Describe a situation where an email marketing campaign's open or click-through rate dropped significantly compared to your usual benchmarks. How did you identify the issue and what did you do to improve it?

Situation

At my previous job as a CRM executive for a retail brand, our weekly newsletter open rate fell from 22% to 12% over a single month, and click-through rate dropped from 4.5% to 1.8%.

Task

I had to determine whether the decline was due to deliverability issues, content relevance, or audience fatigue, and restore engagement to maintain our email channel revenue contribution.

Action

I segmented the audience by engagement level and ran a delivery audit using tools like GlockApps, discovering our sender domain reputation had slipped due to a spike in spam complaints from unengaged recipients. I immediately launched a re-engagement campaign asking inactive subscribers to confirm their interest, purged non-openers after 90 days, and changed our send frequency for low-engagement segments from weekly to bi-weekly. I also A/B tested subject lines with personalization tags and adjusted send times based on open time data per user cohort.

Result

After the list hygiene cleanup and content tweaks, open rates climbed back to 24% and click-through to 5.1% within six weeks. The re-engagement campaign reactivated 15% of dormant subscribers, leading to an extra ₱280,000 in email-attributed revenue.