#15: What’s Killing Your Email Open Rates (And How to Save Them)

Poor email performance isn’t just a content problem. An outdated contact list and bad sending strategy can tank your email results and put your sending domain at risk down the road. In this episode, Grace and Peter break down why ignoring your email deliverability is one of the most common (and costly) mistakes in marketing. They walk through a real-world case study showing why so many email campaigns result in low open rates. 

You’ll learn how to identify deliverability issues and improve results by validating and segmenting your email list. With this step-by-step approach, your email will get past spam filters, promotions tabs, and ultimately see better performance from start to finish.  

This episode is a must-listen for anyone using email marketing as part of their business development strategy.

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Chapters 

00:00 – Intro

01:23 – Today’s focus: Email health and why it matters

02:30 – Case study: When 100% of Gmail emails go to spam

05:00 – What inbox placement tests reveal

06:48 – What is email list validation and how it works

08:26 – Segmentation strategies that drive results

09:49 – Why unsubscribes aren’t a bad thing

10:28 – Top mistakes causing poor email health

12:00 – Organic list-building vs. purchased lists

13:30 – How to grow better email lists organically

 

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Peter (00:55)Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the Accelerated Velocity podcast where we pay a lot of attention to AI and how it's affecting us, how it's affecting the world and what the future may bring, although we're not necessarily that good at knowing what the future may bring, but we try our best.

(00:01):
Grace (01:16)Peter, how's it going? I know today we're gonna deviate a little bit from AI, right?
Peter (01:23)So today, we're going to look at a couple of subjects that are really important, that AI impacts them, but these aren't generally AI subjects. And one of them is email health.
Grace (01:38)Yeah, and I'll just add that we've been wanting to expand some of the subjects that we talk about here on accelerated velocity based on what we see being impacted by AI in the marketing world and also the sales world as well. But that being said, these are also issues that are age old. I think with email health and email campaign success, we've seen since
the start of InboundAV, clients coming in thinking that they're doing everything right and easily going down a rabbit hole of poor email health. And so we wanted to kind of focus on some best practices to maintain email health and then what to do when you see your deliverability rates or your open rates are tanking and how you can turn that around.
Peter (02:30)Absolutely. And so let's take a look at a case study for email first And and I must say that this is something that's really Appearing more and more frequently to us and this and often the same story your email open rates have tanked you're getting Potentially getting spam complaints all of those problems which can make it look like Email doesn't work anymore. And so I'm gonna start with an anonymized ⁓
Report a deliverability report and we'll take it from there. All right so this is a placement test of where your emails are landing and this is an account that has this it's been sent to what appears to be a solid list and They're getting this really really low, right? And it really sort of defies logic and so that's why one of the first things we went to was to look at
where these emails are landing. And for those of you who are listening to an audio version of the podcast, I'll try to describe what's on the screen now. And the placement test, what's displaying are four figures, inbox percentage, promotion tab percentage, unreceived percentage, and spam percentage. And in this particular case, the inbox,
not a percentage of emails reaching someone's inbox, 36 % promotions tab, 23%. And you know, promotion tab is kind of the next step away from spam because a lot of people don't read the promotion tab. I know that I probably read, I don't know, like 5%. I, hope I look at 5 % of the emails that come into my promotion tab and probably open one, 1 % of them.
So 23 % promotions, 36 % inbox, total of 59%. The unreceived is 0%, so they're all being delivered. Spam is 41 % of all emails and a stunning number. And so I'm going to scroll down to the next slide for those of you who can see it. And this slide shows the overview of where the deliverability problems are happening.
And so it has Gmail, G Suite, Outlook, Microsoft 365, Yahoo, Zoho, and private SMTP. So I'm just going to go over the Gmail products and Outlook and Microsoft 365. This is the most relevant for businesses. So in this particular case, 100 % of emails
that we're going to Gmail or G Suite, the business accounts of Gmail, 100 % of them are going to spam. Oh look, 100 % were going to spam. Microsoft 365, 100 % were being delivered to the inbox. So that's really kind of stark difference, right? Nothing's getting to anybody on Gmail. Everything's getting delivered on Microsoft 365. And then for those of you who can see this, I'll just scroll down through
you know, the more detailed report, which basically says spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, then Microsoft 365 inbox, inbox, shows Zoho and a couple of the things that it shows that there are blacklists out against this email account. And those are things that can be fixed, but you have to make an effort to get your email domain off of these blacklists. So
That's essentially it. so it's really that one report shines a really bright light onto what's going on. What's going on is this particular company's emails are going into spam or going into promotion. And what can you do about it? The first, the real low hanging fruit is you can validate your emails.
Grace (06:48)Yeah, so email list validation basically means you take your marketing contacts from your marketing automation platform or your CRM and you run them through, there are a number of apps that can do this. You run them through a validator and what you get back is a breakdown of results and the types of email addresses that you're sending out to. So it will identify
Email addresses that are no longer with a particular company, people who have left the company, cash all email addresses, something like info at such and such.com. So the validator will kind of categorize things like that and identify email addresses that should just completely be taken out of your marketing list.
Peter (07:34)Basically, what they do is they ping the email address. In other words, they send a message to the email address. And if it comes back in one particular way, it's a valid email. If it doesn't come back at all, it's an invalid email. But then the middle ground is what's known as catch-all. And catch-all usually refers to a situation where a company doesn't close the email account.
of a former employee. want to keep it open. Maybe they want to check up on stuff that was coming in case they miss a lead or something like that. But then they forget to just delete it. They get to eventually turn it off. And so those catch all emails and there can be a lot of them hurt your, it hurts your open rate because none of them are going to get
Grace (08:26)And from there, you can also get really helpful data on segmentation. So segmentation would be that next step after your email list validation, where you go back into your marketing automation platform and you're segmenting out your contact lists in a way that's going to optimize not just the deliverability, but also the open rates of your emails. And I just want to make a distinction too. I think people have a big fear about high
unsubscribe rates and that is a little bit different. So just to make the distinction, we're talking about low open rates and poor email health overall. You have a bad email list. You know, you do want to keep unsubscribe rates down because you want to be sending engaging content that your recipients are resonating with. But at the same time, once you validated your email list, you've weeded out the
crummy emails and you've started segmenting your email list into more targeted segments for marketing. know, seeing some unsubscribers might not be a bad thing. That means you're again weeding out contacts who are receiving your emails and legitimately viewing them and maybe even opening them, but deciding that that content is not for them right now. And that can actually increase the overall effectiveness of an email marketing campaign in the end.
Peter (09:49)Yeah,

