Answered: Why am I seeing a drop in open rates in the last few months?
Have you been experiencing a steep and sudden decrease in open rates that seems to defy explanation?
Have you checked your SPF, DKIM, blacklists, and every other deliverability trick you can find, but everything looks clean?
I’ve seen this issue popping up in forums and job posting sites more and more lately - folks who have been running a healthy-looking email list for a while, who are seeing their open rates steadily drop over the span of a few months.
So what’s going on?
Email deliverability is a big, complicated world, but I believe it’s primarily tied to Gmail, and recent changes to its sender guidelines.
These guidelines were announced in October last year (2023) with a deadline of February 2024. In particular, the guidelines you might have heard about are that Gmail now requires SPF and/or DKIM authentication, as well as DMARC - many email providers like ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp provided notifications to users to help them get this set up.
There were a bunch of other requirements that Gmail stated, though it wasn’t necessary to worry about most of them since they were technical details that email providers needed to figure out on the back-end.
However, there was a statement buried in the guidelines that also described the acceptable levels of spam for each sender:
What is user-reported spam rate? As you may have already guessed, it’s the rate at which Gmail recipients mark an email in their inbox as spam. So if you send a campaign to a list of 1000 Gmail recipients, and 1 marks it as spam, Gmail sees your spam rate for that campaign as 0.1%.
And as you can see, Gmail uses your spam rate to calculate your “inbox delivery” - i.e. whether your email should go to a recipient’s inbox, or directly to the spam folder. So in general, the more the emails you send that get marked as spam, the more likely that your future email sends will go directly to the recipient’s spam folder.
Now, tracking spam rates to regulate inbox delivery is not new - Gmail has been doing this for a while.
However, my hunch is that with the new focus on authentication and deliverability, Gmail has started to crack down harder on spam rates since June.
And here we get to the problem: if spam rates are more greatly impacting inbox delivery, then more emails are going directly to spam. And because emails that go directly to spam are unlikely to be read, that could be why your open rates are declining over time.
And rather insidiously, although open rates have dropped, you may not have realized this is due to emails going directly to spam, because email providers may show your email spam feedback per email, but they don’t/can’t show you your ongoing inbox placement rate. So because you haven’t realized these problems are due to spam, and thus you haven’t taken any action, your inbox placement continues to spiral downwards as Gmail sees no corrective action from your end.
So how do you check Gmail’s measure of your inbox placement? Gmail calls this your domain reputation. It’s an ongoing measure of how trustworthy you’re perceived to be as a sender. It’s built over time based on how your audience reacts to your emails.
So let’s talk about how to check your domain reputation, and how to fix it if it’s not looking good.
(Note: before we go further, I should acknowledge that Gmail isn't the only email inbox provider. However, for any businesses selling B2C, Gmail addresses are going to make up a good chunk of your email list. So it’s very likely that any changes to enforceement by Gmail will have a substantial impact on your open rates)
(Second note: if you’ve reached this point and you’re thinking “I don’t have time to read this, I just need help!” please feel free to grab a time with me to chat).
How to see your reputation
So how do you see your domain reputation to tell if this is actually the problem you’re experiencing?
Google has a free tool called Google Postmaster - setting it up simply requires adding a DNS record to your website domain (something similar to what you may have already done earlier in the year to set up SPF or DKIM or DMARC).
Google Postmaster is incredibly handy because it tells you directly what Gmail thinks of you as a sender. And the main one I want you to look at once you have it set up is “Domain reputation”.
Note, if you get to this screen, click “Visit old Postmaster Tools”:
Here’s what domain reputation looks like - note how in this example domain reputation has slowly declined from “Medium” to “Low”:
Note: use the timerange dropdown in the top-right if you want to see more historical data
If you see that you’re trending Medium, Low, or Bad, it means Gmail thinks you’re not following good sending practices, and is impacting your inbox delivery. Seeing this is a huge flag that your drop in open rates is because your reputation is causing emails to go directly to spam.
So, if your reputation isn’t looking good, what do you do? It’s time for some “PR” to help Gmail see that you’re an honest, respectable email-sending citizen. And that means cleaning up your subscriber lists and sending practices.
Follow the steps below, and you will see over time that your domain reputation starts increasing, all the way back to “High”. This is the good news - you can recover your email reputation. It takes effort, and you might have to temper your revenue expectations for 1-3 months while your deliverability recovers. But the outcome is higher open rates, higher click rates, and greater revenue from your email list.
How to clean your list
So what’s a clean list? It’s a set of subscribers who want to hear from you. They typically meet the following criteria:
they have recently engaged with you in some way
they actually signed up to your list, and care about your content
they’re receiving your emails, and not a malicious actor pretending to be you
If you send to subscribers who meet all of these critera, your emails are much less likely to be marked as spam, and your reputation and inbox placement will increase.
Let’s go through each one - I’m going to talk about option one first because in my opinion, it’s far and above the most likely to save your reputation.
