Moving Block & Chisel beyond open rates: click-led optimisation and an evening send window that converts.

Block & Chisel were shipping campaigns consistently, but performance was not being fully understood and optimisation was effectively guesswork. Reporting was heavily reliant on open rates, a metric that, in a post-Apple-MPP world, no longer provides a clear or reliable view of true engagement.

As volume scaled up, surface-level metrics made it harder, not easier, to measure success or spot opportunities. Opens couldn't be trusted to reflect interest or intent. The team needed to move to a metric that genuinely correlated with revenue, and a send pattern that aligned with how their audience actually behaved.

The brief: stop reporting on vanity, start reporting on action.

We rebuilt the campaign analytics layer around clicks, click-to-conversion rate, and time-of-day engagement, not opens. The first job was to understand whether emails were driving action, not just whether they were being seen.

From there, we ran a behavioural analysis across the database, modelling when subscribers were most likely to interact beyond the open. A clear pattern emerged: evening windows, between 5pm and 7pm, consistently outperformed daytime sends. Around payday and on Sundays, the effect was even stronger.

The audience profile explained it. Block & Chisel's customers skew toward working professionals who engage with non-urgent content after hours, when they're winding down. The morning send window we'd inherited was fighting that behaviour, not riding it.

We migrated the campaign calendar to a 6pm primary send window, with secondary tests on Sunday morning and post-payday Friday evenings. Every campaign was scored against a single metric, click-to-conversion rate, rather than the previous mix of opens, clicks, deliveries and unsubscribes.

Reporting was simplified to three numbers the merchandising team could act on: click-to-conversion rate, revenue per recipient, and active-subscriber rate (clicked in the last 90 days). The old dashboard was retired.

The first month was a controlled test. Three campaigns sent at the new time, three at the old, audience-matched. The evening campaigns won on every commercial metric. The team had the evidence it needed to commit.

Click-to-conversion rate is up 34% on the new send pattern. Reporting noise dropped 45% by removing the metrics that weren't driving decisions. The merchandising team now plans campaigns around when the audience actually buys, not when the inbox is theoretically less crowded.

More importantly, the client moved from reporting on surface-level metrics to making decisions based on real engagement. That changes the conversation in every weekly review, and it changes the brief every retailer writes for their email programme.

The send-time learning has now been folded into Block & Chisel's seasonal calendar, with payday and pre-weekend windows treated as premium inventory rather than incidental moments.