Twelve people are involved. Three approval rounds before anything can go out. A dedicated chat channel just so everyone involved can keep track of the current issue. For a newsletter. Not a product campaign. Not an investor announcement. A format that's supposed to be routine.
The right question isn't: “Was the design good enough?” It's: Isn't this a little too much process for what you're actually sending?
The process that took on a life of its own
When a recurring format is treated like a major project, the workload grows with every additional handoff. Every additional stakeholder means another opinion, another delay, and another opportunity for something to be revised again, not necessarily because it gets better, but because someone else is now involved.
The critical test for any internal process: Would a company founded today build this process exactly the same way from scratch? For many newsletter approval processes, the answer is probably no. The process grew over time. It wasn't designed deliberately.
Why design is rarely the real problem behind your open rate
When open rates stagnate, the reflex is often the same: redesign the newsletter. New colors, a new layout, different images, a cleaner grid.
But there's an obvious problem: Recipients don't see the newsletter design until after they've opened the email. Design can affect readability, click behavior, brand perception, and conversion. But the decision to open the email happens before any of that.
There's another issue: Email design is harder to control than website design.
- Rendering isn't fully controllable: Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail, and other clients can display the same email differently.
- Mobile changes the layout: Screen size, font scaling, and dark mode affect how the email appears.
- Newsletters are often scanned: That makes visual hierarchy and clarity more important than perfecting every design detail.
If you're running three approval rounds over color nuances and image placement, it's worth asking which metric that's actually supposed to improve. If open rate is the problem, the lever comes before the open.
What can actually influence the decision to open
The key distinction is simple: What does the recipient see or experience before opening the email, and what only becomes visible afterward?
| Factor | Relevance to the decision to open |
|---|---|
| Subject line | Directly relevant: visible before the email is opened |
| Sender name | Directly relevant: creates recognition and trust |
| Send time | Directly relevant: affects when the message competes for attention |
| Segmentation | Directly relevant: affects whether the sender and message are relevant to the recipient |
| Preheader text | Directly relevant: supplements the subject line in many email clients |
| Deliverability | Fundamental: without inbox placement, there is no normal open |
| Too many topics per issue | No direct impact: only becomes visible after opening |
| Too many CTAs | No direct impact: more relevant to clicks and conversion |
| Copy that's too long | No direct impact: affects engagement after opening |
| Fine-tuning colors and image placement | No direct impact: only becomes visible after opening |
| Third approval round | No direct impact: unless it improves the subject line, audience, timing, or deliverability |
That doesn't mean design is unimportant. It means: Design solves a different problem.
“If three design revisions don't move the numbers, it's worth changing the hypothesis.”
Too many topics, too many CTAs: The quiet problem of choice overload
When a company tries to fit as many topics as possible into a single issue because every department wants its slot, the result can quickly become a newsletter with no clear priority. A well-known experiment by Iyengar and Lepper from 2000 shows why more choice isn't automatically better.
Consumers encountered a display with either 24 or 6 varieties of jam. The larger selection attracted more attention. In the experiment, however, the smaller selection led to purchases more often. The experiment became a classic example of choice overload: Under certain conditions, more options can make decisions harder.
But the effect isn't a universal rule. A later meta-analysis by Scheibehenne, Greifeneder, and Todd examined 63 conditions across 50 experiments and found almost no choice-overload effect on average, with substantial variation across contexts. So the jam experiment can't simply be transferred 1:1 to newsletters.
The relevant hypothesis remains: If five topics and seven CTAs all look equally important, the recipient may no longer know what action you actually want them to take. Whether fewer topics or CTAs actually generate more clicks and conversions should be tested in your own newsletter.
Open rate isn't what it used to be
There's an even more fundamental question: Is open rate still the right primary metric? Since Apple introduced Mail Privacy Protection, tracking pixels can be loaded automatically. As a result, an open can be recorded without reliably indicating that the recipient actually read the email. A high open rate therefore doesn't automatically mean a successful newsletter.
Depending on the objective, other metrics may be more meaningful:
- Unique Click Rate: How many individual recipients actually clicked?
