What to do when email click rates and open rates decline rapidly?

Key findings

• Reputation Impact: A sudden decline in rates is often a direct indicator of a damaged sender reputation, which can take time to rebuild. Recovering domain reputation is a gradual process.
• Underlying Causes: Problems are rarely due to the email service provider's (ESP) infrastructure, but more commonly stem from sender-side actions or list quality issues. Many factors contribute to a sudden drop in email open rates, which is crucial to diagnose quickly.
• Time for Recovery: Email reputations are built over time, so expect recovery to be a multi-week or even multi-month effort rather than an immediate fix.
• Authentication Failures: Ensure proper email authentication protocols like DMARC, SPF, and DKIM are correctly configured. Misconfigurations can lead to emails landing in spam folders, severely impacting rates. You can find a simple guide to DMARC, SPF, and DKIM here.
• Content and Engagement: Beyond technical issues, declines can also be linked to stale content, inconsistent sending frequency, or a lack of compelling calls to action (CTAs).

Key considerations

• Holistic Diagnosis: Diagnose the problem comprehensively, looking at technical setup, list health, content strategy, and engagement metrics.
• Avoid Quick Fixes: Be wary of solutions promising instant results, as reputation rebuilding is an incremental process. Focus on sustainable long-term strategies.
• Seek Support: Leverage your ESP's support team for platform-specific troubleshooting, as they have direct insight into your sending infrastructure.
• Monitor Continuously: Implement ongoing monitoring of deliverability metrics, domain reputation, and blocklist status to catch issues early and prevent rapid declines. You can use tools for blocklist checking regularly.
• Content Optimization: Re-evaluate your email content for relevance, personalization, and clear value propositions. Engagement driven by strong content is key to improving rates.

Key opinions

• Urgency is Key: A rapid decline in engagement rates is considered a critical business issue, particularly when tied to launch deadlines or revenue goals. Marketers want immediate insights and steps.
• ESP Role: Some marketers suspect ESPs might switch IP pools, impacting deliverability, though this is often not the primary cause. Most understand that the ESP's support channel is the appropriate route for troubleshooting.
• Internal Responsibility: Many acknowledge that issues might stem from their own sending practices, such as list quality or content changes, rather than external factors. Template redesigns can also affect open rates, for example.
• Trust in Support: Experienced marketers emphasize the effectiveness of dedicated support teams for resolving complex deliverability challenges. For more information, see KlientBoost's guide on improving email open rates.
• List Hygiene: Inactivity or incorrect data in email lists can significantly impact deliverability and engagement, highlighting the importance of regular list cleaning.

Key considerations

• Open Support Tickets: For critical issues, the most effective first step is to open a formal support ticket with your email service provider, ensuring you are an authorized account user.
• Internal Review: Before escalating, conduct an internal audit of recent email campaigns, list management practices, and any changes in sending volume or frequency. You can also review what causes sudden email open rate drops for specific campaign types.
• Content Freshness: Re-evaluate the compelling nature of your subject lines and email content. Stale content can lead to decreased engagement. Discover how to increase email click-through rate.
• Audience Segmentation: Ensure your audience segmentation is robust and that you are sending relevant content to the right people. Sending to disengaged segments can drag down overall performance.

Key opinions

• Sender Responsibility: Deliverability issues causing drops in rates are overwhelmingly attributed to sender actions, not the ESP's infrastructure. This includes poor list quality, high bounce rates, or increased spam complaints.
• Reputation is Gradual: Building a positive email reputation takes significant time and consistent effort. Therefore, fixing a damaged reputation cannot be rushed. Learn more about how long it takes to recover domain reputation.
• Solvable, but Complex: While all deliverability problems are solvable, they require a deep dive into historical sending practices and data, making quick fixes uncommon. This is part of a larger set of email deliverability issues.
• Content and Engagement Matters: Poor email content, irrelevant messaging, and lack of audience engagement directly correlate with declining open and click rates, signaling to ISPs that your emails are not valuable.
• Authentication is Foundational: Ensuring proper email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) is a fundamental step, as failure here can immediately trigger spam filters and lead to rate drops. Sometimes, even after fixing email authentication, drops can occur, indicating deeper issues.

Key considerations

• Data Analysis: Thoroughly analyze sending data, including bounce rates, complaint rates, and engagement over time, to pinpoint the exact moment of the decline and potential triggers.
• Long-Term Strategy: Focus on implementing sustainable changes to list acquisition, content strategy, and sending frequency that will improve reputation over time. As a rule, confirm compliance standards with sender requirements.
• List Cleaning: Regularly clean email lists to remove inactive subscribers, hard bounces, and known spam traps. This prevents further damage to sender reputation. For more detail, see how spam traps work.
• Engagement Monitoring: Pay close attention to engagement metrics beyond opens and clicks, such as unsubscribes and spam complaints, as these are direct signals to ISPs.

Key findings

• Authentication Standards: Major email providers (like Gmail and Yahoo) increasingly enforce strict authentication protocols (SPF, DKIM, DMARC). Failures can lead to direct rejection or placement in spam, severely affecting open rates. For example, Outlook has new sender requirements.
• Engagement Metrics: ISPs monitor user engagement signals (opens, clicks, replies, deletes without opening, spam complaints) to determine inbox placement. A drop in positive engagement or rise in negative signals will lower deliverability.
• List Quality: Sending to invalid or inactive addresses inflates bounce rates and triggers spam traps, which are critical indicators of poor list hygiene and can cause sudden drops in reputation.
• Content Relevance: Content that is not personalized or relevant to the recipient segment can lead to low engagement, or worse, spam complaints, impacting future delivery. This is highlighted in Orbit Media Studios' success factors.
• Sender Reputation Systems: ISPs use complex algorithms to assign sender reputation scores based on a multitude of factors, affecting whether emails reach the inbox or spam folder. Declines are often due to a negative shift in this score.

Key considerations

• Implement DMARC, SPF, DKIM: Ensure these authentication protocols are correctly configured and enforced. Monitor DMARC reports for compliance and potential issues. You can use a free DMARC record generator tool.
• Monitor Deliverability Tools: Utilize ISP-specific tools like Google Postmaster Tools to track your domain's reputation, spam rate, and authentication errors. This is crucial for understanding Google Postmaster Tools domain reputation.
• Maintain List Hygiene: Regularly clean your email list, remove inactive subscribers, and use double opt-in to ensure high-quality contacts.
• Optimize Content & Personalization: Focus on creating engaging, relevant content tailored to segments of your audience to drive positive engagement metrics.