Today’s my last (planned) email of the year 🙌 

To celebrate, let’s do something a little different.

I often get asked: “What’s your best article?”

Simple question, tricky to answer.

How do you measure ‘best’? Email opens? Web traffic? Shares? Something else?

Couldn’t decide, so I pulled together a shortlist - the top 10 articles from this year (based on 10 different measures).

You get to decide which one actually deserves the title (vote in the poll at the end of this email!)

— Tom

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2025 Wrapped

Breakdown

The ‘best’ Strategy Breakdowns article(s) from this year

1.  The Inbox MVP

Article with the highest open-rate: 

→ 78%

The first metric you’d think of for ‘best-performing email newsletter’ is Open-Rate. 

Opens are the email-native equivalent of views, so Open-Rate tells you ‘what % of your list liked this topic enough to read the piece?’.

But, it has plenty of downsides as a North Star Metric:

• Apple Mail (and many email firewall tools) opens all incoming emails to pre-screen for dodgy links/images, which inflates open-rate for senders

• You can also manually inflate it by just sending to more engaged readers (e.g. subscribers with a 50%+ open-rate)

• Just because someone opened, doesn’t mean they read / enjoyed the whole thing

• It’s ultimately a better measure for ‘how intriguing was the subject line + preview text?’, since a super catchy subject line + a terrible article = high open-rate

That said, of all my articles sent to my entire list, this one had the highest open-rate. I normally see 50-60% opens, so 78% had me popping a celebratory Cava (was living in Valencia at the time - more on that here).

The subject line hit (I A/B tested 4 variants and the winner led by a cracking margin), and anecdotally all other metrics were off the charts too, so this piece is a solid first bid for ‘breakdown of the year’.

2. The Most Read

Article with the most ‘total reads’ (including same reader opening multiple times, email getting forwarded to others, traffic to web version):

→ 145,410 reads

This is basically the biggest number award.

Admittedly this is another messy metric since counting multiple opens + raw web traffic includes firewalls + crawlers, but assuming the variability affects all articles equally, this one reached more people (and bots - we don’t discriminate here) than any other this year.

145k encounters with a single breakdown is something I honestly can’t quite get my head around.

It’s the biggest number I can credibly associate with any piece, so let’s take the win and not overthink it!

3. The Group Chat Virus

Article with the most organic social shares:

→ 154 reposts, 449 sends in DMs, 201k impressions

I normally prefer to write about evergreen topics with timeless lessons rather than latest news which gets a lot of attention then becomes quickly irrelevant. But when I saw OpenAI’s leaked strategy memo for ChatGPT I spent the next few hours scrambling to get one of the first ‘here’s everything you need to know’ write-ups live.

Hundreds of DM-shares and organic reposts pushed the LinkedIn post about this breakdown out to 200k+ people. It also got some love on X and in other newsletters, plus presumably some spots I didn’t see myself.

Obviously more a case of ‘news-jacking’ than ‘I loved this wonderful breakdown’, but it’s always a buzz to feel your content hit the group chats.

4. The Traffic Surge

Article with the highest click-through rate:

→ 6.46%

Click-Through Rate measures the percentage of people who clicked any link in the email, which could be on sponsors, inline links, Rabbit Hole links, polls, links to our website etc.

It’s a quick, solid measure for how ‘engaging’ an email was (and the classic copilot to pair with Open-Rate).

At 6.46%, this piece generated 4,000 unique clicks.

Looking at why: the sponsor placements had strong social proof and clear benefits, all 3 Rabbit Hole links created curiosity gaps, and the poll in the intro got folks interacting immediately.

I hope some of you clickers are out there building the next Instagram.

5. The Deepest Dive

Article with the longest read-time:

→ 19min 42sec

Not sure if high read-time equates to ‘best’ in the traditional sense, but this 3-part interview series I did with Tanguy Crusson (Head of Product for Atlassian’s latest breakout success story Jira Product Discovery) was a milestone I had to include.

It’s ~5,000 ultra-tactical words covering the exact playbooks they used to:

• Secure stakeholder buy-in and budget inside a large company with virtually limitless other opportunities to fund

• Validate and test features directly with a core group of 10 ‘lighthouse customers’

• Land on a pricing strategy that let’s them cut through in a competitive market

Exclusive lessons you won’t find anywhere else, directly from a world-class founder - stoked to have published this one.

6. The Citation Source

Article with the most Backlinks (i.e. other websites linking to it):

→ 21

I always knew about Backlinks conceptually but was never running an SEO strategy so didn’t look into them.

I was writing a piece about ahrefs, testing their tool for my research, and when I stumbled into the Backlinks data it was one of the best moments of my year.

A list of 100s of other websites, newsletters, creators etc who had organically linked to my articles over the past 2 years. A feed of organic shoutouts, but being on a permanent website feels 10x more satisfying than social.

And unlike social @tags, you don’t get notified about Backlinks (without hooking your site up to an SEO tool), so I would have never seen any of these without randomly coming across them that day. Ended up connecting with a handful of other founders/writers because of it.

This piece about Attio’s approach to design ended up on a bunch of tech and design blogs, giving it the most Backlinks of any breakdown this year.

Super cool to actually see the organic flywheel in action.

7. The Most Loved

Article with the highest percentage of people who voted ‘loved’ in our weekly poll:

→ 58%

Arguably the cleanest measure of ‘how good was this breakdown?’ = asking readers to rate it.

I include a poll at the end of each email, and normally its a pretty even spread of ‘Loved’, ‘Great’, and ‘Good’, (and I appreciate the honesty - really helps me improve!)

For some reason, this one absolutely ripped.

When you vote, you can add free text context - most feedback on this one came down to the uniqueness of the strategies covered (it’s a piece about why some tech companies publish physical books).

If this 2025 roundup was a democracy, voters said this breakdown was the best.

8. The Magnet

Article with the most web traffic:

→ 14,056 visits

Ok so this more comes down to UI that popularity, and this piece was technically published back in 2023, but turns out just being the top-left thumbnail on strategybreakdowns.com nets you 14k visits in 2025 alone.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s one of my favourites (that’s why I put it there), but it’s probably more of a courtesy nominee on a technicality than a ‘best picture’ award-winner.

But still - 14k people (or 3.83% of my total web traffic) landing on a single page is pretty fun to see.

Note to self: It’d be cool to have a ‘surprise me’ button / thumbnail that takes visitors to a random article.

9. The Least Offensive

Article with the lowest unsubscribe rate:

→ 0.21%

Fun fact of the day: every time a newsletter sends an email, they get a wave of unsubscribes.

If they are sending to tens → hundreds of thousands (or millions) of subscribers, it feels more like a tidal wave.

For me its normally several hundred, which means I need to add more than several hundred subscribers each week just to stay at the same list size (even more if I want to grow).

Interestingly, the article with the lowest % of unsubscribes also got the highest ever spam reports of any email I’ve ever sent. Weird, right? Not entirely sure what to take away from that.

Anyway - this article satisfied the highest percentage of readers, but highly offended 7. Can’t win em all!

10. The Editor’s Cut

Article that I’m most proud of writing:

In my personal opinion, I’d say this is my favourite piece of writing I put out this year.

It’d make for a painfully awkward few sentences to try to justify that statement, so I’ll just put it out there and let you be the judge if interested :)

That’s all for today’s breakdown - the last one of 2025!

Got any ideas for what you’d like to see in 2026? Reply to this email and let me know - all replies land directly in my inbox and I read (and try to reply) to every single one.

Here’s to another year writing the world’s greatest newsletter.

Appreciate you being here.

See you in Jan!

— Tom