Hello,
We send a series of weekly onboarding emails to new users, triggered by the user's provision date. We had been running this program with GainSight for some time and were consistently seeing open rates over 30%, some months up to 35%. Once we switched the program over to Marketo, our open rates immediately dropped to just over 20%. The subject lines, "from" & "reply-to" addresses stayed the same, as did the cadence of the sends. One possible cause could from discrepancies in the smart lists that pull in the users to the recipient list but we checked/tested them a million times and I just don't see how the small differences in recipient lists could account for this big of a drop in open rates.
The only thing i can think of would be if the email clients our customers are using can tell when an incoming email is being sent by a marketing automation tool like Marketo and the email gets quarantined, is that a thing? I know we are on a shared IP and some of our emails have hit spam traps but our delivery rate is still at almost 98% and none of that should affect open rates. I have also noticed that the open rate dropped much more sharply for our Enterprise clients than Mid-Market or SMB. Are there some security measures that our customers (especially enterprise-level) could be using that quarantine emails without Marketo counting them as "bounced"? So our delivery rate would remain high but the customers would never actually see the emails and open rates would drop?
Any help would be much appreciated, getting pretty desperate. Thanks
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