reason: open rates. Welcome emails average an open rate of around 50%,according to Invesp which is two to three times the average for standard campaigns.

The reason is simple: the subscriber just signed up. They took a deliberate action, they’re expecting a response, and your name is fresh in their mind. That window closes fast and a well-built welcome flow is how you make use of it.

Trigger: A new subscriber joins your email list (via sign-up form, website opt-in, or lead magnet download).

What it should do: Confirm the sign-up, deliver whatever you promised (a discount, a resource, access to something), introduce who you are, and set clear expectations for what comes next. The welcome flow is not the place to sell hard; it’s the place to prove the subscription was worth it.

How to structure a welcome email flow 

Email	When it sends	Job
Email 1: Confirmation and delivery	Immediately	Confirm the sign-up and deliver what you promised. One sentence about what to expect next. Subject line example: “Here’s what you signed up for.”
Email 2: Brand introduction	2 days after email 1	Who you are, what problem you solve, why it matters. Human and specific — not a company bio. One soft call to action: read a post, visit a page, reply with a question.
Email 3: First real ask	4 days after email 2	One clear ask: book a call, browse your services, try your product. By now it’s earned.

With SiteGround Email Marketing, the email automation setup is straightforward: create a group for new subscribers, set it as the trigger in the automation builder, and add your email steps. You can set a delay before each email based on your goals and audience — more on that in the following sections.

What a good welcome email flow looks like in practice

A good welcome email is personal, on-brand, and delivers exactly what the subscriber signed up for. Here’s an example built using a SiteGround Email Marketing template:

Clear welcome, a founder note that puts a human face on the brand, and a visual that matches the tone. That’s it.

Lead nurture flow

A lead nurture flow is a sequence triggered by a specific sign-up — a guide download, a quote request, a contact form submission — that follows up on that interest with relevant content before making an ask. The goal is to move the subscriber from “I gave you my email” to “I trust this business enough to take the next step.”

Unlike the welcome flow, which is about building the relationship, a nurture flow is about the decision. The emails look different: less brand introduction, more proof, education, and value tied to the specific thing that brought them in.

Trigger: A subscriber joins via a specific sign-up source — a lead magnet, a landing page, a demo request, or a contact form tied to a particular service or topic.

What it should do: Address the specific interest that brought the subscriber in, build credibility through useful content and social proof, and move them toward a decision — whether that’s booking a call, starting a free trial, or making a purchase.

How to structure a lead nurture flow:

Email	When it sends	Job
Email 1: Deliver and orient	Immediately	Deliver what they signed up for. Confirm what this sequence covers.
Email 2: Educate	Day 3	One specific, useful piece of content related to their interest. No ask yet.
Email 3: Build proof	Day 6	A customer story, a case study, or a concrete result that answers: “Does this work for someone like me?”
Email 4: Address hesitation	Day 9	Handle the most common objection — price, time, complexity, or fit. Keep it honest.
Email 5: Direct ask	Day 12–14	One call to action, one link, no ambiguity.

In SiteGround Email Marketing, create a separate group for each sign-up source and set each one as the trigger for its own automation, so every subscriber gets a sequence built around what brought them in.

What a nurture email flow looks like in practice

A specific, high-value offer, like this free meal plan from 100 Days of Real Food, is exactly the kind of sign-up that should trigger a nurture flow, not just a welcome email. The subscriber came for something specific. The sequence that follows should speak directly to that.

Re-engagement campaigns

A re-engagement email flow is an automated sequence that targets subscribers who’ve gone quiet and either wins them back or removes them from your active list.

Inactive subscribers hurt your sender reputation. Low open rates signal to email providers that your content isn’t worth delivering, which affects how reliably your emails reach everyone else. A re-engagement flow fixes that proactively.

Trigger: A subscriber hasn’t opened or clicked any email in the past 60–90 days. The exact threshold depends on your typical send frequency. If you email weekly, 60 days is reasonable. If you send monthly, 90–120 days may make more sense.

What it should do: Remind the subscriber why they signed up, give them a reason to re-engage (a specific offer, a piece of content, a direct question), and, for those who still don’t respond, cleanly remove them from your active list.

How to structure a re-engagement email flow:

Email	When it sends	Job
Email 1: “We miss you”	Day 1	Acknowledge the gap, remind them of the value they signed up for, include something useful. Subject line example: “Still want [what they signed up for]?”
Email 2: Final nudge	5–7 days after email 1	Make the ask clearer. Add a small incentive if appropriate — a discount, a free resource, early access. Subject line example: “One click to stay in the loop.”
Email 3: Sunset email	5–7 days after email 2	Tell them honestly you’re about to remove them and give one last chance to stay. Subject line example: “Should we say goodbye?”

Exit conditions: If a subscriber opens or clicks any email in the flow, pull them out immediately and return them to your regular list. The goal of the flow is re-engagement — the moment that happens, the flow has done its job.

Subscribers who complete all three emails without engaging should be unsubscribed or moved to a suppression list. Keeping them on your active list costs you in deliverability and distorts your reporting.

What a re-engagement email looks in practice

A good re-engagement email acknowledges the gap without making it awkward. Google’s Local Guides example does this well — a disarming visual, a subject line that’s hard to ignore, and a single, low-friction ask.

Flows to add once the basics are running

Once your welcome, lead nurture, and re-engagement flows are live, these are the logical next builds. They’re valuable, but they’re not urgent until your foundational flows are in place. Think of this as your second round of automation: each flow below targets a more specific trigger or a more defined group of subscribers.

Onboarding flow

An onboarding email flow is a sequence that guides new customers through their first steps with your product or service. If someone just bought your course but never logs in, or signed up for your tool but never completes setup, they’re already on their way out — and you may not even know it.

A well-built onboarding flow catches them at that moment: here’s what to do first, here’s what to do next, here’s how to get value fast. The result is fewer support requests, less early churn, and customers who actually get what they paid for.

Event or webinar follow-up flow

An event follow-up flow is a sequence triggered by registration or attendance at a webinar, live event, or workshop.

Someone who carved out time for your webinar is already more interested than the average subscriber; don’t let that momentum go cold with a single replay link. A well-timed follow-up sequence delivers the replay, surfaces related resources, and moves them toward a clear next step while the topic is still fresh. If you can, split attendees from no-shows: they showed up for different reasons and should get different emails.

Birthday or anniversary flow

A birthday or anniversary flow is a single email or short sequence, triggered by a date field in the subscriber profile: a birthday, a sign-up anniversary, or a customer anniversary.

In an inbox full of promotions and newsletters, an email that acknowledges a personal milestone stands out. It’s low effort to build, but it lands as something thoughtful — and a genuine targeted message with an optional offer on the right date can quietly outperform campaigns you spent hours on. The only requirement: collect the date field at sign-up.

Content engagement flow

A content engagement flow is a short sequence triggered when a subscriber clicks a specific link in one of your emails — a pricing page, a product, a resource. That click is a signal: they’re interested in something specific, right now.

Unlike the nurture flow, this one fires mid-relationship, when an existing subscriber shows renewed intent. Two or three focused emails on exactly what they clicked on can turn a casual browse into a real conversation.

What makes an email flow actually work

The difference between a flow that performs and one that sits in your platform collecting dust usually comes down to four variables. Competitors cover these briefly or not at all, but they’re worth understanding in detail, because getting even one of them wrong can undermine an otherwise solid sequence.

The trigger

The trigger is the most important decision you make when building a flow. It defines who enters, when, and with what context. A vague or broad trigger like “anyone who joined my list” produces a flow that goes to people who may have very different expectations and needs.

A precise trigger such as “anyone who signed up via the free SEO checklist download on my homepage” produces a flow that can be highly specific, because you know exactly what brought that person in.

When setting up a trigger, ask two questions: 

1. What did this subscriber just do? 
2. And what do they likely want next? 

The more directly your flow answers the second question based on the first, the better it will perform.

In SiteGround Email Marketing, segmentation happens at the group level. You define who belongs in a flow by deciding which group triggers it. A group for inactive subscribers triggers the re-engagement flow. A group for guide downloads triggers the nurture flow. The group is both the segment and the trigger.

Segmentation

Segmentation is the process of defining who qualifies to enter an automation flow and just as importantly, who doesn’t. In practice, this means being deliberate about which group triggers a flow: a re-engagement flow should only be linked to a group of inactive subscribers; a lead nurture flow for a specific service should only go to subscribers who expressed interest in that service.

Poor segmentation is one of the most common reasons email flows underperform. When irrelevant subscribers enter a flow, they’re more likely to ignore or unsubscribe, which drags down the engagement metrics for the entire sequence. Before you build a flow, define the audience clearly: which list, which segment, and what behavior or attribute qualifies someone for entry.

