It’s a question that I have to deal with all too often. When it comes to open rates, there’s a huge variety of reasons why they could be declining. Many people are inclined to treat the symptoms of a declining open rate (change subject lines, provide more engaging content, etc.) but they never actually find the underlying reason.
That’s why Root Cause Analysis is so important when it comes to email.
More often than not, marketers will ask “why” but they will not continue to ask it over and over again.
Open rate decline can be a blaring symptom for a bigger problem within your email program. IP reputation, deliverability issues, spam scores, and missing email authentication integrations can all be the root behind the decrease in open rate.
When you see declining open rates over time, it’s important to ask these questions to get to the root cause:
- When did the decline originally occur and were there other changes made during this time?
- When was the last time the health of your email program was evaluated?
- Why did people stop opening the emails?
Past that, looking at the three basic causes can help formulate answers as well:
- Physical causes: Are your emails not actually making it to the inbox? Are you getting spammed box? Is your reputation being damaged by the people you are sending to?
- Human causes: Are people just not interested in your emails? Is it purely a content issue?
- Organizational causes: Is your company not supporting email? Is there enough technical support for the email program?
In order for open rate to increase, you cannot just send an email with a catchy subject line and expect the same results every time. It is crucial instead to fix the underlying issue to prevent a decline in the future.
Source: https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMC_80.htm
Hi Shannon – super helpful. We are just starting to get into email marketing at my job (healthcare is always 10 years behind) and these are good tips that could easily turn into a formulated processes for after each email blast is sent out.
Awesome to hear! And genuinely, if you need any help with email marketing just let me know. More than happy to share my knowledge!
Hi Shannon, thought your post was relevant since my Marketing team recently dropped an email about two weeks ago with an open rate of 20%. As you mentioned looking beyond the subject line and email content is necessary to dive into the “real” reason why recipients aren’t opening. In 2017 the average open rate across all industries was 24.7% and it’s known that about 20% of all emails delivered never make it to the recipients inbox. Some additional factors which can affect the open rate include timing of deployment, email personalization, mobile optimization, email segmentation. Conducting A/B testing and really analyzing the data of previous email campaigns can certainly shed light to exactly what needs to be improved for future campaigns.
Here’s the article based on my references: https://www.superoffice.com/blog/email-open-rates/
Thanks for sharing this additional info! Every company I have done email for so far has been dealing with open rate as their number one issue. That 20% of emails that aren’t getting delivered is killing sender scores and sometimes it’s too late before you realize it!
Since this is also my realm and my team also runs the deployment platform I can give some insight into other areas you can look into in determining your root cause on why 20% of your emails aren’t even being delivered.
1. Audience targeting and customer database: Make sure the info is correct in format and up to date for each customer. We ran into an issue with the list we were deploying to had added a space to the end of to some of the email addresses that unless you put your cursor in each cell you wouldn’t know. Those all failed. Also do you run a suppression file against your list of known fail to deliver email addresses? That helps a lot on deliverability.
2. It make not be you. Some ISPs when they’re getting slammed with email and traffic will block your emails. Comcast is notorious for it. Throttling and time of day you send helps with this.
3. Which leads me to, also timing your campaigns with others if they are going out off the same platform. ISPs can’t tell the difference if your whole company is deploying from the same server/IP address. Then you run into issue number 2.
Hope this helps!