Sudden Email Open Rate Decrease

Sarah Robie · May 2016

Hi Luminate Users,

I was wondering if anyone has seen a rather unexplainable decrease in open rates for their emails in the past two weeks, since around April 22. We're seeing only about 66% of our typical open rates for large file email sends, yet our email complaint rate still seems low. Our only other thought is to investigate hard and soft bounces (which Luminate is having trouble reporting for us right now), and we've opened up a case with Blackbaud. Please let me know if you've seen similar issues on your end or if you have ideas for other things we can investigate.

Thanks!

Sarah

Liz Pomper · May 2016

Hi Sarah,

I just checked with my colleagues, and we haven't seen a decrease in open rates. I wonder if you could compare a message open report to a delivery recipient report, to see if there's a domain that jumps out as not opening. If so, it may be that ESP that is blocking your messages or diverting them to spam?

Let us know what you find out!

Sarah Robie · May 2016

Thanks, Liz! As it turns out, we discovered that we're seeing an ongoing issue where our gmail recipients are receiving our email in their spam folder. Please let us know if you or anyone you know is also having this delivery issue with Luminate emails.

-Sarah

Liz Pomper:

Hi Sarah,

I just checked with my colleagues, and we haven't seen a decrease in open rates. I wonder if you could compare a message open report to a delivery recipient report, to see if there's a domain that jumps out as not opening. If so, it may be that ESP that is blocking your messages or diverting them to spam?

Let us know what you find out!

Sarah Robie · May 2016

An update to all who are reading this... We discovered that our emails to gmail constituents are being sent directy to their spam folders, regardless of whether they have opened our emails in the past. If you've experienced similar issues recently, I'd love to chat with you to help this get resolved. Please feel free to contact me directly at sarah.robie@wwfus.org.

Thanks!

Sarah

Guzel duChateau · June 2016

Hi Sarah,

I've recently noticed a similar issue for the emails we're sending here at the National Trust. Have you managed to resolve this issue or figure out a workaround?

-Guzel

BJ Gehlhausen · June 2016

Our organinzation is getting reports from our supporters that our emails are causing Outlook to shut down in one case, and Outlook to dramatically slow down in another case. Have either of you had this complaint?

Regarding gmail, our emails are being sent to their promotions tab, rather than their regular inbox. I'm hoping it doesn't eventually send it to the spam folder.

Emily Stevenson · June 2016

We're experiencing similar problems. Since about mid-April we have seen decreased open rates, and although our delivery rates remain 98-99% we are anecdotally getting lots of reports from friends, vendors, and staff subscribed with their personal addresses that our messages are going into their spam folders on Gmail and Yahoo. Vendors that offer inbox monitoring have also begun reaching out to us telling us we have an extremely low Inbox Placement Rate--one recent vendor said that edatasource.com is reporting we have spam placement over 50%.

In April when this first began happening, we immediately tightened our targeting criteria and we now routinely suppress anyone who hasn't opened or clicked more than a couple emails in the past 3 months from all but 2-4 of our top emails each month. We've been using this suppression for 2 months now, which has doubled our open rates, but we are still getting reports of our messages hitting Gmail and Yahoo spam folders even as recently as this weekend, and click and response rates still haven't recovered to where they were pre-April, suggesting that many of the emails going into spam would have in the past gone to people who would have clicked and responded. Our email complaint rate and unsubscribe rates are well below average in all the benchmarks I've seen.

It feels like we are doing all the right things - we're sending emails to tight audiences of recently-engaged subscribers who are opening and clicking and not complaining, yet we can't seem to get out of the spam dungeon. Would love to hear if anyone else has navigated or solved this problem.

Sarah Robie · June 2016

Hi Guzel,

Sorry I missed your post! If you're still seeing these issues (as we are) please email me directly at sarah.robie@wwfus.org. I'd love to connect! Thanks.

Sudden Email Open Rate Decrease

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