Setting up an engaged segment
An engaged segment is your existing email list, excluding anyone who hasn’t interacted with you in a while (e.g. hasn’t subscribed, opened an email, clicked a link in an email, visited your website, purchased, attended an event).
What’s “a while”? It is up to you - I recommend excluding anyone with activity older than 6 months, and then make it even tighter (e.g. 3 months) if you’re still not seeing an improvement in your reputation.
I actually wrote a guide on how you can create your engaged list/segment in ActiveCampaign, and the methods are similar using any other email provider.
Once you’ve created your engaged segment, only send to it. No more emailing your entire list. I know it’s scary cutting down your list like this (in some cases this could reduce your sends by 80% or more), but it’s necessary.
Wait until you see a steady improvement in your domain reputation (depending on how often you send, this could take a couple of weeks or longer). Then, you can very carefully play around with loosening your segment, however you must tighten it again if you see any signs of reputation dropping again.
This step is so important. Lists that have been sending for a while tend to get clogged with people who aren’t interested any more, email addresses that have become inactive, or email addresses that weren’t legitimate in the first place.
The first two are inevitable and will be excluded over time, but what about those illegitimate email addresses? How do you catch those before they do damage to your reputation?
Cleaning spam signups, spam traps, and list practices
An engaged segment assumes your subscribers are all people who have opted in for your email content because they want to hear from you. But what if they’re not?
One possibility is that spambots attacked your website, and subscribed email addresses that (at best) aren’t real, or (at worst) belong to real people who have never heard of you (and thus will mark you as spam). Sometimes these spam attacks can add 1,000s of contacts to your list within the space of a day.
To identify spam subscriber attacks, look for weird patterns and spikes in your new subscriber reporting that might indicate a spam attack on your mailing list. If you can identify a pattern, that might help you unsubscribe anyone who is obviously spam:
Note the two huge spikes - unless you were are running a huge marketing campaign tied to a specific date, this is a big red flag.
Note the recurring email domain and the identical “Created at” times.
However, it’s not always this easy - sometimes spam attacks happen gradually over time, and sometimes they use legitimate-looking email addresses and/or names that defy pattern-identification.
So how do you stop these from getting on your list, or at least, clean them from your list if they’re already there?
First, let’s talk about how to prevent them ever getting on your list:
beef up your website security to stop spam bots from subscribing in the first place
use double opt-in. This is a contentious one, because it adds friction to the signup process, so I don’t necessarily recommend it. However, it is very effective at reducing the harm that future spam attacks will cause
Second, let’s talk about what to do with spam addresses that are already on your list:
run your list through a tool like ZeroBounce and EmailListVerify to identify all sorts of junk contacts, whether they’re spam, inactive, or even have turned into spam traps. Unsubscribe these contacts from your email marketing
as mentioned above, continue to be vigilant for weird patterns, and unsubscribe any obvious spam
Last, let’s talk about your list opt-in practices:
Never buy lists
Be careful about “assuming” that people should be subscribed if they have only tangentially interacted with you
Here’s an example of point 2: let’s say you were a sponsor for a trade show, who hands over their attendee email list after the show. If the trade show organizers informed all of the attendees about you, and said to expect direct communication from you, that’s good. However, if they didn’t, be careful - emailing these contacts may lead to a bunch of spam complaints because they weren’t expecting to hear from you.
So, just because you receive an email list, doesn’t mean you should always just add them to your main list. As with the engaged segment above, play around and always be ready to exclude contacts again if you see a drop in your reputation.
Making sure subscribers only get emails from you
As I mentioned earlier, Gmail (and Yahoo) released guidelines for email senders earlier this year. Among those were having SPF, DKIM, and a DMARC records, which are all ways of authenticating your domain for email sending.
If you haven’t done those, reach out to your email provider to get help with authentication ASAP.
BUT, the last concern I’ll talk about for domain reputation is called email spoofing. This is when a malicious actor pretends to email people from your domain. This can harm your deliverability because the content of those malicious emails will probably get recipients to mark them as spam.
So, with all the other things that are going on, how do you track and prevent THAT??
I recommend a DMARC platform like DMARC Digests (you can also Google search for “DMARC tools” to see all the other options out there). DMARC is a bit too complex to go into in this article, but these tools will help you identify if there are any malicious actors trying to spoof your email address, and how to take steps to fix it.
Summary
Like I mentioned at the beginning, I’m seeing problems with open rates trend upwards recently, so my hope is that this post offers an easy-to-understand guide for everyone (not just deliverability experts) to take domain reputation into their own hands.
For the TL;DR:
Set up Google Postmaster on your domain ASAP
If your domain reputation is anything other than “High”:
Only send to an engaged segment (anyone who has interacted with you in the last 6 months)
Implement website security or double opt-in to prevent spam signups
Run your existing list through an email verification tool
Only add contacts to your list if they would reasonably expect to hear from you (e.g. express or implied consent)
And if you’re looking for expert help with any of this, please don’t hesitate to grab a time on my calendar 👋
