Newsletter Clicks down after switch from MailChimp

[Anonymous]

Hello,

My organization started sending newsletters out of Marketo last week. Previously we had sent newsletters out of MailChimp.

The Daily Newsletter (sent Monday - Friday) has ~22k subscribers, and the Weekly Newsletter (sent Saturday) has ~85k subscribers.

The newsletter's deliverability (~99.8%) and open rates have not changed much during this transition, but clicks have dropped drastically -- particularly on the sponsored banner ads (down from an average .4% to .04%).

The template has changed slightly, so tomorrow we will replicate the old MailChimp template in Marketo and test on half of the subscribers. But still, we don't think the new template would cause this kind of drop in CTR.

Has anyone else experienced a drop in CTR when switching to Marketo for large sends? Any ideas on what could be the issue here, or does anyone have suggestions on what we should try?

Thanks!

Derek

[Justin_Cooperm2]

To confirm, our Email Performance Report only shows you "Clicked Emails", meaning "at least one link was clicked" in the email. If you want to see "total clicks" you'll want to use the Email Link Performance Report. Is this currently how you're looking at the metrics? When you are comparing to MailChimp, what is the exact metric you're looking at? The total clicks for a certain link?

[Anonymous]

Hi Justin,

I currently am looking at metrics in the Email Link Performance Report.

And when comparing to MailChimp, I'm looking at both unique and total clicks of the banner ad link.

[Justin_Cooperm2]

Definitely not sure then. But, last question. How are you defining the percentages? Are you manually diving unique clicks ("Leads" in the ELPR) by the # delivered? Because we don't show you those percentages in that report.

[Anonymous]

We are manually coming up with the percentages.

The ads in the MailChimp newsletter were getting 60-40 unique clicks per email. The range of unique clicks of the ads in the Marketo newsletter is 14-6 so far.

Could it be that more emails are being sent to spam because we just started using Marketo?

[Brent_Baker1]

Did you set up the DKIM and SPF so the recipient mail server knows it is approved by/part of the domain of the email from address?

[Steven_Vanderb3]

There are email link scanners that test the safety of links before delivering the message to the recipient's mailbox by clicking on them.  This can inflate click rates because they look the same as clicks by humans.  If you noticed a sudden drop in clicks after switching to Marketo, but not much of a change in deliveries or opens, it's possible that link scanners are more trustworthy of your emails now and are not testing links as often.  Especially if your sponsored banner was one of the first clickable regions of the emails; often link scanners check the first link.

[Brent_Baker1]

Our numbers are dropping fast! We have the configurations all correct but the shared IP addresses of marketo servers are bad. Submitted a case and hope to have it resolved fast.

Here is a reply from an admin (Richard) at spamcop.net (deputies@admin.spamcop.net) in reference to marketo IP 199.15.213.53

This is a shared IP belonging to mktomail, which has been sending spam

to our traps and/or users. We have seen a large increase in spam from

mktomail IP space, causing more of their IP addresses to be listed.

You will have to discuss the problem with mktomail and perhaps ask to be

moved to an IP that doesn't send spam.