Office 365 Configuration Issue?

[Kevin_Lustgarte]

This one's hard to describe but I'll give it a go.

We use Marketo to send a number of newsletters to internal audiences. Our dedicated IP address is whitelisted, and we've had no internal deliverability issues. Here's what I noticed though: a couple of our newsletters had been getting 70-80% open rates for months and months until July of 2019. At that point open rates dropped in half or worse. Again - only going to internal people. One of our IT resources says that we need to make some config changes to Outlook 365 / Azure (?) in order to solve this problem. He says the emails are being delivered; they're not going to SPAM. He asked that I come up with steps needed to re-onboard Marketo in our new Office 365 environment. Any clues, suggestions?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Do they mean that images need to be enabled by default for your sender domain? Strange for them to be cagey about what changes they're suggesting as it's all within your company...

[Kevin_Lustgarte]

Hi Sanford. Thanks for responding. My ETUMOS partner is also considering the issue but no answer yet.

The IT guy I'm working with said we had a similar issue with another vendor's product called, Newsweaver. He says: 

"we had to add newsweaver.com and nw045.com and nw033.com in order for pics and pixel to work." He also says: Mobile and Outlook web access do not have the same security controls as Outlook. He thinks the problem is when people are on Mobile and/or Outlook web access. I dunno.

I have the Internet Header info, if that's helpful.

I'm having enormous trouble submitting a support case today, which is why I'm here in Community. 

[SanfordWhiteman]

AFAIK, Outlook Web Access and Outlook desktop share the same (user- or admin-managed) set of senders for whom images are automatically downloaded.

[Andrea_Spivey]

New poster here. We've had the exact same problem since June 2019. Email newsletters which were previously in the 50-60% open rate suddenly dropped to 30% or below.

Have you ever found out what changes your IT people needed to make? Our IT team has added the Marketo domains to trusted senders and also changed a setting that forces the email addresses of the newsletters to the focused tab, but our open rates have not really improved.