Open rates dropped drastically in a short period of time

Emily Kobel

Hi everyone! I have an odd situation and I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced this and has some insight.


My organization began using BBNC to deploy a monthly newsletter (among other emails) in January 2018. Our open rates were continually improving, reaching their highest total (approx 20%) over the summer. In October we had an 18% open rate. Then in November our open rate dropped to approx 10% and stayed there for December and January. Our February open rate dropped again to 6%. A similar trend started occurring with a weekly email we send out, except those open rates started dropping at a later time (around January). During this time, we did not change the day of the week that we send these emails on.


While I know a drop in open rates could be related to a drop in readership, we have never seen such low figures before. Prior to using BBNC, we used another deployment system where we averaged a 15% open rate, often times higher. I pulled a list of constituents who opened the newsletter in October 2018 and then stopped opening, but I'm not seeing any patterns or similarities among those email addresses (in terms of domain, soft bounces, etc). We removed hard bounces from our lists, but so far that hasn't seemed to improve things. Some constituents who are no longer opening the newsletter do sometimes open other types of emails we send and do open emails from other departments in our organization (which use a different sender email name and address). I contacted BBNC support but they said between October 2018 and now nothing has changed in regards to what they define as an open rate.


Has anyone experienced something like this? Did you develop any solutions for emails going forward? Could this be a spam filter issue? I ran our emails through a free spam tester online but received fine results. 

Alicia Barevich

I haven't done a readership analysis, but we certainly have gotten far more complaints from parents that they didn't receive certain emails from us than I ever remember. Specifically, this is in relation to emails sent in the last 6 weeks or so.

Emily Kobel

Thanks, Alicia. I wonder if anyone else has been experiencing the problem.

Elizabeth Perron

Hi Emily and Alicia,


Peer to peer answers is the goal in the community. However, I see you opened a ticket with Support to troubleshoot.  I hope you will continue working with them as we wait on other peers to answer.   I want you to get any technical issues resolved as quickly as possible.


In harmony,

Elizabeth

Blackbaud Community Team

Jayne OLeary

Hi Emily

We too have been tracking our open rates over the last 18-24 months with our house list. At BBCON18 I presented on this and the need to segment and stop sending to your largest list for the exact same reason you are currently experiencing. Overall this is a problem not necessarily having to do with your provider, across the board if you send via Constant Contact or Emma or Outlook, Blackbaud (in our case NetCommunity) open rates are falling drastically. You may have great months as we do in September or January (as a higher education institution) but the trend is still downward. I can only presume that recipients in general are just OVER receiving so much in there inboxes and with the newer updates to spam some recipients are getting the message. And there is the rub in all this...Spam Traps look for non-opened valid recipient emails. So my suggestion would be to limit the amount of times you email your house list, use the preview and subject text that is unique and specific and message aligned and start segmenting the population into specific queries and email to those groups. I find that with the smaller lists I get better open rates.

Let me know how you make out.

Jayne OLeary

Emily Kobel

Thank you, Jayne, for that insight! I will take that into consideration going forward with our lists.