Timing and frequency

Spacing between emails in a flow is not a set-and-forget decision. Too close together, and subscribers feel pressured or overwhelmed, which leads to unsubscribes. Too far apart, and the context of what triggered the flow gets lost, which leads to irrelevance. The right cadence depends on the flow type and your audience’s expectations.

As a general starting point: welcome flows work well with emails 2–3 days apart. Lead nurture flows typically run on a three-day cadence over two weeks. Re-engagement flows need more space: 5–7 days between emails gives subscribers time to notice the gap.

The best way to calibrate is to monitor open rates across the sequence and look for where customer engagement drops. A sharp drop between email two and three often signals the timing is too tight or the content isn’t holding relevance.

Exit conditions

Exit conditions define when a subscriber should leave a flow before completing it. Without them, flows keep sending to people who’ve already converted, already unsubscribed, or are now in a different flow with conflicting messaging.

A subscriber who purchases during a nurture flow shouldn’t keep receiving “still thinking about it?” emails. A subscriber who re-engages in your win-back flow shouldn’t receive the sunset email telling them they’re about to be removed.

Every flow you build should have at least one exit condition defined: the action that signals the goal has been achieved. 

How to set up automated email flows with SiteGround Email Marketing

Setting up your first flow doesn’t have to feel like a project. Here’s what the process looks like in practice — from prep to going live.

What to have ready before you build

Before you start, get three things clear: what action triggers the flow, who should receive it, and what each email needs to say. A rough outline per email is enough. And if the writing part feels like the biggest hurdle, SiteGround Email Marketing has a built-in AI text generator to help you get the copy done faster.

Build your first flow

1. Create your account and access the Email Marketing dashboard.
2. Set up a group for the subscribers who will trigger the flow — new sign-ups, contacts from a specific form, or any segment that makes sense for your sequence.
3. Build your email sequence in the automation builder — add emails, write your content using the email editor, and set delays between each step.
4. Activate the flow and it runs automatically from that point forward — every new contact who joins the trigger group moves through the sequence on their own.

Pick one automated email flow and press send

Still deciding where to start? Build the welcome flow. It has the clearest trigger, the highest open rates, and the most immediate impact — and once it’s live, every new subscriber gets a real introduction to your business without you lifting a finger.

That’s the compounding value of automated email flows. Build them once, and they handle the most common subscriber interactions on their own — freeing your time for the work that actually needs you.

SiteGround Email Marketing gives you everything you need to get your first flow live today.

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Frequently asked questions about automated email flows

Your emails look fine. Your list is clean. And yet, someone still hits the spam button, and you may not know it until your metrics start taking a turn.

The metric we’re talking about here is your spam rate, which tells you how often that’s happening and why. Here’s what spam rate is, what counts as too high, and what’s actually causing people to hit that button.

What is the spam rate in email marketing?

Spam rate is the percentage of delivered emails that recipients report as spam by clicking “Report spam” (or “Mark as junk”) in their email client. It’s calculated like this:

So if you send 1,000 emails, 990 land in inboxes, and three people report them as spam, your spam rate is approximately 0.3%.

A few things spam rate is not:

• It’s not a spam score. Spam score (sometimes called a spam filter score) is a pre-send content analysis that predicts whether your email will be flagged. Spam rate is a post-send measurement of what actually happened.
• It’s not a bounce rate. Bounces happen when an email can’t be delivered at all — the address doesn’t exist, the inbox is full, or the server rejected it. Spam reports come from real people who received the email and chose to flag it.
• It’s not an unsubscribe rate. An unsubscribe is a clean exit. A spam report is a complaint that damages your sender reputation. Both mean someone doesn’t want your emails anymore, but they carry very different consequences.

Mailbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo track spam reports at the domain level and use them to build a picture of your sender reputation. This is a trust score that determines whether your messages reach the inbox, land in spam, or get blocked.

Flag enough messages and those providers start treating everything from your domain with suspicion, not just the campaign that caused the problem. For small senders with low volumes, even a handful of complaints can tip you over a threshold.

And if you’ve come across the terms complaint rate or abuse rate, they mean exactly the same thing. Different providers just use different names for it.

One thing worth knowing: For privacy reasons, Gmail doesn’t share complaint data with email platforms, so it won’t show up in your campaign reports. To see how your emails are performing in Gmail specifically, you need to check Google Postmaster Tools separately. 

• Gmail doesn’t share spam data with email platforms. To see your Gmail complaint rate, you need Google Postmaster Tools, a free dashboard that shows how your domain looks from Gmail’s side. 
• Other providers, including Yahoo, do share complaint data with Email Service Providers (ESPs) through a feedback loop (FBL), which is a system that automatically forwards complaint reports back to your ESP every time someone hits “Report spam.” Those numbers show up directly in your campaign reports. 

More on where to find all of this in the steps below. But first, what rate are you actually aiming for?

What’s a good spam rate?

The short answer: below 0.1%. That’s the rate the industry has treated as a healthy benchmark for years, and it’s the number Google explicitly recommends staying under for reliable inbox placement.

The longer answer involves two distinct thresholds that every email sender should know.

Google and Yahoo spam rate thresholds

In February 2024, Google and Yahoo formally codified spam rate requirements as part of their updated bulk sender requirements (rules that apply to anyone sending more than 5,000 emails per day to Gmail or Yahoo addresses). 

The complaint threshold they set has two distinct levels that every sender should treat as separate targets. Microsoft followed with equivalent rules for Outlook, Hotmail, and Live.com addresses in May 2025.

Spam rate	What it means	What to do
Below 0.1%	Healthy. Google’s recommended target for reliable inbox placement.	Maintain current practices. Keep monitoring.
0.1% – 0.29%	Caution zone. Complaints are above ideal; deliverability may start to slip.	Investigate the cause. Don’t wait for it to climb.
0.3% or above	Action threshold. Google and Yahoo begin blocking or filtering your messages.	Act immediately. At 0.3%, you’re ineligible for mitigation at Gmail.

To put 0.3% in concrete terms: if you send 10,000 emails, just 30 spam reports push you to that threshold. Aim for below 0.1% and treat anything above it as a warning sign, not a passing grade.

How to check your spam rate

You have two dedicated tools for the biggest providers: Google Postmaster Tools for Gmail data, Yahoo’s Complaint Feedback Loop for Yahoo data, and your SiteGround Email Marketing campaign analytics, which surface complaint data from providers that share it. Between those three, you have a complete picture of how your emails are landing.

The goal is to spot a trend before it becomes a problem.

Complaints compound quietly. By the time you notice a drop in open rates, you may already have a reputation problem.

5 reasons why people mark your emails as spam

Spam complaints are usually a human decision, not a technical failure. The most common triggers: they forgot they signed up, the emails stopped feeling relevant, unsubscribing was too hard, you were sending too often, or the email just looked suspicious. 

Here’s what’s behind each one.

#1. They forgot they signed up

Someone gets an email, doesn’t recognize the sender, and hits “Report spam” before even reading the subject line. They’re not angry; their inbox is just full and that’s the fastest way to clear it.

This happens more than you’d think. Someone signs up for a discount or a free download, your newsletter lands two weeks later, and they genuinely have no idea who you are. A pre-checked checkout box, no confirmation email, a list that’s been cold for months: none of these count as real consent. The person never made a deliberate choice to hear from you, and when your email lands, it feels like it came out of nowhere.

#2. The emails stopped feeling relevant

Relevance is a moving target. Someone who signed up for your newsletter when you were writing about freelancing tips may not want your new content about enterprise software. A customer who bought a specific product may have no interest in emails about a completely different category.

When your content consistently misses what a subscriber actually cares about, they don’t see a reason to unsubscribe when “Report spam” achieves the same result in one click.

#3. They couldn’t find the unsubscribe button

When people want out and can’t find an obvious way to leave, they find another one. A link buried in a dense footer, a confirmation page that requires logging in. Any friction pushes someone toward the spam button instead. It’s not that they’re frustrated with you specifically. Spam is just faster.

What makes this worse: Gmail and Yahoo now show an “Unsubscribe” link right next to your sender name in the inbox, before the email is even opened. When people still choose “Report spam” over that, it’s usually because the unsubscribe process has burned them before. Тhey clicked it somewhere else and the emails kept coming.

#4. You’re sending too often

Frequency fatigue is one of the most consistent drivers of spam complaints. A subscriber who liked your weekly newsletter may not want to hear from you daily. A promotional email a day during a sale can push even engaged contacts over the edge.

Frequency fatigue is real. When someone’s inbox starts filling up with your emails, the spam button is the quickest way out.

