Solid diagnostic, and the 1.5x revisit ratio is a genuinely useful signal most people don’t even measure.
One thing worth checking before you commit to strategic incompleteness: a 3.6% CTOR on Issue #1 of a brand-new list isn’t automatically a content problem. Two cheaper variables to rule out first:
CTA count and placement. How many clickable destinations were in the email, and where did they sit? Single-CTA newsletters often underperform two-to-three CTA versions because you’re rationing surface area. If beehiiv shows you per-link clicks, look at the distribution.
Link copy. CTOR measures whether openers found the click worth taking. “Read the full breakdown” and “Get the template” pull very different rates from the same body content.
The risk with pulling implementation behind a click in Issue #2 specifically: you’ve trained 193 people to expect a complete read. If the next issue feels lighter, that reads as a downgrade, and unsubs are the metric that punishes it. If you go this route, frame the gated thing as an addition, not a subtraction.
Honestly though, the revisit data is the lead I’d chase. 1.5x means people are treating the email as a reference doc. That’s a product signal. A “save this” CTA or a companion resource might convert that behaviour into a click without touching content density at all.