Help - extremely poor open and clicks (mostly by bots)!

[Marketing_Inte1]

We just started our email marketing efforts recently with a brand new database.

For the first email, I expected some bounces, so not surprised with that. 

What I didn't expect is our open rate and click rate will be so low. We have 6.5% open rate and approx 2% click rate. But when I looked at the details, I found that most of these opens and clicks are from what seems like bots, since they have the same pattern of going through every single link on the email (including our social media links, the privacy policy and unsubscribe), and come from the same set of 3 or 4 large financial institutions..

From 6600 emails sent out, we seem to only have 3 real people that have actually clicked and gone to our landing page! The quality of my emails is decent (sure, everyone has room for improvement). Its definitely not bad enough to warrant click rate of less than .05%!

Does anyone have any other thoughts on what else I should be looking for? Is it possible the emails are going into their bulk/spam folder (not marked as spam, but just not being read)? How could I correct that?

[Amanda_Reilly2]

For new Marketo instances you would want to start to "warm" the instance by only sending to customers, or people that know your company so they actually engage with the email and your sender score can be raised and be more trusted similar to what Amit Jain suggested. Something you can do when someone fills out a form is remind them to look for your domain in their email inbox and add you to their address book, or ask the sales team to remind customers to add the domain to their address book so your company can communicate important updates. 

Purchasing lists is bad practice and against Marketo policy, as mentioned above, and can not only hurt your sender score/Marketo's shared IPs and annoy the person you're emailing, it also gives your brand a bad name too. With the new GDPR-like laws being voted on or implemented in America, purchasing data even from DiscoverOrg is going to become a much dicier situation. 

If you're sending to people who have opted in or are customers, your best bet would be to send a few emails as text-only (no images, little-to-no styling) and make sure your subject lines don't have spam trigger words (the finance industry has several- I usually will check this list before sends: The Ultimate List of Email SPAM Trigger Words)

[Carey_Picklesi7]

One of the biggest issues that I see for customers is the content and quality of the emails. I generally ignore open rates since they aren't as reliable of an email metric. Therefore, I look more to click-through-ratio and custom conversations (such as did they fill out the form you wanted on the page where you directed them?)

Was the content compelling enough for your audience to want to open the email? Did it address a pain point? Was there a solid reason - for the customer - to click through the email? If it was overly salesy or unclear about what the reader gets by clicking through, then you won't get good results. 

People's inboxes are crowded so you have to show your audience that you understand them and offer them value. That includes offering them value for the time it takes to open, read and click an email.

[Ronnie_Duke2]

As inboxes are getting smarter, it's getting tougher and tougher go get in front of people via email. As Vladislav Vagner mentioned, Outlook web has a "Focussed" and "Other" inherently designed to weed out "Marketing" emails from real people. You see this too from Gmail/Google Apps where it auto-sorts into social, updates, promotions, etc. 

From what I've read, the pattern seems to be messages with "Unsubscribe" in the email, as well as amount of images and HTML used in the email body are showing up in these auto sorted tabs more and more and not ever getting in front of user's eyes.

While there are some things you can do to the email (such as cutting down on the graphics and HTML), ultimately cold email is likely to continue showing less and less positive results. As others have alluded to, getting people to engage through quality content is going to yield the best results, but is also the hardest to do. My advice would be to keep focussing on creating relevant content that is easy to find (SEO), and be active in the communities where your prospects tend to hang out such as LinkedIn, or other Social sites (however, I would caution that if you only share "Look at me!" content, it will just add to the noise on these platforms). 

Anyway - I know this was a little beyond the scope of your initial question, but hopefully helps your team going forward.

Best of luck!

[Kiersti_Esparz1]

Marketing Interface Team,

You mention that you mailed to a brand new database, this sounds like these were addresses you had never mailed and who you did not have a previous relationship.  As a reminder, Marketo has an Email Use Policy that is explicitly Opt In.  

Acceptable Use Policy for Adobe Campaign | Adobe 

Prohibition against Unsolicited Email/Spam:

Customers must refrain from directly or indirectly sending, transmitting, distributing, or delivering:

Unsolicited bulk email ("spam" or "spamming”) i.e., emails to persons who have not consented to the receipt of such emails by providing their email address in a manner from which consent to receive email may be reasonably implied.

(ii) Email to an address obtained via Internet harvesting or other surreptitious methods (e.g., scraping, renting, purchased list, co-registration, affiliate marketing, incomplete or old lists; or email appending).  Adobe defines email appending as a marketing practice that involves taking known Customer Data (name, address, etc.) and matching it against a third-party vendor’s database to obtain email addresses.

