This represents everything I hate about email marketing. You’d honestly consider wasting 99 people's time, and possibly engaging 1 person, as a 'good' result? The bar for email marketing is set so low, it might as well not exist. Email was a free, effective communication mechanism that we’ve all but ruined. At least a return to plain text might rescue it to some extent, but I fear it’s already too late.

Seen in the context as just another form of advertising, 1% is well within the range of acceptable engagement.

I agree with you, but suggest that the frustration is with the broader issue of "noise" pollution created by advertising incentives.

Really? The last newsletter I sent out went to ~20k people and had a click rate of 18% - although I think that's out of people who opened it, which was 51%.

I don't know much about this space, but 1% of people seems really, really low if it's people who have actually asked you to email them

(Author here) It varies. Well done on your 9% overall CTR--that's fantastic for a list of 20k. Not all companies are as fortunate to have an audience like that, so for them an increase from practically 0% to 1% is a big deal, even if there's still more room to improve.

I should update the post to include a few more recent examples from other companies, that had higher baseline metrics but still saw improvements from simplifying their emails.