You can understand the effect of your campaigns by reviewing delivery rates, open rates, click rates, and bounce rates. This follow-up work is key for your long-term deliverability strategy.
A high delivery rate, together with a high open rate, is what you're aiming for with all sendouts. Meanwhile, low bounce rates mean that your list management and complaint rate are well maintained.
Sometimes you may see a high delivery rate but a low open rate, be it a significant drop for one specific sendout or a successively decreasing open rate. There are some tips and tricks to keep up your sleeve for managing such cases.
Four example cases
A delivery rate at 99% and above is considered good, while a good bounce rate is ideally lower than 1%. We encourage you to regularly investigate your delivery rates to improve your reach and list quality.
The typical open rate can vary between businesses, making it challenging to provide an exact percentage for sudden drops or changes over time.
| Delivery rate | Open rate | Bounce rate | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Case 1 | Good | Normal | Good |
| Case 2 | Good | Sudden drop | Good |
| Case 3 | Good | Drop over time | Good |
| Case 4 | Lower than good | – | High |
Case 1
Business as usual, everything looks good. All you need to do is keep monitoring.
Case 2
A sudden drop may suggest that emails are being delivered to the domain but not reaching the intended recipient. This suspicion arises when the delivery rate remains normal, yet there is an abrupt decline in the open rate. While a drop in open rate could indicate a gradual loss of recipient interest, sudden declines are typically more temporary.
If you notice a sudden drop in the open rate for one sendout, and the next sendout returns to a "normal" state, it's most likely a temporary issue that doesn't require immediate action. However, if consecutive sendouts show consistent drops, we recommend taking prompt action.
Do the following:
- Use Engage's filtering tool to check the open rates for each of your top five domains during the last affected sendouts. Learn more about this here.
- Once you've identified the domain, reach out to the Inbox Service Provider (ISP), present your case, and request mitigation. If you're unsure what to say, refer to the guidelines further down.
Case 3
To confirm this not a "Case 2", we recommend that you start by performing the same check as described above. If you decide it's not a "Case 2", a drop in the open rate over time generally means that your recipients are not as active as they used to be. This doesn't have to be a deliverability issue.
Check your general CRM strategies, such as segmentation and sendout frequency.
Case 4
If your delivery rate is below 95%, it's advisable to investigate. We recommend reviewing the bounce details to understand the reasons and take steps toward a solution.
Do you have many soft bounces due to full mailbox? Then it might be time to adjust your segments or reach out to the soft-bouncing contacts through another channel, maybe SMS.
Do you have many hard bounces due to email addresses being incorrect? Check your sign-up process; an extra confirmation step could solve the problem.
Please see the domain overview statistics for a more in-depth bounce analysis.
Guidelines for contacting ISPs
For most ISPs, you can reach out to their postmaster address (usually postmaster@domain.com):
- Give a quick introduction to your business and mention that you use Engage for email sendouts.
- If the problem is lower open rates, express concern about a sudden drop in open rates, emphasising that your overall sendouts are performing well apart from the domain in question.
- If the reason is bounces, express your concern about an increase in bounces, and supply the bounce reason. Emphasise that your overall sendouts are performing well, apart from the domain in question.
- Assure the postmaster that your recipients have willingly opted in, expect to receive transactional communications from your business, and have the option to opt-out from every email.
- Inform the postmaster if you have users who've contacted support due to non-receipt of emails.
- If you're sending from your own IP, include the IP address. Otherwise, specify that you're sending from Voyado's IP Pool. (If you're unsure, contact Voyado support for help.)