Adapt Or Perish

Adapt or Perish. This has been my mindset for a long time and was even further solidified through my studies on natural selection in college. In the wild, it is survival of the fittest. No ambulances or modern medicine are coming to the aid of a wounded gazelle in the grasslands of Africa. That gazelle either needs to figure it out or, unfortunately, it’s over for them.

It may be a bit exaggerated, but I feel the same concept applies to all life aspects. If I don’t adapt to my own newsletter being sent to my personal email’s spam folder, this business I am trying to build will perish and eventually die. So adapt we must.

As the spam reports continued to come in a few at a time, I continued to grow frustrated but needed to figure out a solution. Today, I’m happy to report the latest email sent just yesterday was delivered to 1901 out of 1911, a 99.5% delivery rate. This email in the first 24 hours has 30% open rate, and a 11% click rate, the highest open rate in two weeks and a mind numbing click rate.

How did we adapt to get these results? While SparkLoop was sending me a lot of referrals, and I was approving all partners to send more subscribers after their initial 50-referral pilot phase capacity, a lot of these referrals didn’t know they were subscribing to a baseball newsletter or how they subscribed. Using data points provided to me via my unsubscribe survey, nearly every single reason for someone unsubscribing was they didn’t know they subscribed in the first place.

This made a lot of sense to me as SparkLoop's default option is to subscribe to all publications being recommended. My thought process was people are seeing one, two, or even no other newsletters they would like to subscribe to, and because SparkLoop has all recommended newsletter options highlighted for the user to subscribe to, they unknowingly subscribe to something like a baseball newsletter when they really wanted to subscribe to a stock tip newsletter.

I paused the growth side of SparkLoop to stop any referrals coming in until I had a better grasp of the situation. Ideally, I can turn on a double-opt-in feature specific to the referral source so I can still get referrals from SparkLoop, but they’ll need to have a little bit of a clunkier process to ensure they want the newsletter.

TLDR: Adapt or perish. Set yourself up to successfully obtain data, monitor this data, and act swiftly to adapt your process in order to survive. Hesitation will kill you; trust the data and your gut. If you’re running a newsletter, Beehiiv gives you all the tools and more to do this, and I couldn’t recommend it more.

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