Troubleshooting Low Email Open Rate

Email open rate and click rate used to be the key indicators of success of an email campaign. These metrics offer valuable insights into how well your recipients are engaged with your brand and it’s always worrying to see a decrease in opens and clicks.

It is to note that a slight fluctuation or an occasional drop of an email open rate is acceptable because different email campaigns arise a different interest. But a sustained decline in open rates from message to message indicates a serious issue that has to be thoroughly investigated. Below are the troubleshooting tips you can take into consideration.

1. Run Email Spam Test.

First of all, test your deliverability to find out where the message is placed by different providers: Inbox or Spam. You can run a spam test with GlockApps.

Depending on the email spam test results, you will take the further steps. If your Inbox rate is high, you’ll want to play with your Subject lines, offers, or sending times to re-engage your recipients. If the Spam placement rate is high, it’s essential to resolve this issue before it impacts your business seriously.

• Optimize Email Template

For better deliverability, it’s important that you use a good text-to-image ratio, verify URLs to make sure you don’t host them on blacklisted or suspicious domains, and clean up your HTML code. You’ll want to test different versions of the template to see which one produces the best Inbox placement rate.

• Verify Sender Reputation

The sender’s reputation works as your credit score and often determines where the message lands. Based on the resources available, each email service provider uses a set of standards to evaluate a sender’s reputation. The common factors that are evaluated are:

• volume of emails sent;
• messages filtered out to Spam,
• blocked messages,
• bounced messages,
• spam trap hits,
• messages reported as Spam/Not Spam,
• opened and deleted messages.

Google Postmaster Tools give good data about a domain and IP reputation. Microsoft provides access to the Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) for senders using dedicated IP addresses. A SNDS report shows email traffic coming from an IP address and allows senders to understand possible causes of Spam email placements with Microsoft domains.

• Test Email Authentication

Email authentication protocols SPF and DKIM must be set up for your email communications. Moreover, DMARC will soon become a requirement for bulk email senders according to Google.

If you are already using DMARC, double check your policy and DMARC compliance. If your messages fail DMARC authentication, Spam placements or delivery failures may be the result of a DMARC ‘quarantine’ or ‘reject’ policy.

2. Check Bounce Email Data.

Examining the error descriptions in bounce messages helps comprehend what you have done wrong. The most common reasons why emails bounce are:

• invalid email addresses;
• bad reputation of the IP or domain;
• high number of spam reports submitted by the recipients;
• content with spam looking elements (attachments, URLs, dirty HTML, etc.).

Once you identify why emails bounced back, you will know what to do. The process may be quick if it’s about email content. But it may require work with an expert if a bad sender reputation prevents your emails from being delivered.

3. Work with Your Email Service Provider.

Deliverability issues at the side of SMTP servers and email service providers may affect the email open rate. For instance, your email service provider is able to deliver emails to AOL and Gmail, but has trouble with Hotmail because its server’s IP addresses are on Hotmail’s blocklist.

It’s helpful to determine if the problem is general or specific to one or a few ISPs. To find it out, you’ll want to look over your email tracking statistics and note which domains have not demonstrated any openings in the past month.

The next step is to contact your email service provider and work with them to troubleshoot the deliverability. If you send via your own SMTP server, you’ll want to read the logs of the SMTP server to know the cause of the message sending failure.