Follow up on your campaign rates

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You will know 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 send-outs. 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 send-out 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 few words regarding the rates

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.

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 send-out, and the next send-out returns to a “normal” state, it's most likely a temporary issue that don't require immediate action. However, if consecutive send-outs show consistent drops, we recommend taking prompt action.

Do the following:

• Use Engage’s segmentation tool to check the open rates for each of your top five domains during the last affected send-outs. Compare these opens with the statistics for a “normal” send-out. Given the sudden drop in the open rate, it is likely to have occurred on one of your top domains, creating a noticeable impact.

• Once you've identified the domain, reach out to the Inbox Service Provider (ISP), present your case, and request mitigation. If you're unsure about what to communicate, refer to the guidelines provided at the end of this article.

Case 3

To make sure this is not a “Case 2”, we recommend that you start by performing the same check as described above.

If it’s not a “Case 2”, a drop in 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. We suggest that you check your general CRM strategies, such as segmentation and send-out 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.

Many Soft Bounces due to Full Mailbox?
It might be time to adjust your segments or reach out to the soft-bouncing contacts through another channel, maybe SMS.

Many Hard Bounces due to poor spelling?
Look over your sign-up process—confirmed option could solve the problem.

Please see the domain overview statistics for a more in-depth bounce analysis.

Guidelines for contacting the ISPs

For most ISPs, you can reach out to their postmaster address (usually postmaster@domain.com):

• Provide a brief introduction to your business and mention that you utilize our CRM platform for your email communication.
• Express your concern regarding a sudden drop in open rates, emphasizing that your overall send-outs are performing well, except for the specific domain in question.
• Assure the Postmaster that your recipients have willingly opted in, expect to receive communications from your business, and have the option to opt-out from every email.
• If you have users who've contacted support due to non-receipt of your emails, include this information for additional context.
• If you're sending from your own IP, include the IP address in the email. Otherwise, specify that you're sending from Voyado’s IP Pool. (If you're unsure, please contact our support team for assistance.)

For Hotmail, we recommend that you use this form Microsoft Support Request and state your issue in the field “Copy and paste any error messages”.