There’s no universal “right” frequency that applies to every list. It depends on your audience, your industry, and what you’ve set expectations about. The email marketing benchmarks guide covers typical cadence ranges by list size and industry as a starting point.

#5. The email looked suspicious

Even if your content is legitimate, an email that looks like spam will get reported like spam. This includes:

• A sender name that doesn’t match the brand the subscriber signed up for (for example, a personal name with no company context)
• Subject lines with excessive punctuation, all-caps words, or vague urgency (“YOU WON!!! Open now!!!!”)
• Broken images, misaligned layouts, or fonts that render oddly on mobile
• Links that don’t match where they appear to go
• No physical mailing address (required under CAN-SPAM)

According to Zero Bounce, around 80% of people will report an email as spam simply because it looks like spam. That’s before they’ve read a single word. Make sure your emails look like they come from a sender worth trusting: a recognizable name, a clean email layout, a subject line that doesn’t scream “promotional.” People should associate your address with something they actually want to open.

Knowing what drives complaints is half the battle. Let’s see what you can do about it.

6 steps to lower your spam rate

Most spam rate problems aren’t technical, they’re behavioral. The way you grow your list, how often you send, and how easy you make it to leave all have a direct impact on how often people reach for that button. These six steps address the most common causes.

#1. Keep an eye on your campaign reports

Your SiteGround Email Marketing reports are your first line of defense. Check them regularly for complaint data from providers that share it. If you want the full picture for Gmail specifically, Google Postmaster Tools fills that gap. It’s free, takes about 10 minutes to set up, and shows you data your campaign reports can’t.

For Yahoo and other providers, complaint data reaches you through a feedback loop (FBL).

If you’re using SiteGround Email Marketing, complaint data surfaces in your campaign reports automatically as a dedicated “Reported as spam” metric. If you’re sending frequently, check after every campaign. If you send once a week or less, a quick check every two weeks is enough. What you’re looking for is a trend, not a one-off spike.

A spam rate climbing from 0.05% to 0.12% over a few campaigns is a signal worth investigating. Spotted six weeks later, after your inbox placement has already dropped, it’s a much harder situation to recover from.

#2. Use double opt-in

Double opt-in means that after someone signs up, they receive a confirmation email with a link they have to click before they’re added to your list. This filters out typos, bots, and people who signed up impulsively and won’t remember doing so: the exact people most likely to hit the spam button later.

Yes, it reduces raw list growth numbers. But a smaller list of people who genuinely want to hear from you means higher open rates, fewer complaints, and better inbox placement over time: all of which matter more than a big number in your contacts dashboard.

SiteGround Email Marketing has double opt-in built in. You can enable it per group directly from your Contacts settings: either when creating a new group or by switching it on for an existing one.

#3. Clean your list

Inactive subscribers (people who haven’t opened or clicked in six to 12 months) aren’t just dead weight. They actively pull your metrics in the wrong direction. Low engagement signals to mailbox providers that your content isn’t wanted. And inactive email addresses sometimes get recycled into spam traps, which can damage your sender reputation even further.

A regular list cleaning process removes contacts who no longer interact with your emails before they become a problem. This means setting a window for inactivity (six months is a common standard) and either running a re-engagement campaign to see who responds, or removing non-responders from your main sending list.

#4. Make unsubscribing easy

As covered in the reasons above, a hidden or broken unsubscribe process pushes people toward the spam button. The fix is simple: make it visible, make it work in one click, and honor it immediately.

SiteGround Email Marketing handles one-click unsubscribe by default, so if you’re sending through the platform, you’re already covered. If you’re using a different tool, check that RFC 8058 compliance is enabled. Most modern email platforms support it, but it’s worth confirming.

#5. Segment before you send

Relevance is the strongest complaint deterrent you have. Sending a promotional email about enterprise software to a list that signed up for freelancing tips is a fast way to accumulate spam reports from people who just don’t care.

Segmentation doesn’t have to be complex. With SiteGround Email Marketing, you can organize subscribers into groups: by sign-up source or custom fields, and send campaigns to specific segments rather than your whole list. Even sending different content to different audience groups is enough to reduce the chance someone marks you as spam out of irrelevance.

#6. Watch your sending frequency

Too many emails is one of the most consistent reasons people reach for the spam button. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to how often you should send. It depends on your audience’s expectations, your content type, and what you established when they signed up.

What matters is that frequency feels predictable and proportional. A subscriber who signed up for a weekly roundup and starts getting daily emails from you didn’t agree to that. When volume increases without warning, spam reports tend to follow.

The lower your spam rate, the better your chances in the inbox

Most spam rate problems trace back to the same handful of situations: a list that wasn’t cleaned before a reactivation campaign, emails sent too soon after a growth spike, or frequency creeping up around a sale period. None of those are random — and none require a technical fix. They just require catching the pattern before it compounds.

Keep your spam rate below 0.1%, watch your numbers consistently, and treat anything climbing toward 0.3% as a warning sign, not a passing grade. Your sender reputation and inbox placement depend on it.

One thing worth remembering: your deliverability also depends on the platform you send from. A poorly managed infrastructure, shared with spammers, can get your sending IP flagged regardless of how clean your own list is.

SiteGround Email Marketing gives you campaign-level reporting to monitor complaint data, built-in audience management to keep your list healthy, and the sending infrastructure to back it up.

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Check your email marketing metrics regularly, not just when something feels off. The senders who maintain healthy spam rates aren’t doing anything extraordinary — they’re just watching the right numbers consistently.

Frequently asked questions about spam rate

When you plan an email, it’s easy to focus on the offer, the segment, and the subject line. It’s also easy to forget there’s a real person on the other side deciding, in a second, whether they feel like reading any of it.

Humor is one of the few tools that can change that feeling quickly, even though it’s not always easy to pull off. In this article, we’ll look at a handful of humor styles that work in email and how to use them intentionally. For small businesses, that can lead to higher opens, more clicks, and a brand people actually remember when they need what you sell.

Why humor actually works in emails

When an email makes you smile, you don’t experience it as “marketing” first but as a human moment. But the deeper reason humor works has nothing to do with comedy. It’s about recognition.

When you make someone laugh, you’re proving you understand them: their day, their frustrations, their industry, the specific kind of tired they are on a Tuesday afternoon. As conversion copywriter Lianna Patch puts it: “People don’t buy products. They buy feelings that come with them.” Laughter is one of the fastest ways to create that feeling.

According to Oracle’s Happiness Report, 72% of people would choose a brand that makes them laugh over a competitor. That’s a majority of your potential customers actively rewarding brands that don’t take themselves too seriously.

That’s the emotional core of good email marketing, humor or not. Laughter is just the shortcut.

5 types of humor that work in email marketing

Not all humor is equal. Different styles work for different audiences and moments.

1. Self-deprecating humor (the safest kind)

Poking fun at your own product, your team, or your industry is low-risk and high-reward. It signals confidence, honesty, and humanity, three things marketing copy is usually missing.

The structure is simple: admit something true that’s slightly unflattering, then own it completely. A re‑engagement email that says, “We noticed you haven’t opened lately. We cried a little, ate a cookie, and decided to win you back” injects vulnerability and charm into what’s usually a dry message. Humor makes the outreach feel personal.

Online liquor store Drizly once sent an email full of lorem ipsum by mistake, then followed up with “lol, wtf was that” and a discount code called LOREMIPSUM. They turned an error into a self-deprecating moment that actually made subscribers like them more.

2. Pain-point humor (the most effective kind)

Take a real frustration your audience lives with and exaggerate it until it becomes absurd. This works because of recognition. When someone reads a copy that names their exact problem — not a vague approximation of it, the specific Tuesday-at-4pm version of it — they feel seen. And feeling seen is the fastest path to a click.

A fitness coach can mock the gap between January gym motivation and February reality. A web designer can joke about exported files named “FINAL” and “FINAL FINAL v3”. If your audience has felt it, you can joke about it.

Death Wish Coffee has framed running out of coffee like a horror movie plot, riffing on Friday the 13th in their emails. It’s funny because the fear is real for their audience: they’re exaggerating a genuine pain point, not inventing one.

3. Puns and wordplay (use sparingly, but use them)

Everyone rolls their eyes at puns. Everyone secretly enjoys them. That little eye-roll? It means the pun worked. It caught their attention, made them react, and that’s what makes it memorable.

Research consistently shows pun-based subject lines outperform generic ones (even the obvious ones) because they create a micro-moment of surprise that breaks the monotony of the inbox.

Subject line examples that work:

• Florist: “We’re rooting for you 🌱”
• Coffee brand: “Espresso yourself.”
• Pet shop: “Pawsome deals end Sunday.”

