Low Open Rate? How Email Testing and Uptime Monitoring Helps
Open rate and click rate are the main measures in email marketing. They allow senders to understand how successful their email campaigns are. After all, this is what we do email marketing for: more clicks — more customers.
It’s always distressing to see a decrease in email opens. While an occasional drop is not yet a catastrophe, an open rate decreasing from message to message is a serious issue that has to be investigated.
However, a fluctuation in an open rate is normal as people change interests, jobs, locations, etc. Not everyone unsubscribes to let you know that they don’t want your emails anymore. Some just don’t open and don’t read.
But if a decrease of an open rate is impactful and you are concerned, it’s time to make an audit of your email sending program and messages. Sometimes technical issues can lead to low deliverability and open rate.
1. Emails are Going to Spam.
It happens even to the best senders. Spam filters change, sender reputation changes. It can lead to an increased percentage of messages delivered to the subscribers’ Spam folders.
Why are the emails going to Spam? Below are the top 3 reasons:
1.1. Sender Reputation.
As in other areas of life, a reputation makes it all. Sender reputation is built based on many factors:
- quantity of sent messages,
- quantity of messages filtered out to Spam,
- blocked messages,
- bounced messages,
- spam trap hits,
- messages reported as Spam and Not Spam,
- opened and deleted messages.
Each mailbox provider uses an individual set of rules, depending on its resources, to calculate sender reputation. Sender reputation applies to both domain and IP address. When the reputation goes down, more messages start going to Spam.
With the GlockApps Inbox Insight tester, you can test your email deliverability and see which mailbox providers send your messages to the Spam folder.
Not all mailbox providers allow to see the reputation of the IP and domain. But Google has the Google postmaster tools where you can get data about your sender reputation and factors that influenced it.
If your sender reputation is low, you’ll want to take the steps to improve it by verifying your email list collection methods, cleaning your mailing list from invalid users, verifying that you are sending relevant messages, separating mail streams by different IP addresses and sub-domains, and using a list segmentation by user activity.
Read more: How to Restore Sender Reputation and Get out of the Spam Folder
1.2. DMARC ‘Quarantine’ Policy.
A DMARC ‘Quarantine’ policy does a good thing as it makes all spam and phishing emails pretending to be coming from you being sent to the Spam or Junk folder.
It works perfectly as far as your email authentication is set up correctly and your messages pass a DMARC check.
When DMARC fails due to email authentication issues, the messages sent by your legit sources start falling to the Junk folder where they may never be seen by readers.
With the GlockApps DMARC Analyzer, you can quickly check if your domain has a DMARC and SPF records. If the test shows that the DMARC record exists and your domain is protected, you’ll want to verify your DMARC policy and make sure that all the messages coming from your legit senders pass DMARC. In case of any issues with SPF or DKIM, you’ll want to fix them as soon as possible to avoid spam folder placements.
Read the full story on the GlockApps blog
