Significant Drop in Open Rates for Trial Nurture

[Jessica_Biblis]

In November 2016, we launched a new trial nurture and we've had really great engagement with it up until about 3 weeks ago, when our open rates dropped by nearly half. We haven't made any changes to the email content or to how the emails are being sent, the cadence and frequency.

I've submitted the emails to mail-tester.com and all have a passing score. I've checked our domain across multiple blacklist checkers, and we're all clear there. I've even reached out to support for guidance, but was given a rather generic response instead of some real help.

I check our domain's Sender Score from Return Path and while the majority of the sending IPs are in the 80-90s, there are some that are not so hot. How can I improve the sender scores for these poor performing IPs? Is there any way to control that if we don't have a dedicated IP with Marketo?

Any other advice for troubleshooting what could be causing such a significant drop?

[Robb_Barrett]

How are your delivery and send rates?Are you seeing non-nurture emails performing as well as expected or have those dropped too? 

[Jessica_Biblis]

Hi Robb,

Our deliverability rates are good, generally no less than 97%. Non-nurture emails have taken a hit, but not nearly as dramatic as our trial nurture. Anecdotally, I sent some sample emails to my test account, simply to QA the email itself, and all three went to my junk. Today, a colleague signed up for our trial with some test leads, and both welcome emails went to spam. A new hire was added as a customer last week, and two of three of the onboarding emails went to spam as well.

We're definitely having some inbox placement issues--now I'm just trying to figure out the best course of action for diagnosing what's causing the spam issue and how to correct it.

[Anonymous]

Hi Jessica,

We are having the same issues on our end. Deliverability rates are healthy, IPs are healthy, nothing has been changed to our automated programs, yet we are seeing a significant decline in Open Rates which is directly impacting revenue.

Have you been able to get further assistance/guidance/insight from Marketo? All we got from Marketo so far is that there "seems" to be issues with google apps. Otherwise, nothing actionable.

Cheers,

Melissa

[Jessica_Kao3]

Has there been a change or an update on the Email Client side like google, outlook that is placing your emails not in the primary inbox?  Just throwing it out there?

[Anonymous]

Hi Jess K,

That's exactly what we are thinking - although, we tested quite a few emails and they have been landing in the promotions tab since last year (which is correct, because most of the emails are promotional emails) but their OR have significantly dropped in the last few weeks. A bit stumped as to what is causing the OR drop. Delivery rates are healthy, send numbers are stable, CTOR is proportional/stable, IPs are health o_0

[Jessica_Biblis]

Hi Melissa,

We met with a Marketo deliverability expert yesterday and got some more insight. While overall our delivery rates are great, there are so specific problem domains in which our delivery rates were very poor. We're taking some measures to exclude those domains from our mailings. Marketo's team suggested that this may be contributing to our emails going to spam.

We're making some changes to our targeting as well. Tightening up what we define as an inactive lead so that we're only sending to those who are most engaged and most likely to interact with the email. We were doing some occasional wide-net sends that I think ended up hurting us in the long run.

Good luck on getting your rates back up!