So now I ask a different question before I send anything.
Did it get there is the easy one, the servers handle that.
The harder one: will anyone notice it got there.
I don't have a metric for that.
So now, before writing anything, I ask where this person already pays attention on purpose.
That's a different question than where it's cheap to reach them.
Cheap reach is usually cheap because they stopped looking there.
Our best email of the year got our worst open rate.
Black Friday morning, I refreshed the dashboard maybe six times.
Kept thinking the numbers hadn't synced yet.
They had.
What changed after:
1. We treat send timing as strategy, not logistics.
2. Big pushes move to the days around the noise, not into it.
3. Crowded channel gets the reminder, quiet channel gets the real ask.