The rule: a pun earns its place when it connects to something real in the email. A pun that exists just for the joke misses the point. A pun that bridges your subject line to your actual offer is a hook.

4. Inside jokes (the most bonding kind)

Nothing signals “I’m one of you” faster than a joke only your audience would get. Industry-specific humor: references to shared tools, shared nightmares, shared jargon — creates a sense of belonging that generic content never can.

Morning Brew, for example, constantly winks to finance in-jokes, niche business memes, and recurring “characters” in the news cycle, jokes that make no sense unless you’ve been following along.

And Cards Against Humanity has turned ridiculous Black Friday stunts into a tradition their audience feels part of: charging more, selling nothing, or listing ridiculous items. Both have built cult-level loyalty partly because of it.

For small business owners: what’s the joke only your customers would get? The one that’s so niche it would mean nothing to anyone outside your world? That’s the joke worth putting in an email.

5. The unexpected twist (the most shareable kind)

Set up an expectation. Break it.

The twist works because it rewards attention. Subscribers who read all the way through feel like they got something: a joke, a reveal, a moment of surprise. That feeling makes them more likely to click, more likely to remember you, and significantly more likely to forward the email to a friend.

Think: a “50% off” subject line that turns out, in the body copy, to be “50% off… your stress, because this tool now does the boring part for you,” then smoothly pivots into the actual (smaller but still real) discount.

Subject line humor vs. body copy humor: Two different skills

Most advice on funny emails treats subject lines and body copy as the same thing. They’re not. Getting one right doesn’t automatically mean you’ll get the other right and mixing up the approach is one of the most common reasons a “humorous” email falls flat.

Subject line humor

A subject line has roughly 40–50 characters to do everything: earn the open, set a tone, and create enough curiosity or recognition that clicking feels like the obvious next move.

This means subject line humor needs to be immediate. The joke has to land on the first read, without setup. The formats that work best here are:

Bluntly honest confessions

“This is a shameless bribe to open” or “Yes, this is a sales email” call out what’s happening and disarm skepticism in one line.

Broken clichés and flipped phrases

Take something familiar and twist it once, like “New year, same beautiful chaos” or “Limited-time offer (for real this time).”

Exaggerated overreactions

Lines like “Everything is under control (we think)” or “We need to talk about your cart” heighten a small situation just enough to be funny, not confusing.

What doesn’t work: jokes that require context to land, references that only make sense if you already know what the email is about, or wordplay so layered it needs a second read. In a subject line, if someone has to think, you’ve already lost them.

Body copy humor

Email body copy humor has the opposite problem. You have room which means you have enough rope to hang yourself with. The risk isn’t that the joke won’t land, it’s that you’ll keep going after it lands, explaining it into the ground, and arriving at your email CTA with no momentum left.

Good body copy humor follows a three-beat structure:

1. Setup: Establish the bit. Name the pain, the absurdity, or the premise. Keep it short, one or two sentences maximum.
2. Payoff: The punchline, the reveal, or the escalation. This is the moment the reader rewards you with a smile. It should arrive before they expect it.
3. Pivot: The clean turn toward your actual point. This is where most brands lose the thread. They stay in the joke too long and the CTA doesn’t feel like the obvious next step anymore. The pivot should feel like the natural conclusion of the joke.

Map your humor to the right moment

Humor is an emotion, and emotions belong in specific places in your marketing funnel.

• Welcome emails: Self-deprecating humor sets your voice immediately. It tells subscribers what kind of relationship this is going to be.

• Promotional emails: Pain-point humor makes the problem feel real before your solution feels necessary. The joke is the setup, your offer is the punchline.

• Re-engagement campaigns: Unexpected twists and a light tone work best here. Your subscriber has gone quiet — a funny email feels lower-stakes to respond to than a serious one.

• Post-purchase follow-ups: The customer is happy, their guard is down. A funny follow-up deepens loyalty without asking for anything.

• April Fools (and cultural moments): The rare occasion when everyone expects something different from their inbox. Your subscribers are primed. The bar is lower. Use it.

Priming your audience for humor

Humor lands differently depending on what your subscribers expect from you. If your tone has always been polished and professional, going playful without warning can feel jarring — like a stranger cracking a joke in a business meeting.

The solution is a permission layer: a few small signals that tell your audience your voice is loosening up, before it actually does:

• Add a PS line with a light touch. A single line at the end of an otherwise normal email — something like “PS. We’re working on something a little different for next week. Just saying.” — plants a seed without committing to anything. It also gets opened: PS lines have disproportionately high read rates because they feel personal.

• Let one sentence breathe. In your next regular email, swap one stiff, formal sentence for something slightly more human. “Honestly, this one took us a while to get right.” That’s enough. It starts recalibrating what subscribers expect from your voice.

• Reference your audience’s reality, not just their goals. Most marketing emails speak to where subscribers want to be. One sentence about where they actually are: the frustration, the Monday morning feeling, the thing that’s not working yet, builds the kind of recognition that makes humor land when it arrives.

The permission layer matters most for two groups: new subscribers (who haven’t established a relationship with your voice yet) and long-term subscribers who joined during a more formal era of your brand. For everyone else who already expects warmth and personality from you, you can skip it.

5 rules to not make it weird

1. Anchor every joke to something real

Every joke should connect to a real pain, a real product, or a real benefit. If you removed the humor, the email should still make sense.

2. Don’t sacrifice clarity for cleverness

If a subscriber has to decode the joke to understand what you’re selling, you’ve lost them. Funny subject line, clear email body. Never the other way around.

3. Know what your audience finds funny

A meme that lands with 25-year-old freelancers may confuse a 55-year-old dentist. Test with a small segment first.

4. Humor is hot sauce, not the main course

One strong humor moment per email. If every line is a gag, the offer disappears. The joke is the hook; the value is why they stay.

5. Test on 3 real humans before sending

If they don’t immediately “get it” — rewrite. Explained humor is dead humor. Always test outside your own bubble.

What to avoid (seriously)

✓ Do this

• Joke about your failures, not your customer’s
• Use humor in the subject line, then deliver value in the body
• Lean on audience-specific references (insider jokes)
• Use a warm, honest disclaimer when it’s a prank
• A/B test your humorous vs. standard subject lines

X Avoid this

• Cultural, political, or religious references
• Humor that punches at a group (even lightly)
• Sarcasm without a clear signal — it reads as rude in plain text
• Over-explaining the joke (this is worse than the joke itself)
• Humor that has nothing to do with your offer
• Forcing humor in genuinely serious communications

How to measure if your humor is working

You don’t just want laughs, you want conversions. Here’s the email marketing benchmarks to watch:

• Email open rate: Did the funny subject line work? Compare against your average.

• Click-through rate: Did they engage, or just laugh and close? A spike in opens with flat CTR means your humor didn’t connect to the offer.

• Reply rate: Positive replies are the strongest signal. Humor makes people respond.

• Unsubscribe rate: A small spike is normal for anything unusual. A big spike means you missed the mark.

• Forward/share rate: The ultimate proof, did subscribers share it?

Where to start with humor in your emails

At the end of the day, “funny” isn’t the goal. “Remembered,” “clicked,” and “bought again” are the goals, humor is just one way to get there.

A line that makes them smile, a subject line that surprises them a little, that’s often enough to tip the balance toward an open or a click.

Start small. Test one funny subject line against your usual one. Add a single joke to your next welcome email and see how people respond. Over time, you’ll figure out what your audience actually laughs at, not what a marketer on the internet told you should be funny.

Your subscribers are people. They have a sense of humor. Give them credit for it.

You hit send. Opens roll in. Clicks? Not so much.

Before you scrap your whole email marketing campaign, there’s one metric worth checking first: your click-to-open rate (CTOR). Open rate tells you who showed up, CTR tells you who clicked out of everyone you emailed, but neither one tells you whether your copy, images, CTA, and layout are actually working. CTOR filters out everything upstream: deliverability, subject lines, send time, and looks only at what happened inside your email. 

What is email click-to-open rate (CTOR)? 

Click-to-open rate measures how many people who opened your email actually clicked something inside it. While email open rate tells you how many people showed up, CTOR tells you whether the content was worth their time.

The formula is straightforward:

So if 200 people opened your email and 40 clicked a link, your CTOR is 20%.

One number, one answer: did the people who read your email care enough to act? Clicks are where email starts turning into revenue. A higher CTOR means more of your openers are taking action. And more action means better email marketing ROI.

CTOR vs. other email metrics 

Low clicks: is it the subject line, the content of the email, or just a bad send day? Before you can answer that, you need to know what each email marketing metric is actually measuring. They measure different things, and knowing which one to look at saves you a lot of time going in the wrong direction.

