20 Newsletters In - ALL THE STATS - I see no trends [except CTR spiraling]

Hardware is Hard is a niche recruiting website for mechanical engineers. Over the last 8 months, we have written 19 newsletters and grown our audience.

We are new to writing newsletters and have honestly been winging it when it comes to deliverability etc. But, to celebrate the 20th we wanted to do a deep dive into the stats.

There has been one major trend. CTR has been spiraling. This makes sense given our audience is mostly students looking for internships and the recruiting season for that is in the fall (aka not now) and our early adopters/friends are a smaller portion of the overall audience now. But the one glimmer of hope is that CTR has stabilized at 5% . . .

The bigger question I have is about the open rate. I see no trend between the open rate and any metric. Some emails are just hits and others aren't. We use Substack. Does anyone who uses Substack have any suggestions? Also, is Substack the right platform?

Any and all feedback is appreciated!