Campaign engagement down? 6 reasons why

There’s a meeting that happens in every marketing team about every eighteen months. Open rates have slipped and the click-through rate is quite unflattering. Someone has made a deck. The deck has a slide titled ‘Hypotheses,’ and the hypotheses are always the same four: subject lines, send times, segmentation, creative. The team picks one, runs an A/B test, and feels productive for a quarter. 

Then the meeting happens again.

But there are at least 6 other culprits worth considering before you even begin to touch the subject line.

You’re benchmarking against a phantom

Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection has been pre-fetching opens since 2021, which inflated everyone’s numbers by something like 30-40% depending on the audience. Our collective open rates became, for a while, a flattering work of fiction. Now Gmail and Apple’s AI summarisers are reading the emails for the recipient, extracting the gist and presenting it in a tidy preview. Your content is being consumed without ever generating a click.

And speaking of logging in, a meaningful share of active sessions in any energy retailer’s analytics is functionally administrative. A customer tapping in to check a balance before a direct debit hits or a push notification opened and dismissed in three seconds aren’t engagement in any sense that predicts retention or willingness to take a higher-margin product. 

Demote the soft metrics to diagnostics, and rebuild your dashboard around things customers choose: email reply rates, tariff upgrades, cross-sell uptake, NPS at renewal.

The dead are killing the living

Most email lists are 60-80% dormant. People who haven’t opened in a year, inboxes that auto-archive you, customers who switched away two years ago and never got cleaned out, prospect lists from a 2022 acquisition push that nobody pruned, addresses belonging to people who moved house and forgot you exist. You keep emailing them because pruning feels like shrinkage and shrinkage is failure.

The inbox providers only see a sender whose mail mostly goes unread. So they throttle delivery to the engaged people too, on the reasonable suspicion that you’re a low-quality sender. 

So. Cut. That. List. It will feel good, we promise. And it will bring better results.

Everyone converged, including you

Open ten energy retailer newsletters right now. They have the same hooks (a friendly first-name greeting, a slightly informal sign-off, a tone calibrated somewhere between ‘your clever friend' and ‘a slightly serious bank’). They have the same content beats: a usage tip, a green-tariff nudge, a small mention of the app. They have the same AI-buffed prose that’s been through the same eight rounds of ‘make it more human.’ Your customers are disengaging because this is interchangeable, and the human brain treats interchangeable things as background noise.

So have a point of view sharp enough that an attentive reader could identify the sender from a paragraph with the byline removed. Most teams cannot pass that test, and most teams have not noticed they cannot pass it.

Trust is a balance sheet you don’t want to overdraft

Every tariff change pitched as ‘you’ll save money’ when in practice most customers saved very little to nothing was a withdrawal. Every hardship promise that turned into a forty-minute hold queue was also another withdrawal.

These compound. Customers will simply stop interacting with you and start scrolling through comparison sites a few weeks before their fixed term ends. Even retailers who behaved well during the energy crisis are now operating against a polluted baseline. Customers don’t differentiate. At a low enough level of attention, the category is the brand.

Send fewer, better things. Mean what the subject line says and don't promise savings you can’t deliver. 

Your audience graduated

The customer who joined you in 2020 is not the same customer in 2026. They’ve lived through an energy crisis. They know roughly what a kWh is. They’ve heard of time-of-use tariffs even if they haven’t taken one. A meaningful slice of them have a heat pump, PV, an EV or some combination. The 2020 version of them wanted a 101 explainer on reading their bill and winter tips but the 2026 version is being patronised by it. 

Tier your communications by product sophistication. Product holdings are the clearest signal of how much a customer wants to think about energy. Someone with solar is a different reader to someone on a standard fixed tariff, regardless of their age or postcode. 

Then mine the depth you already have. Your customer service team can give you engaging content ideas specifically because they answer the real questions: how does our export tariff work in winter; what happens to a fixed price if you add a heat pump mid-term. This is the content your engaged customers want.

You’re optimising the wrong loop

If you optimise for opens, you select for openers. If you optimise your messaging for switches and price savers, guess who will you attract? Neither group is the same as your most valuable customers. 

Pick a north-star metric that lives downstream of money, like renewal rate and demote everything else to a diagnostic. Then pull your most engaged email cohort and overlay it on your most valuable customer cohort. If they’re the same people, congratulations, your loop is calibrated correctly. 

So, what?

Notice that none of this is a tactics problem solved by a better template or whatever the LinkedIn carousel is selling this week. The problems are structural, about who you’re talking to, what you’ve spent their trust on and how you measure success.

The right question is ‘what would make a smart, busy person from our ICP look forward to hearing from us?’