Metric	Formula	What it measures	What it tells you
Open rate	(number of opens / number of delivered emails) x 100	How many people opened your email	Whether your subject line, sender name, and send time are working
CTR	(clicks / delivered emails) x 100	How many people clicked out of everyone you delivered to	The overall performance of your email marketing campaign
CTOR	(clicks / opens) x 100	How many openers clicked	Whether your content, email design, and CTA earned the click

Open rate sets the stage: it tells you whether your email got noticed at all. Click through rate (CTR) gives you the big picture. CTOR zooms in on what happened after the open, which makes it the more useful metric when you’re trying to figure out what inside your email isn’t working.

What’s a good CTOR? 

Depends on who you ask. Benchmarks vary widely across industries anywhere from 6% to 30% — and that gap isn’t a typo. Industry, audience size, email type, and how often you send all pull the number in different directions. A transactional email to an engaged list will naturally outperform a promotional blast to cold contacts.

Rather than chasing a universal benchmark, track your own. Run a few campaigns, record your CTOR for each email type, and let that become your baseline. A 12% CTOR that’s climbing tells you more than hitting someone else’s average once.

A low CTOR? Start here.

A low CTOR is a signal, not just a bad number. What you do with it depends on what your other email marketing metrics are doing.

• Opens are healthy, CTOR is low: the email isn’t earning the click. Look at your content, CTA, email layout, and images.
• Both opens and CTOR are low: the email isn’t getting opened in the first place. Start with your subject line, sender name, and send time.
• Opens are low, CTOR is high: your content is working, but not enough people are seeing it. Check your deliverability, list health, and subject line.
• Both are healthy: keep testing. Don’t touch what’s working.

The most common scenario for small business senders is the first one: decent email open rates, disappointing clicks. The email got opened, it just didn’t give anyone a reason to click. And that’s exactly what the next section is about.

Your CTOR is low. Here are the parts of your email to look at.

If your opens are healthy but clicks aren’t coming, here are the parts of your email most likely to cost you the click.

Email copy

Your subject line made a promise. Does your email body deliver on it? A mismatch between the two is one of the fastest ways to lose a click. Readers feel misled and move on.

Keep the copy short and leave just enough out to make clicking feel worth it. A little curiosity goes a long way. Pick one marketing goal per email, stick to it, and personalize where you can. Not sure how to phrase it? SiteGround Email Marketing comes with a built-in AI Email Writer to help you draft focused, on-point copy. The strategy is still yours, but the words don’t have to be a struggle.You can also segment contacts directly from your campaign analytics. If someone clicked your last email, you can pull them into a separate group and follow up with something more targeted. A second touch that speaks to what they already showed interest in is a lot harder to ignore. Sending more relevant content to a tighter and engaged audience means more of the people who open will actually click. And that’s exactly what CTOR measures.

Images

Images work best when they’re specific to the message: a product shot, a before/after, a screenshot that backs up what the copy is saying. A generic stock photo of a smiling person at a laptop adds nothing and takes up space.

As a rule of thumb, one to three images per email is plenty for most campaigns. More than that and you’re competing with your own content for attention and risking the spam folder before anyone even sees it.

And we’re not done with AI yet. SiteGround Email Marketing also has a built-in AI Image Generator, so you can create visuals that actually match your message instead of settling for another stock photo of a handshake.

Always check how your email renders on mobile before hitting send, and don’t skip the alt text. Email accessibility is a legal requirement in many countries, and alt text is a core part of that. SiteGround Email Marketing prompts you to add it every time you upload an image, so it’s hard to miss.

Call to action 

One email, one CTA. The more options you give people, the less likely they are to pick any of them.

Place your primary email CTA above the fold so it’s visible without scrolling, use a button color that stands out from the rest of the email, and write copy that tells readers exactly what they’re getting. “Get my guide” lands better than “Submit” every time. A little urgency or curiosity in the button text doesn’t hurt either.

A CTA that’s clear, specific, and easy to find is often the difference between a CTOR you’re proud of and one that makes you scratch your head.

Email layout

Most of your subscribers are reading on their phones, so design for mobile first and treat desktop as secondary. That means single-column layouts over multi-column, large enough font sizes to read without zooming, and a CTA button big enough to tap with a thumb.

Keep the layout simple and the path to the CTA short. The more a reader has to scroll through blocks of content before they reach it, the less likely they are to get there. Put your most important content and your CTA early, and don’t bury either under decorative sections. This matters more than ever now that email clients are summarizing email messages with AI. If your key point and CTA aren’t near the top, they may not make it into the summary at all.

If you’re starting from scratch, SiteGround Email Marketing offers a range of professional templates you can customize with a no-code builder and a built-in AI assistant — so you’re not making layout decisions from a blank page. A well-structured email doesn’t just look good; it removes every excuse not to click.

Use CTOR to fix the right thing

CTOR won’t fix your emails for you, but it will stop you from fixing the wrong thing. Track it alongside your open rate, build your own baseline, and the next time a campaign underperforms, you’ll know exactly where to start.

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Frequently asked questions about email CTOR

If your emails aren’t performing the way you’d expect, your list might be the reason. Invalid email addresses, contacts who’ve gone quiet, people who never really meant to sign up — they all quietly chip away at your email deliverability and your results.

This guide helps you figure out what’s actually going on with your list, and what to do about it.

What is email list cleaning?

Email list cleaning, also called email list hygiene or email scrubbing, is the process of going through the email list you’ve built and removing addresses that shouldn’t be there. Think of it like cleaning out your closet: you’re not getting rid of everything, just the stuff that’s taking up space and serving no purpose.

That includes invalid or misspelled addresses that never deliver, contacts who haven’t engaged in a long time, duplicates, and spam traps.

Done regularly, it keeps your sender reputation intact, improves your email deliverability, and means your stats actually reflect how your emails are performing; not how much dead weight is dragging them down.

The real cost of a dirty email list

A dirty email list hurts you in three ways: 

1. Inflates your costs
2. Damages your sender reputation
3. Skews your data so you can’t tell what’s actually working

Start with the money. Most email platforms charge by the number of contacts you have. So if a chunk of your list is made up of people who will never open your emails, you’re paying for them anyway and getting nothing back. And lists go stale faster than you’d think. Roughly 22-30% of email addresses become invalid every year as people change jobs, abandon old accounts, or simply move on, according to Bulk Email Checker.

Then there’s what it does to your reputation. Every bounce, every ignored email, every spam complaint sends a signal to inbox providers like Gmail and Outlook. Too many of those signals and they start marking your emails as unwanted: treating them as spam, even for email subscribers who actually want to hear from you. In the worst case, you can end up blacklisted. That means ISPs have flagged your domain or IP as a spam sender, and your emails get blocked before they even reach anyone’s inbox.

And if your list is full of people who never engage, your numbers lie to you. Low email open rates and click-to-open rates aren’t always a content problem. They’re often a sign your list is full of disengaged or irrelevant contacts.

How to tell if you need to perform email cleaning

You should definitely clean your email list when your deliverability starts slipping, your email engagement drops without a clear reason, or your email provider flags your account. But sometimes the signs are subtler than that, or even nonexistent, because the damage is building quietly in the background.

So you know what email list cleaning is and why it matters. But how do you know if your list actually needs it right now? These are the signals worth looking for.

Your email bounce rate is climbing

Your email bounce rate is the percentage of emails in a campaign that were rejected by the recipient’s mail server. A bounce here and there is normal. But if your bounce rate is consistently above 2%, your list has a problem. Hard bounces (emails sent to addresses that don’t exist) are the ones to watch most closely. They’re a direct signal to inbox providers that your list isn’t well maintained, and they add up fast.

SiteGround Email Marketing automatically suppresses hard-bounced contacts so they don’t keep affecting your deliverability. To keep an eye on how things are going, you can check your bounce rate and other campaign performance analysis in your email campaign reports.

Your open and click-to-open rates are trending down

If your open rate or click-to-open rate has been trending down without an obvious reason, disengaged contacts are likely dragging the numbers. These are people who are still on your list but haven’t opened or clicked anything in months, sometimes years.

Say you ran a Black Friday campaign and picked up 200 new subscribers. A few months later, most of them have gone quiet, but they’re still on your list, still counted in your totals, and still pulling your averages down every time you hit send.

Your ESP (email service provider) sent you a warning

Most email marketing platforms will flag your account if your bounce rate or spam complaint rate crosses a threshold. If you’ve had a warning, don’t ignore it. It means the problem is already affecting your sending ability.

You imported an email database and never cleaned it

Imported lists are high risk. Whether it came from an old CRM, a spreadsheet, or another platform, you have no way of knowing how stale it is or how those contacts were collected. 

