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9 Comments

What's going on with my emails?

I've noticed a big drop in the open rate of my emails all of a sudden (stats below). I've been sending them at the same time and day as always. The list has seen a little growth but nothing huge. Any idea what could have caused this and what I can do to correct it? Emails are sent with Sendgrid.

Percentage is the open rate:

  • Feb 19 2020 - 16%
  • Feb 10 2020 - 21%
  • Jan 29 2020- 40%
  • Dec 4 2019 - 38%
  • any previous emails hovered around 40%
  1. 2

    What's the frequency of the sends? Do you use the same subject line, or are they different?

    More than likely you're just experiencing some list fatigue, or you've been hitting people's spam bucket more regularly (I'd run some diagnostics on your domain to make sure it's on the up and up / not on any spam lists)

    1. 1

      Sends tended to be pretty sporadic, but around once a month. Different subject line each time. The emails sent to this list were updates leading up to my launch, which my launch email was the first one to have the low open rate (feb 10th).

      Any suggested resources for running diagnostics on this? Thanks for the help!

      1. 2

        Not a problem, yeah, I mean, could argue that perhaps the subject line variance was a factor, could also argue around seasonality (end of year inbox cleanup, beginning of the year commitment to inbox zero, then falling off).

        Here's one of my favorites -- https://mxtoolbox.com/domain/ -- gives insight to configuration issues (DNS and such) as well as any blacklisting that's in play

        1. 1

          Thanks for sharing the tool. One thing that I figured about that tool; in order for detailed reporting, you have to log in there. As I searched for more health checker tool and came with that tool
          https://dnschecker.org/domain-health-checker.php
          that tool is quite similar to the MX toolbox health checker tool but provides you the reports under one roof.

  2. 1

    Would be awesome if you can share more background information regarding your mailing list and campaign strategy @asebold

    Just to name a few to be considered:

    1. Have you ever did any split test?
    2. Double opt-in?
    3. How's your content look like? (loads of images and links have a higher likelihood to be counted as spam
    4. How big is your list?
    1. 1

      List is around 1900. The content is text with maybe 3-4 links per email. I try to keep it as simple as possible. No double opt-in. What is a split test?

  3. 1

    How you are tracking those openings? 1x1 transparent pixel, or some image (logo) ?

    Keep in mind that many email clients (Thunderbird, etc) are improving their privacy settings and blocking specific behavior such as tracking links or loading images from server.

    For example, if user doesn't specifically allow for images to be loaded, you will not see email as opened. Maybe email readings are still good or even better but you can't see it due to their settings.

    1. 1

      I use sendgrid, so I guess it's a tracking pixel. I just don't understand why there would be such a sudden drop off when things were so consistent before. Maybe gmail pushed some kind of tracking pixel update.

  4. 1

    The first thing you have to do is to see if you have SPF/DKIM/DMARC setup properly. However, this alone doesn't guarantee your email deliverability.

    We had the same problem due to content of the emails. Some minor changes to the content of the email subject and body had a huge effect on the inbox rates.

    We released a tool recently to test the content/body of the emails against the popular email providers, gmail, yahoo and outlook. http://vetter.monsoonyeti.com/ https://www.indiehackers.com/product/vetter-2

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