Rescuing games technology career newsletter open rate from 3% to 45%
At SeriousGamesJobs.com, we deliver a weekly email containing job openings beyond entertainment for people with game development skills.
We have a small, growing and niche audience, and we've never bought email lists or signed people up without their permission. We'd also implemented Capcha verification for new users some time ago to weed out bots. Despite trying to be good email citizens, I'd noticed that our open rate had plummeted. What happened?
There didn't seem to be one particular trigger, but after some exploration it appeared the digests were almost always ending up in the spam folder- not ideal by any measure. At the time we were using Sendgrid, and had fully authenticated our domain and were sending out from kit@seriousgamesjobs.com. Just 3% of our emails were even being opened, which was an alarming drop from the 30% we experienced in the first weeks of the newsletter.
I decided to make a sweeping list of changes, and have listed them here case anyone is stuck with the same delivery issue and looking for inspiration-
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Searched through my own 'updates' folder in gmail, which was where we wanted to end up, to compare ads which landed here (and not in 'promotional' or 'spam'). Based on this;
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Slightly updated the email title template (from "Weekly digest 27th January 2020" to "Today's job digest: 27th Jan 2021"). I found that 'Today's digest' seemed to hit the Updates folder more often.
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Changed the sender to a 'role based' email- from "kit@seriousgamesjobs.com" to "digest@seriousgamesjobs.com"
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Moved to EmailOctopus- despite wanting to use the more comprehensive API features Sendgrid offers, I was keen to give them a try to see if they could improve our delivery rate.
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Added a banner image- I was worried that some of our audience might not remember signing up, so I reasoned that adding a banner which matched the background of the site would help with recognition.
The results are just in from last week's newsletter- after hitting Send last night I woke up eight hours later to our best open rate ever at over 45%!
I'm by no means an email wizard, so if you have comments as to why these worked or what else to try out, please do comment below!
(Oh- and if you know of a way to write & send email using EmailOctopus's API, I'd love to hear from you!)
Nice save—your changes map perfectly to inboxing fundamentals: subject line avoids promo keywords, role-based sender improves trust, and provider switch + domain/auth alignment often fixes spam placement. The “branding banner” is underrated too—recognition reduces delete/report spam.
If you want to keep it stable long-term, next steps:
Just an FYI, your domain doesn't work without typing "www." before hand, so the link you provided in the first sentence doesn't work. Shouldn't be a hard thing to fix in your DNS settings if you google it.
Great work though, it always seems to be such little things that can make a huge difference, but you hardly ever know without experience or someone sharing like this.
Thanks so much for letting me know! I think I've managed to sort out the issue- if you have a spare moment could you try once more and let me know if it's resolved on your browser?
And glad to hear it's useful, that was exactly my thinking- I'm reasonably technical but very fresh in the marketing world, so wanted to share this failure & my grab-bag of attempts to reverse things. Happily now at an open rate of over 51% for that campaign, so we'll see how it keeps up in coming weeks!
Yup you fixed it!
Thanks so much again, really appreciate it!