Say you switched email platforms and brought your entire contact list with you. Some of those email addresses could be years old, collected through a form you no longer use, or from a campaign people barely remember signing up for. Sending to that list without cleaning it first is one of the fastest ways to damage your sender reputation.

You’ve just never done it

If you’ve been sending emails for a year or more and never removed anyone, your list almost certainly has dead weight. It doesn’t mean something is visibly wrong, it just means the problem is building quietly in the background.

Regardless of which situation sounds familiar, the fix follows the same logic: identify what’s dragging your list down, then remove it. 

These signals don’t just tell you something’s wrong. Each one points to a different kind of problem and a different fix.

How to clean your email list in four steps

Once you’ve identified what’s dragging your list down, the fix is more straightforward than it sounds.

#1. Remove hard bounces

Hard bounces need to go immediately. Every time you send to an address that doesn’t exist, you’re signaling to inbox providers that your list isn’t looked after and that signal sticks.

SiteGround Email Marketing handles this automatically. When an email hard bounces, the contact is moved to a suppressed list and won’t receive future email campaigns. That means your sender reputation is protected without you having to manually track down and delete problem addresses.

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#2. Handle soft bounces

Soft bounces are temporary: a full inbox or the recipient’s mail server being briefly down. One soft bounce isn’t a reason to remove someone. But if the same address keeps bouncing, it’s a sign something more permanent is going on.

#3. Cut or re-engage disengaged subscribers

Inactive subscribers are people who haven’t opened or clicked anything in six months or more. They are worth a second look before you remove them. A short re-engagement email can tell you quickly who’s still interested and who’s just taking up space. Anyone who doesn’t respond is safe to remove.

#4. Scrub imported or old lists

Imported and old lists need extra scrutiny. You don’t always know how the contacts were collected, how long ago, or whether they ever consented to hear from you.

Keep a clean email list going forward 

A clean email list isn’t a one-time project. It’s what keeps your emails reaching the right people, your stats telling the truth, and your sender reputation intact.

It also doesn’t have to be a big deal. Know what to look for, deal with the warning signs before they snowball, and set up a few habits that mostly run themselves. The simplest one: enable double opt-in. It means every new contact has confirmed they want to hear from you, which cuts out a big chunk of the problem before it starts.

If you’re on SiteGround Email Marketing, a chunk of that is already taken care of: hard bounces are suppressed automatically and you’re not left guessing where your email deliverability stands. The rest is a quarterly check and a bit of common sense.

Frequently asked questions about email list cleaning

On paper, growing an email list sounds simple. In practice, you add a signup form, check your stats, and still see only a handful of new subscribers each month.

That’s because, people rarely hand over their email address without getting something useful in return.

In this guide, we’ll look at 10 practical ways to make your signup forms attract more subscribers: from improving what they offer to placing them where visitors are most likely to act. Along the way, you’ll also see how small tweaks can help you attract subscribers who are genuinely interested in what you sell.

The 10 forms covered in this guide:

1. Welcome discount form: for visitors close to buying
2. Lead magnet form: for people researching a problem
3. Back-in-stock notification: for products that sell out
4. Price drop alert: for price-sensitive shoppers
5. Waitlist form: for launches and fully booked services
6. Webinar or event registration: for topic-specific audiences
7. Challenge or course signup: for people who need structured help
8. Interest-based form: so subscribers self-select what they care about
9. Frequency preference form: so people choose how often they hear from you
10. Forms for specific roles or audiences: for businesses with different customer types

Use more specific offers on your forms to get higher‑intent leads

Sometimes the only thing standing between you and more leads is what you offer on your signup forms. A “join our newsletter” call to action is too broad to attract qualified subscribers. The people who sign up for it are curious at best, not motivated. The ones who are actually close to buying need something more specific to stop and hand over their email.

Here are two form types that attract people who are already leaning toward action.

1. Lead with a welcome discount code

Best for: ecommerce, services, coaches
The job: “I’m interested in buying, but I need a small push to commit.”

This is the most straightforward value exchange: someone is considering a purchase, and you offer a discount in exchange for their email. You get a subscriber who has already shown buying intent, and they get a reason to act now instead of “someday.”

What makes it work

• The visitor gets tangible value (10% off, free shipping, a bonus session, or a free sample).
• You get a lead who is actively browsing your product or service and is likely to be interested in future emails and offers.
• The email you send next has a clear purpose: “Here’s your discount code, here’s how to use it.”

Where to place it

• Product or service pages, where purchase intent is highest.
• Your homepage, for new visitors who are just discovering you.

What to ask for

• Email (essential)
• First name (optional but recommended, for personalizing subject lines and intros),

What to send next (simple 3‑email flow)

• Email 1: Discount + how to use it
• Email 2: Social proof (reviews, before/after, testimonials) for that category.
• Email 3: Reminder before the discount expires, with one clear call to action. (if applicable)

2. Add a lead magnet for people actively looking for a solution

Best for: almost any business
The job: “I have a problem and I want a resource that helps me solve it right now.”

A lead magnet is a small, focused resource you give away so people are willing to give you their email and keep hearing from you. It might be a checklist, a short guide, a mini‑course, or a simple tool that helps them solve one specific, annoying problem without much effort.

Good lead magnet ideas

• Checklists (people love checking things off).
• Templates (saves them from starting from scratch).
• Mini‑courses delivered by email (spreads the value over time).
• Calculators that give a personalized result.

Why this is a lead, not just a subscriber

• They’re telling you exactly what problem they’re trying to solve.
• They’re open to learning from you, which makes later offers feel natural.
• Their behavior (what they download, what they click) helps you decide what to send next.

Where to place it

• Blog posts on related topics (“Want the full checklist? Get it here.”).
• Resource or academy pages.
• Landing pages you share on social media.

What to ask for

• Email and first name.
• One short, multiple‑choice question like “What’s your biggest challenge right now?”

What to send next

• Email 1: Deliver the resource and show them how to use it quickly.
• Email 2: A story or case study that matches the challenge they selected.
• Email 3: A soft offer (free consult, audit, discovery call, or product recommendation) that helps them go further.

Catch the leads who were ready to buy, but couldn’t

Some visitors don’t need convincing. They’ve already decided they want what you sell. The only thing stopping them is timing: the product is out of stock, the price is out of reach right now, or you haven’t launched yet.

Back in stock and price drop alerts are features many ecommerce platforms offer natively but usually on higher-tier plans. If you’re on a leaner setup, both can be replicated manually with a signup form and a targeted email when the moment comes. Less automated, but it works.

3. Use forms for “back in stock” notifications

Best for: ecommerce
The job: “I want this specific product and I don’t want to miss it when it’s available.”

A back-in-stock form on sold‑out product pages turns a missed sale into a queue of ready‑to‑purchase customers for when inventory returns. 

If your shop platform doesn’t have built‑in back‑in‑stock alerts, you can still collect these leads with a basic form connected to your email tool. It won’t update stock automatically, but it will give you a list of people to notify the moment you restock.

How to set it up

• Add a simple form on out‑of‑stock product pages asking for an email to be notified when it’s back.
• Assign subscribers to a dedicated Group like “Back‑in‑stock: Product X”. Groups act like tags you can use to send targeted emails or trigger automations later.
• When you restock, send a focused email to everyone who signed up for that item.

Pro tip: Include a small checkbox like “Also tell me about similar products.” Everyone who checks it becomes a lead for recommendations in that category, not just that one product.

With SiteGround Email Marketing, you can create custom forms, assign Groups when someone signs up, and trigger automated email sequences from those groups, all without much effort.

4. Use forms for price drop alerts

Best for: ecommerce, services, learning platforms
The job: “I want this, but not at this price. Let me know when I can afford it.”

A price drop alert form captures price‑sensitive leads who would otherwise leave and forget about you. They’re interested, they just need the right timing or a better deal. Even without a built‑in price‑drop feature in your shop, you can let visitors leave their email and later email that group specifically when you run a promotion.

This works especially well for

• Higher‑priced items where people need time to decide.
• Seasonal businesses (outdoor furniture, winter gear).
• Products that regularly go on promotion.
• Courses or programs with occasional sales.

What to send next

• An email when the price changes or a promotion starts, highlighting the new price clearly.
• A reminder before the promotion ends.

5. Use waitlist forms to build demand before launch

Best for: ecommerce, courses, creators, services, events, restaurants
The job: “I want to be first when this becomes available.”

Waitlist forms let you start marketing something before it’s ready and build an audience around it early. Instead of starting from zero on launch day, you launch to a group of people who already asked to hear from you.

This is especially powerful for service‑based businesses: think of an upcoming workshop, a new program, a seasonal offering, or next seasonal menu.

