In February of last year I stopped sending my newsletter. Not deliberately — I just didn’t send one, and then another month passed, and then it had been three months and the gap felt too large to explain, and then it had been six months and I had stopped thinking about it.
In September I restarted it. Here’s what happened.
The fear of coming back
The worst part wasn’t writing the email. It was the story I’d built up in my head about what my subscribers thought of the absence. I imagined them annoyed, or worse, having entirely forgotten I existed.
Neither was true, as far as I can tell.
The first send after the hiatus got a 41% open rate. My average before the break had been 38%. Whatever penalty I’d imagined for going dark, it didn’t show up in the data.
What I sent
I didn’t write a lengthy explanation or apology. I wrote one paragraph acknowledging the gap, honestly:
“I stopped sending this for a while. Life did what it does. I’ve been doing work I’m proud of and I wanted to start writing about it again, so here we are.”
That paragraph got me 31 replies. More than any individual section of the email that followed. People wrote to say they’d missed it, or that they’d had similar experiences of letting something slip, or just to say hello. It opened more conversations than any “content” I’d carefully produced before the break.
What I didn’t send
I didn’t send a full summary of everything I’d been doing for eighteen months. I started fresh, with a single project I’d just finished, written the same way I always wrote: with some context, some process, and something that might be useful to someone else.
Catching up is a trap. It creates a debt you never feel you’ve paid. Better to start fresh and let the archive speak for whatever came before.
On the subject of list decay
People ask whether a list “goes cold” if you don’t send. It does, a little. I had about an 8% hard-bounce rate from addresses that had become invalid, which is normal for an eighteen-month gap. And some people who might have unsubscribed if given the opportunity had simply changed email addresses.
But the people who remained were the ones who’d never unsubscribed and hadn’t changed their email. By some measures, that’s a higher-quality list than I’d started with.
What I’d do differently
Send something small every six weeks, even when you don’t feel like you have much to say. “Not much happening here but I finished reading this and thought you might like it” is a better email than silence. It keeps the relationship alive without requiring a fully formed essay.
The eighteen months felt necessary at the time. I’m not sure they were.
Ada runs a one-person studio doing brand work for restaurants and shops. She writes Folio's recurring column on websites that don't get in the way.
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