Users forget you exist between sessions
A personalized stats email gives users a reason to come back. Not a newsletter—their own data, delivered every week.
When to use
Your product generates user activity data that can be summarized into interesting personal metrics. Users have at least weekly sessions on average.
Hypothesis template
If we send users a weekly email with their [personal stats], open rates will beat [X]% and re-engagement will increase because personalized data is inherently interesting.
Method
The problem: Users love your product when they use it, but they forget about it. You send newsletters and product updates, but open rates are 15% and declining.
What Grammarly did: Sends every user a "Weekly Writing Update" with their personal stats: words checked, top mistakes, accuracy score, vocabulary uniqueness, and how they compare to other users.
The result: 40%+ open rate—nearly 3x the industry average for SaaS emails. The email itself brings users back to the product because they want to improve their score. It's retention disguised as a report.
How to do it:
- Identify 3-5 personal metrics that are interesting to your users (not vanity metrics—things they care about improving)
- Build a weekly email that surfaces these stats in a visual, scannable format
- Add a comparison element: "You're in the top 30% of users" or "Up 15% from last week"
- Include one clear CTA: "See your full report" or "Keep your streak going"
- Send on the same day/time every week (consistency builds habit)
- Make it skippable—don't guilt trip inactive users, just show zeros and encourage them
Key insight: People don't open emails about your product. They open emails about themselves. Make the email about the user, not about you.
Success metrics
- •Email open rate
- •Click-through rate to product
- •Weekly active users (before vs. after)
- •Users returning within 24h of email
- •Unsubscribe rate
Prerequisites
- User activity data to summarize
- Email infrastructure (transactional email service)
- A weekly cron job or scheduler
Common pitfalls
- •Making it about your product instead of the user
- •Sending too many metrics (pick 3-5 max)
- •No clear CTA to bring them back
- •Sending to inactive users with "you did nothing this week" messaging
Source: Grammarly. 40%+ open rate on weekly stats email, 3x industry average.
Suggested ICE scores
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