A third of my list stopped seeing ApexQuant in their primary inbox for a few weeks this spring. Sitting in Promotions instead. I only found out because I went digging for something else entirely.
22,000 subscribers, mostly founders and agency owners in the US, UK, Canada. Engagement had been off for a while, not cratering, just duller than it should’ve been given the list size. I chalked it up to people getting tired of the format. That wasn’t it.
Eventually I stopped rereading my own copy for the tenth time and actually looked at the emails as objects instead of as writing. Dollar signs in subject lines. Shortened redirect links instead of full URLs. Sends going out late on Sunday nights because that’s just when I got around to it. Two or three links competing for attention in one email instead of picking a single ask. Gmail apparently reads all four of those as “this is a promo blast” and files it accordingly, and it will do this regardless of how good the sentence right after the subject line is. I ran a handful of recent sends through a spam-scoring tool almost as an afterthought, expecting it to come back clean, and it flagged three of the four issues immediately.
I’d rewritten subject lines three different times over two months trying to solve an engagement problem that had nothing to do with the words in them. Kind of embarrassing, honestly, given what I do for a living.
The actual fix was almost annoying in how small it was. Full URLs. One CTA. Sends moved to Tuesday, 5 to 7 PM. First attempt at that last part didn’t even work, I scheduled “Tuesday 5 PM” and forgot Substack’s scheduler runs on UTC, so it went out around 10 AM Nepal time on a Wednesday instead. Fixed the offset, rescheduled, didn’t think about it again.
No new tool. No rebuild. Just four small habits I stopped doing.
30% open rate now, 2.9% click-through, both back within a few send cycles of making the change.
See What’s Leaking in Your Workflows
The bigger thing this points at has nothing to do with email specifically. You watch whatever number sits at the top of your dashboard, subscriber count, revenue, whatever, and as long as that one’s still climbing you don’t go looking underneath it. My list grew the entire time engagement was dying under it. I only caught the problem because I happened to be looking for something else and tripped over it.
Same shape shows up constantly in client workflows. A CRM field mislabeled since setup, quietly breaking a routing rule nobody’s touched since launch. A webhook that’s been retrying into a dead endpoint for three weeks, still showing “active” in the dashboard because nobody checks the dashboard. An automation sending confirmation emails from a domain that got flagged months ago, and the only reason anyone found out was a client mentioning offhand that customers kept asking if the order actually went through. It’s never one dramatic failure. It’s four or five small things nobody’s looked at since the day they were set up, each one costing a little, none of them costing enough on its own to notice.
5 free AI automation audits open this week. I’ll go through your actual workflows, email, CRM, lead routing, whatever’s running, and tell you what’s leaking. First 5 replies get a slot, then it’s closed until next month.
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