Hey there! We’ve been experiencing a steep and sudden decrease in open rates starting about 2 months ago. We have no idea what’s going on…but we assume it’s something to do with our email sender reputation.
We’ve dropped from 23-30% open rate for our emails (which had been fairly consistant for years) to only 8-12% open rate the past few months.
We’re confidently this is not the list being burned out or any normal changes in audience engagement like that.
About three months ago we got the “verify your domain” error message with our email and then we fixed that and reverified the domain.
This sudden drop in open rates does correspond with that…however, we re-authenticated the domain about 2 months ago yet the crazy low open rates have continued.
Just an an example, I’m linking to two screenshots (can’t seem to embed here)…the first is our most recent 6 emails, and the second is a selection of six emails sent before the drop. You see the massive difference there.
Latest Emails: Latest Emails.jpg - Google Drive
Emails 3 Months Ago: Emails (3 Months Ago).jpg - Google Drive
Had a long conversation with ActiveCampaign support but so far no help.
Looking for any help on why this may be happening, how we can get more details on our sender reputation, anything.
Thank you!
Alex
@noblemovement yeah my hunch is that you’re experiencing a drop in sender reputation.
Gmail enforced some new deliverability rules a few months ago and it also seems to be upping its spam response to bad sender reputation.
I highly recommend installing Google Postmaster on the domain you send from - it’s a free tool, and it gives you a good indication of your reputation (at least with Gmail addresses, which do make up the bulk of most lists).
Once you verify it, you may need to send an email or two before you start seeing any data, but once you have, click the “Domain Reputation” from the dropdown in Postmaster.
Feel free to let me know what you discover and I’ll be happy to help with next steps.
Thank you for your support Jacob! We’ll get Postmaster installed tomorrow and share what we discover after our next few emails.
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Hey @jacobmonash and anyone else following.
I installed Postmasters about 8 days ago. However, it’s saying “Data shown with missing records. Some data may be unavailable”.
Here’s a pic: No Postmaster Data.png - Google Drive
It does have dates listed for 8/1 and 8/6 showing that emails were sent (last email was sent this morning 8/7). It’s the ONLY thing it’s showing me across any of the drop-downs.
I took a while to research why this might be happening and there’s almost no answers. People say the domain needs to send “in the order of hundreds of emails a day” but both emails were sent to 3000+ people, so should be PLENTY to receive data.
Any suggestions or ideas on what could be going wrong?
Thank you!
Hey @noblemovement yeah sometimes data doesn’t show up on some of the panels if the volume isn’t as high.
But the main thing is that you’re receiving reporting on your domain reputation, and as I guessed, it’s not great.
You can increase your sender reputation by running a cleaner list - the main way to do this is to exclude contacts who haven’t interacted with you in a while.
For example, using a sending segment with conditions like “has opened an email in the last 90 days”.
I wrote a blog post on how to do this that you might find helpful: How to send to a clean, engaged segment in ActiveCampaign (without automation) — Jacob Monash Email Marketing
Thanks Jacob.
Yeah we got some more data back but the only thing that’s relevant is Sender Reputation, which moves between “Low” to “Bad” and back to “Low” again.
Appreciate your suggestion. We did that around 6 months ago and segmented out around 1500 people from the list. This was a big and sudden drop after we waited a while to reconfirm / revalidate the domain after DNS records changed in GoDaddy…but that was months ago and our domain’s been “green” again for a while.
I see there’s any (paid) tools around sender reputation, we’re going to explore a few of those and see if we can find more specific answers.
Sure - I guess you could look into paid tools. I would say that although Google Postmaster is a free tool, the data is directly from Google/Gmail. So they’re basically telling you that your reputation is not good, and that means they’re going to send more and more of your emails directly to recipients’ spam folder (hence the low open rates).
As far as I understand it, a low/bad reputation happens because people keep marking your emails as spam, so either:
A: you haven’t been following good email sending practices (in which case you’ll need to clean them up to improve deliverability)
or
B: a malicious actor is spoofing emails from your domain (in which case you’d need to set up and enforce DMARC to prevent them spoofing)
When you say you segmented those 1500 people out of your list, have you kept them out, or did you add them back in when things looked “green”?