What to ask for

• Email (essential).
• First name (optional).
• One simple question like “What excites you most about this?” or “What describes you best?” to shape your launch messaging.

What to send before launch

• A welcome email explaining what they joined and when to expect news.
• A launch day email with a clear offer, plus a reminder email near the end of the launch window.

Build your email list with webinars, challenges, and email courses

Not every lead is ready to buy today. Some need to learn, compare options, or get to know you first. Forms connected to content and events help you group people by interest so you can follow up with emails that make sense for where they are.

6. Webinar or event registration forms

Best for: education, services, ecommerce, creators, B2B
The job: “I want to attend this event and learn about this topic.”

An event registration form lets you promote a specific topic while collecting an audience that’s explicitly interested in it. Everyone who signs up for a webinar or event about topic X is essentially telling you “I care about X.”

What to include

• Email and name.
• Optional: “What question do you hope we cover?” or “What’s your main goal with this?”

What to send

• Confirmation email
• Reminder emails before the event.
• A “thank you + replay” email after, with a call to action.
• A short sequence with related content and a relevant offer.

7. Challenge or course registration forms

Best for: education, coaching, wellness, creators, services
The job: “I want structured help making progress on this goal.”

Challenges and email courses are a way to keep people engaged over several days or weeks. Instead of a one‑time download, they sign up for a series of emails that move them step by step toward a result. This can be very easy to create if you repurpose content you already have.

These work especially well for

• Habit‑building goals (fitness, productivity, learning, wellness).
• Complex topics that benefit from step‑by‑step guidance.
• Warming people up before a bigger, paid offer.

What to send next

• A welcome email setting expectations (how long, how often, what they’ll achieve).
• A series of short, actionable lessons or prompts.
• A final email summarizing progress and offering the next step (paid program, service, product).

Ask the right questions and your list segments itself

Most businesses wait until someone unsubscribes to wonder what went wrong. A better approach is to find out what people want at the moment they sign up and use that to send emails they actually want to open.

A small number of well‑chosen custom fields can transform a generic list into clear segments you can sell to more effectively.

8. The interest‑based signup form

Best for: ecommerce, content, services
The job: “I want to hear about things that matter to me, not everything you sell.”

Interest‑based signup forms help you understand what new subscribers care about right at the moment they join. Instead of putting everyone into the same newsletter, you ask one simple question and use the answer to decide what content they receive.

Examples

• Content business: “What topics interest you?”
• Ecommerce: “Which product categories should we keep you updated on?”
• Services or coaching: “What’s your primary goal?”

How this creates better leads

• You send emails that match their interests, so engagement stays high.
• When you make an offer related to that interest, it feels natural.
• You avoid blasting everyone with everything, which reduces unsubscribes.

9. The frequency preference form

Best for: any business that sends regular emails
The job: “I want to stay connected but not overwhelmed.”

Frequency preference forms set expectations about how often you’ll email. By letting people choose their cadence at signup, you make it easier to stay in their inbox longer — crucial if you want time to turn leads into customers.

Options to offer

• Weekly digest.
• Monthly roundup.
• Only big announcements.
• “Everything” for people who want it all.

10. Forms for specific roles or audiences

Best for: products and services that serve different types of customers
The job: “I want content that’s relevant to my situation.”

Unlike interest‑based forms that focus on what someone wants to hear about, role‑based fields focus on who they are. When the same product or content can serve very different customer types, this helps you adjust the message for each one. A quick role question at signup lets you send people into a version of your emails that fits their situation from the very first message.

How to implement

• Add a dropdown to your signup form.
• Keep it to 3–4 options so it doesn’t feel like a survey.
• Use the answer to trigger different welcome emails or recommend different products.

A form that asks “What best describes you?” with options like “New business,” “Growing business,” and “Established business” lets you send very different emails and offers to each segment.

A few things to keep in mind

No matter which forms you use, a few small choices can make the difference between “more contacts” and “more and better leads.”

Keep forms simple

The research is clear: simpler forms convert better, especially on mobile. If you’re not going to use a field in your emails or segmentation, don’t ask for it.

• Start with 1–2 fields (email + one more).
• Add a third only if you know exactly how you’ll use it.

Match the form to the intent

A homepage visitor, a blog reader, and a product page browser are in different mindsets. Your form copy and offer should reflect that.

• High intent (product pages, pricing): Direct offers work best. “Get 10% off your first order.”
• Medium intent (blog, resources): Value‑focused offers work. “Get the complete checklist.”
• Low intent (homepage, general browsing): Curiosity‑driven offers work. “See what our subscribers get every week.”

Make every field earn its place

Each form field should have a job:

• First name →  personalize subject lines or intros.
• Location → send localized offers or event invites.
• Interest/role → send different content and offers.

If you’re collecting data but never using it to segment, personalize, or trigger automations, it’s just friction.

Consent and privacy: a quick note

Whatever forms you use, make sure each one includes a clear opt‑in and a link to your privacy policy. If you have customers or subscribers in the EU, UK, or other regions with data protection laws, people need to actively agree to receive marketing emails from you — a pre‑ticked checkbox isn’t enough. When in doubt, check the rules that apply in your region, and always make it easy for people to unsubscribe.

Capture leads beyond your website

The forms above all live on your website, but many small businesses also connect with customers on Instagram, Facebook, or in person. A few ways to bring those leads into the same system:

• Link to a dedicated landing page with your lead magnet or signup form from your Instagram or Facebook bio.
• Use a QR code at events, in your packaging, or on printed materials that takes people directly to a form.

Once someone signs up through any of these routes, you can group them by source so you know where they came from.

How to know if your forms are working

Setting up forms is only half the job. Here are a few numbers worth tracking:

• Form conversion rate: A well‑placed form with a strong offer should convert 2–5% of visitors on a typical page. If yours is well below 1%, it’s worth testing a different offer or placement.

• Welcome email open rate: The first email in any automated flow typically gets the highest open rate — often 40–60% for warm leads. If yours is much lower, the form may be attracting the wrong audience, or the offer isn’t delivering what people expected.

• Click‑through rate on follow‑up emails: For a targeted, interest‑based flow, a click rate of 3–5% is a reasonable benchmark. Below that, consider whether the content matches what subscribers actually signed up for.

These are rough guides, not hard rules. What matters more is your own trend over time: are conversions improving as you test different offers and placements?

If you’re a small business asking “how do I get leads?”, start with these 3 forms

You don’t need to implement everything in this guide at once. If you’re a small business with limited time, three well‑chosen forms will take you further than eight half‑built ones.

• A welcome discount or “first‑order” offer on your product or pricing pages — for people who are already close to buying.

• One strong, problem‑solving lead magnet on your most visited blog post or resource page — for people who are researching but not yet ready.

• A simple interest‑based custom field on your main newsletter form — so every new contact lands in the right segment from day one.

SiteGround Email Marketing lets you build forms, collect the details you care about, and automatically place subscribers into the right Groups. From there, each Group can follow its own automated journey, with emails that match what those people signed up for.

Email lead generation: Frequently asked questions

You check your email campaign stats and scroll to the unsubscribe count. Three more people left your list today.

It stings a little, right? Was your subject line too pushy? Are you emailing too often? Should you delete everything and start over?

Some of those unsubscribes are actually helping you. That person who never opened a single email? They were tanking your sender reputation. The subscriber who wanted daily deals but you send weekly tips? Wrong fit. Better they unsubscribe now than mark you as spam later.

But not all unsubscribes are the helpful kind. Sometimes they’re warning signs. 

So the real question isn’t “is my unsubscribe rate too high?” It’s “who’s leaving and why?”

This article will show you how to figure that out and what to actually do about it.

Understanding email unsubscribe rate

Your unsubscribe rate shows the percentage of people who opt out after receiving your email. But the number itself matters less than what’s behind it — who’s leaving, when, and why. That’s what actually tells you if your list is getting healthier or heading in the wrong direction.

Good unsubscribes vs bad unsubscribes: Which is which

Long story short, good unsubscribes happen when people who weren’t engaging leave your list. 

Bad unsubscribes happen when your active, interested subscribers start leaving.

So before you panic or celebrate, you need to figure out which kind you’re dealing with.

Most email marketing benchmarks will tell you that 0.2% to 0.5% is “normal.” But here’s the problem with that number: it doesn’t tell you if your rate is healthy or not.

A 1% unsubscribe rate might be a red flag for an established email newsletter with an engaged audience. But for a new list you’re still refining? Or after you’ve shifted your content strategy? That same 1% could mean you’re successfully filtering out the wrong people.

Think of it like pruning a plant. You’re not losing something valuable. You’re cutting away what’s not working so the rest can thrive.

