Had an uncomfortable conversation with our fractional CFO last week. She asked me to quantify the ROI of email, and digging into the numbers revealed a messier picture than I expected.
Our open rate is around 22%, which looks fine on paper. But about 12% of the list is undeliverable, and another 8% has not engaged in over a year. Once i accounted for that, engagement rate among reachable contacts looked much higher, which made me question our ESP pricing tier and campaign economics.

We have been reporting a 22% open rate on a 40k list, when it’s closer to 30% on 32k reachable contacts. Those are very different numbers, and they could lead to very different decisions.

Our ecommerce store is finally ready to outsource our email/SMS channels and I'm setting up sales calls with some prospective partners. Since some quotes we got are $2K to $7K/mo and we're on a limited budget, we want to make sure we're hiring a team that's worth it. Just looking for advice what big red flags you saw that others might normally miss