- Click-to-Open Rate: How many recorded opens resulted in a click?
- Conversion: How many recipients completed the desired action?
- Revenue or Pipeline Contribution: What business value did the newsletter generate?
- Unsubscribe Rate: Do recipients continue to find the content relevant over time?
If you only look at opens, you may be optimizing a metric whose reliability has already been technically compromised.
What superficial reporting hides
Many teams report clicks only as a total. That can be misleading. If one person clicks five times and five people click once each, the report shows five clicks in both cases. But for Marketing and Sales, those are two very different signals.
At a minimum, reporting should distinguish between Total Clicks and Unique Clicks. And in B2B, it gets even more interesting: A click on technical documentation, a case study, or a product page may mean something very different from a click on a general company article.
So the real question isn't: “How many clicks did we get?” It's: “Who clicked on what, and what happened next?”
There's also a process symptom that has nothing to do with open rate but reflects the same overengineering instinct: Every newsletter issue comes with its own Jira tickets that have to be created, updated, and closed again. Administrative overhead for a format that's supposed to be routine: project management in miniature.
The significance question that rarely gets asked
After a redesign, the open rate or click rate increases by one percentage point. The next month, it drops by two. Was the redesign successful? You can't answer that from those numbers alone.
Whether a change of 1 or 2 percentage points is meaningful depends on factors including sample size, baseline rate, effect size, and test design. A small change is therefore neither automatically noise nor automatically proof that the redesign worked. That's exactly why controlled tests matter.
If the question is whether a new subject line performs better, ideally only the subject line should change. If the question is whether a new template generates more clicks, the primary success metric should be defined in advance. And if version B is ahead after three days, that doesn't automatically mean version B has won.
Hypothesis first. Then test. Then decision. Not the other way around.
Far more serious than whether an image should sit ten pixels further to the left is a brand that contradicts itself across touchpoints.
The newsletter sounds casual. The landing page sounds formal. LinkedIn feels personal. The website reads like a legal document. The newsletter promises simplicity. The destination page asks for twelve fields.
These aren't details only design perfectionists notice. They show that different teams are working on the same customer journey without shared guidelines.
Consistency doesn't mean every element has to look identical. It means everything should feel like the same brand.
What matters instead
One template, locked in
Set up the structure and core layout properly once, then reuse it consistently. No redesign for every issue.
One owner, not twelve
One person owns the newsletter and makes the decisions. Subject-matter experts can review content, but not every opinion needs another approval round.
Optimize before the open
Subject line, sender, preheader, segmentation, send time, and deliverability set the conditions. If opens are the problem, test here.
Optimize after the open
Content, hierarchy, CTAs, and landing pages determine whether attention turns into action. If clicks or conversions are the problem, this is where the leverage is.
Segmentation before decoration
Relevant content for a clearly defined audience is more valuable than a perfectly designed newsletter that tells everyone the same thing.
Business outcomes over vanity metrics
Opens and clicks are intermediate metrics. Ultimately, the newsletter needs a clear objective: website visits, inquiries, event registrations, product interest, pipeline, or revenue.
A newsletter is a recurring format. It deserves a repeatable, lean process, not a major-project ritual every time an issue goes out.
Design matters. But design can't solve every newsletter problem.
Opens happen before the newsletter. Clicks happen inside it. Conversions happen afterward.
Separate those three levels, and you can test more precisely, measure more clearly, and focus internal discussions on the questions that actually matter.
And if three design revisions don't move the numbers? Maybe the fourth design revision isn't the answer. Maybe it's time to change the hypothesis.
Why an image or video needs to stand on its own because people scroll quickly even in B2B is covered in When only your employees like your posts. And how to build a content strategy that doesn't have to be reinvented for every format is covered in Building a content strategy: One idea, many formats.
Sources: Iyengar & Lepper (2000), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(6), 995–1006 · Scheibehenne, Greifeneder & Todd (2010), Journal of Consumer Research, 37(3), 409–425 · Apple (2021), Mail Privacy Protection, Apple Newsroom.
Published July 2026