Email open rate low for gmail and yahoo domains

[Anonymous]

Hi community folks,

I recently ran into a deliverability issue. Gmail and Yahoo are marking my acquisition emails as spam (according to litmus tests). So I first contacted the marketo support and was told I needed to double check the configuration of DKIM and SPF. But I checked with our network admin and found no issue with those configurations.

so I then went into those emails and found some bad links (I don't know how healthy links all of a sudden were changed into 404 urls prefixed with a marketo prefix string). Then I went ahead and changed those urls back to normal landing page urls.

After above is done, my daily drip continue to get low open rate of 6%-8% which sucks. As a result, the amount of clicks/leads I am getting dropped by half. So I then ran an analysis, still, gmail and yahoo domains are pushing my email into spam (in marketo it shows delivered, but those two domains are not getting opens).

At this point, I think gmail and yahoo somehow have both black listed my sender or my email content. Is there any quick fix I can apply to my drip of emails so the open rate can be fixed?

Thank you so much!

Li

[SanfordWhiteman]

I recently ran into a deliverability issue. Gmail and Yahoo are marking my acquisition emails as spam (according to litmus tests). So I first contacted the marketo support and was told I needed to double check the configuration of DKIM and SPF. But I checked with our network admin and found no issue with those configurations.

Does your network admin actually know how to check those configurations? It's very unlikely that SPF has any relevance to your situation (you have to pay extra to Marketo for it to matter).  But DKIM can't just be passively checked. Does Gmail show a DKIM failure?  You can send me an email to figureonecpr+liu01@gmail.com and I'll see if anything screams out.

[Anonymous]

Hi Stanford,

I just sent you one of my emails. Thank you for helping out. Let me know what you see is breaking and I can fixed it

Li

[SanfordWhiteman]

Well, you're passing DKIM and SPF. The message is being sent to spam due to content: it's not sufficiently differentiated from cold spam you'd send to a purchased list. Can only suggest that you rework the messaging.

[Anonymous]

that is great to know there is no issue with DKIM and SPF!!! Do you think other than the content, there is something about the sender's reputation? Because this drop of open rate happened all of a sudden (same content). So I wonder if Gmail and Yahoo flagged us on the same date? I mean it just doesn't make sense to me that open rate all of a sudden dropped. Have you heard of a similar experience before?

[SanfordWhiteman]

That's the experience you'd have if you sent the content to a new set of purchased leads.

[Anonymous]

I had an interesting find!!! So after you mentioned about content, I narrowed down the issues in the content by removing one thing at a time to find the root cause. What surprised me was once I changed sender (the sender was definitely blocked by gmail), and removed the token (for dynamic first names) in the body of the email, this email passed gmail and yahoo in litmus test. Does that mean I should not use a token in an acquisition email? What are your thoughts? Does Marketo do anything to expose the tokens to gmail when we send emails to them? What should I do next to fix this email? Thank you!!!