(iii) Email that generates abuse/spam complaints or spam trap hits resulting in IP/Domain blacklisting or other deliverability issues that could have material impact on Adobe or its client’s reputation.

Marketo and Adobe maintain this policy to help ensure our customers are following the best practices required to avoid violating Privacy laws globally as well as ensure that our customers can achieve the best delivery rates possible by maintaining healthy email reputations.  Unsolicited email is often complained about and is not engaged with, both actions will impact your reputation as a sender and increase the likelihood of mail being delivered to the spam folder or blocked outright.

If you are looking for information on how to leverage cold leads within Marketo while not violating the Use Policy this may be a place to start.

Best Practices for Purchased Data 

Thank you,

Kiersti

https://www.adobe.com/legal/terms/aup.html

[SanfordWhiteman]

What Kiersti Esparza‌said. Spamming a purchased list hurts every other user of the multitenant platform.

In addition, though I'm loath to give advice on how to spam people -- there is no "right" way -- no one asked about other characteristics of these sends. For example, did they violate DMARC policies? Were URLs in the content on a URIBL? Were domains in the SMTP headers already on a DNSBL because of prior unsolicited activity?

[Vladislav_Vagn1]

My first thought for the low click rates is the quality of your list. Sending to cold leads, like those you would get from DOrg, typically have low engagement and do not typically go to the "Focused" inbox in outlook.

Additionally, to see your "real" clicks easier, we have started actually getting that data from Google Analytics. We tag all the links in an email with the campaign, source, and medium (given that the links are pointing to a website that is hooked to GA). Then filter based on those UTM tags for that data in GA to get how many visitors came to the site from the email.

You can even take a step further and subtract all the people that "bounced" on the page to get a number of people who truly engaged with your email. 

[Milena_Volkova]

I also have this question (how to separate "real" clicks by people from automated ones), and I appreciate your response. I just don't understand: if a bot clicks on that link, wouldn't that activity appear with all the same utm parameters in GA? 

[Vladislav_Vagn1]

Yes and no. It all depends if they load that part of the JS. Some bots do, most don't. Which is why I mentioned that last part because subtracting out the people that bounce, will get you a number of leads who have clicked the link in the email and stayed on the LP, which bots won't do. But with this you are also potentially subtracting real people who clicked but then bounced on the site. 

Even if you don't subtract out the bounces, either of these numbers will be closer to the truth than reporting out of Marketo.

Neither are 100% accurate but for my purposes have been close enough to get an idea of how emails are performing.

I have taken it a step further and am marrying this data in Tableau. I am taking the sent, delivered, bounced, opened, and unsubscribed data from Marketo and coupling it with GA data for site sessions, bounces, avg time on site, and goal completions. I am doing this only at the campaign level, so can't see individual email stats but can see campaigns as a whole. This has worked pretty good for us to see what's working, what's not.

[Amit_Jain]

You mentioned that you started with a brand new database, what is the source of this data?

How old is your marketo instance that you used to send out these emails?

Since you mentioned these are from financial institution, you can understand the security level implement there. I have worked in the past with a financial firm and I can tell you it's close to impossible to pass through the email scanner. 

The approach we used was:

1. We first sent emails to those who we know are active or to those who belongs to companies where we have leads engaging with our emails. We continue sending the emails to these for 3-4 weeks.

2. After that we started adding small number every week with keeping an eye on the performance.

3. In addition, we asked our customer advocates to help us whitelisting our IP address on their servers.

[Marketing_Inte1]

Thanks Amit.

The Marketo instance is brand new. The data was sourced from a discoverorg type of service and then passed through neverbounce to ensure emails are valid.

I'm not concerned about getting blocked by spam filters. The concern is more around email that are getting delivered but that go to junk folders instead.

Add to it the fact that from the ones that did click, more than 90% were by firewall bots - i did a manual analysis of every record. So this brings the numbers down quite a bit.

Will try some of the tips you mentioned. Thanks.

[Steven_Vanderb3]

I would suggest a consulting engagement with the Marketo Deliverability team for some advice on how to land in the inbox. A new instance with your brand sending for the first time from new IPs, to addresses that sounds like were possibly purchased instead of organically sourced from interested recipients (please review our policies)....a lot of red flags that will keep your emails out of inboxes. 

[Balkar_Singh]

Just in case you haven't already - would suggest applying a constraint to read only marketable records. You could also apply a spam monitor program to be better-informed of the potential bad leads for next sends. There c/should be much more to check and looking for thoughts here!