Read your List Health page

Note

This article is held as a draft and will publish when the List Health updates it describes are available to customers.

List Health is a tab on your company Audience page. It shows, for every newsletter you send, whether its list is growing, holding steady, or needs attention, and why. This guide walks through each part of the page and what to do with what you see.

The summary banner

The banner at the top shows how many unique contacts you’re reaching, and across how many newsletters and groups. A unique contact is a person, counted once within each group however many of that group’s newsletters they’re on. Someone who reads newsletters in two different groups is counted in both groups.

Under that, the banner counts your newsletters by status: how many are growing, stable, need attention, or are too new to compare. If mailbox providers are turning away mail from any of your newsletters, the banner leads with that, before anything about list growth. A newsletter whose mail isn’t arriving needs looking at before anything else on the page.

The banner also says when the numbers were last refreshed. List Health updates every hour, so the time you see is the last update, not the start of the day. Hover over it to see the exact date and time.

Newsletter statuses

Each newsletter gets one status. Statuses compare the newsletter today with the same newsletter 30 days ago:

• Healthy: the list grew by more than 1% over the last 30 days and nothing below applies.
• Stable: the list is holding roughly steady and nothing below applies.
• At Risk: something needs a look. Either mailbox providers are turning away a large share of this newsletter’s mail, or over the last 30 days the list shrank by more than 1%, Fading or Ghost readers grew by more than 2 points as a share of the list, or Loyalists and New & Engaged readers together fell by more than 3 points as a share of it. When mail is being turned away, a reason under the status says so, for example Mailbox providers turned away 34% of yesterday’s sends. That outranks every growth signal: a newsletter whose mail is being refused reads At Risk however well its list is doing.
• Not Enough History: the newsletter doesn’t have 30 days of data to compare yet. This doesn’t mean it’s fine or that it’s in trouble, only that there’s nothing to compare it against yet.

The banner’s counts and the newsletter statuses use the same 30-day comparison, so they always agree.

Subscribers and net growth

The Subscribers column counts active subscriptions to each newsletter. A reader on three newsletters appears in all three rows, so the rows in a group add up to more than the group’s unique contacts in the banner.

Net Growth is the change in subscribers over the last 30 days: new signups minus unsubscribes, bounces, and cleaned addresses.

Engagement categories

Each subscription falls into exactly one category based on how that reader engages with that newsletter. Opening an issue or clicking a link in it both count as engaging:

Category	Who’s in it	What to do
Loyalists	Engaged with at least 3 of the last 5 issues	Ask them for referrals, survey them, or offer early access.
New & Engaged	Subscribed in the last 30 days and engaged with at least one issue. Readers you added by importing a list don’t count as new here.	A welcome sequence now sets the tone for whether they stay.
Casual	Engages occasionally, but not enough to be a Loyalist	Stronger subject lines move the needle here.
Fading	Used to engage, but engaged with none of the last 3 issues	Send a re-engagement email, such as a “we miss you” note or a best-of roundup, before they become Ghosts.
Ghosts	Engaged with none of the last 10 issues	Run a re-permission campaign or remove them. A smaller, engaged list delivers better.

For Loyalists, Casual, Fading, and Ghosts, an arrow next to the share shows whether it’s rising or falling compared with 30 days ago. For Fading and Ghosts, a rising share is the warning sign.

”Still learning”

A newsletter that hasn’t sent 10 issues yet shows Still learning with how many it has sent, instead of a category breakdown. The categories look back over your last 10 issues, so until then they’d mostly describe issues that were never sent. The breakdown appears once the newsletter has sent 10 issues.

If you moved to Letterhead from another platform and brought your readers’ engagement history with you, such as their last open date, List Health uses that history. Those newsletters show a category breakdown straight away instead of Still learning.

Reputation

The Reputation column is a 0–100 estimate of each newsletter’s sending reputation. When a newsletter hasn’t sent enough mail to score, it reads Not enough sends to judge. See View newsletter reputation scores in List Health and Portfolio Health for how to read the score.

How your mail is landing at each mailbox provider

Select a newsletter’s row to see how its mail landed at each mailbox provider (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, and the rest) over the last 30 days. For each one you see how many messages were sent, how many were accepted, how many were turned away, and the accepted rate.

This is how you tell a mailbox-provider problem from a list problem:

• One provider is turning away much of your mail while the others accept it. The problem is between you and that provider, not with your readers. Your list may be fine. Look at what changed in what you send to those readers, and see Understanding bounces.
• Every provider accepts your mail, but the newsletter is still At Risk. The issue is engagement or list growth. Look at the category arrows and net growth, and consider List Optimization for inactive readers.

If a newsletter hasn’t sent in the last 30 days, there’s nothing to show yet. If it sends through another email provider, Letterhead can’t see how its mail lands, and the panel says so.

Related

• Smart Engagement-Based Segments: send to the same categories you see here.
• Working in Audience: the rest of the Audience page.