(00:22):
and I would say I'd go so far as to say that an unsubscribe is a win because you're getting rid of somebody who's not interested. Nothing wrong with that. And the win part is they didn't put you in spam. They politely unsubscribed or sometimes not so politely unsubscribed, but nevertheless they unsubscribed.
Grace (10:09)Yeah, that spam button is the ultimate thing that you want to avoid, is why you go through that process of livability, validation, et cetera. So Peter, I just wanted to touch on as well, some of those common, maybe mistakes or poor practices that can lead to this situation.
Peter (10:28)I think the biggest category of that is sending to bulk lists. It's more and more important today to segment the lists and to send to a small list that has a particular interest that's going to respond to your emails than to send to a big blast of like, hey, 20 % off sale today only. It's not like you can never do that. But the providers are looking for
the kind of spammy emails that will come from just somebody blasting 20,000 people at the same time or whatever that number is. So that's something to avoid. so really sort of paying attention to the buckets that your contacts should be in. And I think like a perfect example of that would be like an HR firm. And the HR firm may have a hundred thousand job seekers emails who are in the system.
And then they may have ⁓ 2000 potential customers, people who are going to use their services to find the help that they need in their business. And so those are two very distinct populations. So to be ever mixing an email to one population that should go to the other population is just ⁓ miscommunication as far as the person who receives it. So that's some...
Again, the most stark example of it, but there are different shades of this.
Grace (12:00)Yeah, and I would also say when it comes to marketing emails specifically, grow your newsletter list organically because if your content is amazing and it's resonating with your audience, that's not going to make a difference if your newsletter lists are contacts that you've bought or imported in from somewhere else. So you want to make sure, especially when it comes to informational content or promotional content that
That content is specifically getting to people who have opted into that information.
Peter (12:31)Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And I personally recommend purchasing lists, against purchasing lists, like it's the plague to stay away from it. Because you really sort of think about it is, let's say that list has been fully opted in. right, people on the list have said, yes, I want to receive x marketing email. But they haven't said they want to receive your marketing email. And they haven't.
said they want to receive the 20 other people who get that same list email. by the time you get the list, it can already be dead because people are like, what's all this garbage coming into my inbox? it's really, it is. You need to do it organically. You can do it programmically. And that's where AI can come in, where you can really sort of unearth some prospects that could be high value prospects for you.
and add those to a database and sort of very politely reach out and also reach out with an email that's totally written in text, that it doesn't have any flags that it could be a marketing email. And you'll probably be okay. So, but that's an excellent point. That's a major one. All right, so Grace, we've been talking for a while, although when you...
the listeners, any listener out there is listening. You won't know that, but we've been talking for a long time and maybe we have enough for two podcasts in here.
Grace (14:06)Perfect, Peter. Yeah, we'll check back in next week with more AI updates, more marketing and sales strategy stories. Thank you for listening.
Peter (14:18)See you next time.