Newsletters greet you louder than retailers do

These figures are provisional. Q3 has not closed, the panel is still receiving mail, and every number below will change before the final edition publishes on 1 October. We are showing the method early, not the result.

Alongside the retail edition, today we are publishing an early look at the Inbox Index Publisher Edition, because a newsletter is not a retailer and should not be judged like one. Nobody deserves a penalty for arriving daily when daily is what you signed up for. Publishers are scored on their own three dimensions: does it keep its own rhythm, how much does it send, and how often is it selling you something rather than telling you something.

The finding we did not expect sits in the first seven days.

Every single newsletter in the full table sent five or more emails in its first week. The median retailer sent eight; the median publisher, seven, and the heaviest sent 27. Subscribing to a newsletter now means a louder greeting than following a clothing brand, near-universally.

We publish that first week as its own column rather than folding it into the score, because averaging it in would punish brands for a burst that ends, and excluding it silently would hide a real experience: a sender that fires nine emails in week one and then goes quiet has still sent you nine emails.

At the top of the table, TSN put up the only perfect rhythm in the panel, one hundred per cent of sends on its own cadence, nothing sold in any of them. At the bottom, the highest-volume sender in either edition arrived 28.5 times a week once its welcome series was set aside.

See the provisional Publisher Edition. The final Q3 edition publishes 1 October.