Your “good” rate depends on:

• List size – Smaller lists feel each unsubscribe more, but percentages can look dramatic (one person leaving a 100-person list is 1%)
• List age – New lists shed mismatched subscribers faster; mature lists stabilize
• Content changes – Pivoting your email marketing strategy? Expect temporary spikes as you find your real audience
• Acquisition method – Bought lists or giveaway signups unsubscribe at higher rates than people who intentionally signed up for your specific content

One more thing worth tracking: how quickly someone unsubscribes tells you more than the unsubscribe alone. Someone who opts out within minutes is reacting to that specific campaign: maybe the subject line promised something different, or your send frequency just hit their limit. Someone who unsubscribes three days later was probably already on their way out and your email just reminded them to clean up their inbox.

Good unsubscribes

Here’s when people leaving actually helps your list:

• Low-engagement subscribers leaving – They haven’t opened your last ten emails. Their departure makes email providers trust you more and gives you a clearer picture of who’s actually paying attention.
• Wrong-fit audience filtering out – They signed up expecting product discounts but you send industry insights. Or they wanted daily tips but you send monthly deep dives. Mismatch fixed.
• Natural churn – People change jobs, shift interests, or clean out overflowing inboxes during their annual “digital declutter.” Life happens. This is normal attrition, not a you problem.
• Post-segmentation departures – You started targeting content more specifically and some people realize it’s not for them anymore. Working exactly as intended.

Bad unsubscribes

These are the warning signs that need your attention:

• Engaged subscribers leaving – People who regularly opened and clicked are suddenly opting out. Something shifted, and you need to figure out what.
• Post-campaign spikes – Your unsubscribe rate jumps after a specific email. That campaign missed the mark. Maybe the subject line promised something different, or the content didn’t match expectations.
• Pattern after changes – You increased sending frequency or shifted topics, and longtime subscribers start leaving. The change isn’t landing well with your core audience.
• Sudden spike without explanation – Multiple unsubscribes within hours of sending, especially from people who’ve been with you a while. Something in that email didn’t work.

Say you tighten your content focus or increase your send frequency. You might see unsubscribes climb from 0.3% to 0.8%, but your open rate jumps from 18% to 28% and your click rate doubles. The people leaving weren’t your audience anyway. The people staying are more engaged than ever.

The goal isn’t zero unsubscribes. The goal is a list full of people who actually want to hear from you.

The four reasons people unsubscribe

People unsubscribe for four main reasons: you’re emailing too much (or too little), your content drifted from what they expected, you’re not delivering what you promised at signup, or their life circumstances changed. 

Here’s how to tell which one you’ve got:

1. Frequency issues: This is the most common culprit, and it goes both ways. Send too often and people feel bombarded. Send too sporadically (like once every three months) and they forget who you are. When your email finally lands, they think “who is this?” and hit unsubscribe. The inconsistency is often worse than high frequency.

How to spot it: unsubscribes spike right after a cadence change, or drop off consistently after every send once you increased frequency.

2. Relevance drift: Your content slowly shifted away from what they originally signed up for. Maybe you started as a productivity newsletter and gradually became more about email marketing tools. Or you used to share actionable tips and now you mostly share personal updates. They didn’t sign up for the current version of your emails.

How to spot it: departures happen gradually over months, with no single campaign triggering the pattern.

3. Value mismatch: They expected one thing at signup and got something different. This happens a lot with lead magnets. Someone downloads “10 Landing Page Templates” and suddenly they’re on a list getting emails about SEO strategy. The disconnect is immediate.

How to spot it: new subscribers leave within their first two or three emails.

4. Timing and life changes: This one really isn’t about you. They switched jobs and left that email address behind. They’re in the middle of moving and purging everything non-essential. They had a baby and suddenly 47 newsletters feels like 47 too many. Life gets messy. These unsubscribes aren’t rejecting your content; they’re just making space for what matters right now.

How to spot it: no clear pattern: mixed subscriber ages, no common trigger campaign.

What your unsubscribe rate is actually telling you

Your unsubscribe rate doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The real insight comes from looking at it alongside your other metrics:

Pattern	What it means	What to do
High unsubscribe rate + high open rate	List quality improving	Keep going. This is healthy list cleaning in action.
Low unsubscribe rate + low email engagement	Inactive subscribers not leaving	Run a re-engagement email campaign (“Still want to hear from us?”). Remove non-responders to improve email deliverability.
Sudden unsubscribe spike after a specific campaign	Content/frequency mismatch	Review what changed in that campaign. If possible, send survey emails to people who left to understand why.
Steady unsubscribe climb over time	Relevance or frequency issue	Test your sending cadence. Compare your current content to your original signup promise.
High unsubscribes from new subscribers only	Signup-to-content disconnect	Your lead magnet or signup form is promising something your emails don’t deliver. Revisit your onboarding sequence.
Low unsubscribe rate + rising spam complaints	People can’t find the exit	Your unsubscribe process is too hard to find or too complicated. Make it easier before mailbox providers start filtering you.

The pattern and context together tell you whether you’re looking at a problem or progress.

How to reduce problematic unsubscribes

Now that you can spot the difference between healthy list cleaning and actual warning signs, here’s how to prevent the problematic ones:

Set clear expectations at signup

Tell people exactly what they’re signing up for: topic, format, and frequency. “Get weekly marketing tips every Tuesday” is way better than “Join our newsletter.” When people know what’s coming, they’re less likely to be surprised and bail later.

Use double opt-in

Double opt-in means subscribers have to confirm their email address before they’re added to your list. They sign up, get a confirmation email, and click to verify. It filters out accidental signups, mistyped addresses, and people who weren’t serious about subscribing.

Your list grows slower, yes. But the people on it actually chose to be there and that matters more for engagement, delivery, and sales than a big subscriber count. Lists built with double opt-in consistently see lower unsubscribe rates and fewer spam complaints. 

With SiteGround Email Marketing, it’s a one-click setup — enable double opt-in on any subscriber group and the confirmation flow runs automatically from there.

Match content to subscriber intent

If someone downloaded a guide about Instagram marketing, don’t immediately pivot to email strategy in your follow-up sequence. Start with more Instagram content, then gradually expand. Give them what they came for first.

Better yet: ask what they want right from the start. With SiteGround’s Custom Fields, you can collect specific email preferences when people sign up, such as which topics interest them, what type of content they prefer, or what problems they’re trying to solve. You can add them to a WordPress form. Then set up automated email sequences based on what they actually care about.

This stops two major problems: relevance drift and value mismatch. People get content they actually want, so they stick around instead of thinking “this isn’t for me anymore.”

Find your email frequency sweet spot

There’s no universal “right” cadence. Some audiences want daily emails (deal hunters, news junkies). Others want monthly deep dives. Test different frequencies and watch your email marketing metrics; not just unsubscribe rates. If open rates stay strong as you increase email frequency, your audience can handle more.

Send too sporadically (like once every three months) and they forget who you are. Email your list after a four-month silence with ‘Hey! Long time no talk!’ and don’t be surprised when 15% unsubscribe on the spot.

Make it easy for people to leave

This may feel backwards, like you’re helping people escape, but hiding or complicating your unsubscribe process doesn’t keep subscribers. It just makes them more likely to mark you as spam instead. And that’s way worse for your sender reputation than a clean unsubscribe button.

Add a clear unsubscribe link in every email footer. When people know they can leave anytime, they’re less likely to feel trapped and more likely to stick around. The ones who stay actually want to be there.

Test and monitor content changes

Planning to shift your email focus? Test it with part of your list first. Changing from tips to case studies? Try it with 20% of your list and see how they respond. Big changes without warning drive active subscribers away.

Unsubscribe rates: Quality beats quantity

A list of 10,000 subscribers looks great in your dashboard. But if only 500 actually open your emails? You’ve got 9,500 people hurting your deliverability and skewing your data.

Here’s what matters: the people who open, click, and actually care when you show up in their inbox. Those are your subscribers. The rest are just email addresses taking up space and tanking your deliverability.

Every unsubscribe tells you something. 

• Low-engagement person finally leaves? → Your list just got healthier. 
• Engaged subscriber bails after you tripled your send frequency? → That’s fixable feedback.

Your list size means nothing if people aren’t opening. Focus on the ones who actually want to hear from you.

Want to build a list of people who actually open your emails? SiteGround Email Marketing lets you segment by interest, track who’s engaged, and send relevant content that keeps the right people around while the wrong ones quietly show themselves out.

Not all unsubscribes are bad — but the right setup helps you keep the subscribers who matter. SiteGround Email Marketing comes with built-in double opt-in, easy one-click unsubscribe, and segmentation tools that help you send the right content to the right people from the start.

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Frequently asked questions about email unsubscribe rate