Gmail Open Rates Fall Off Cliff - Is it the Automation Provider's Server?

Your marked as spam and unsub rates are usually treated the same as a complaint.
Most major ESP's have a tolerance level of 0.1%. Anything between 0.1-0.3%, your going to be given warnings and anything over 0.3% is going to cause account termination.
Gmail has determined your email contact to be spammy in nature, causing your high unsub and complaint rates, which is why they have shut the front door on allowing your mails through.

That's the first I've heard unsubscribes being treated the same as a complaint. Technically the email recipient's server knows nothing about when someone presses unsubscribe, only the mark as spam button. ESPs encourage a clear unsub link to prevent spam complaints.

Does someone else have some info on this - unsub == complaint? I'd understand an ESP would keep an eye on this for their own TOS (to prevent actual spam complaints) but I can't see why it would affect delivery rates directly. From the data I've found our unsubscribe rate is average for the industry but the open rate is well above.

Our account manager & support has not tied this to our actual complaint/spam rate which is at 0.07%.

I know that we must be ending up in the gmail spam folder but trying to work out whether it's their mail server or our domain.

I just looked at our stats again and we have a complaint rate of 0.024% All Time. 0.022% for the last 30 days and 0.029% for the last 90 days.

Might have gotten yourself on a black list.

Could try mail-tester, that'll tell you if you are raising any flags with spam cannibal, it also checks a few blacklists for you.

How were the emails acquired and have they been verified?

I imagine you're sending from shared IP's and not dedicated ones, what ESP are you using?

If you test a single email to a private Gmail account is it automatically going into the spam filter? If so generally it gives you a reason, sometimes this is helpful other times somewhat useless.

Also make sure your SPF records are set up correctly for the domain you're sending from.

Thanks, moss! That was a big help and has given me some info to go back to support with.

The provider is Sharpspring and I just sent a preview email to the mail-tester site. The server they're using is blacklisted on sorbs-spam and spamcannibal. (Our domain is not on any blacklists btw).

Their SPF is reported to be correct but I'm getting an error for:

...so I'll investigate that and pass it onto their support for assistance.

I'm hands-on technical but have no experience with this stuff and I honestly thought the provider would be proactive with these issues; especially when I told them about the sudden drop rate.

Are you not using seed accounts to test your message(s) deliverability?

Yes, we discovered there was a problem and reported it. I'm just trying to get the message across to support that the problem is with their server and not our content or the content's history. Moss provided some help which shows some technical issues that need to be resolved.

If I may make a few suggestions.

Know the domain makeup of your list(s) and create seed accounts for the top domains.

Most of the ti,e having seeds for aol, yahoo, gmail and hotmail/outlook, can account for upto 90% of a list. This includes domains that use the same mx for the parent domain.

Test your messages with the seeds. It is best to set the seeds up as a stand alone list and when you send them, do not use the the test function (if using an autoresponder) as they can send the test using a different IP pool or may not include the can-spam info. So always send them as an actual mailing, that way you will get the same results.

Also add the seeds to your lists, so that anytime the list is sent you can check the deliverability. This way you can catch problems early on.

If a message goes to the spam folder, you ideally want to learn how to fix it or identify what the problem is, if it is something that you can't fix and have ot fixed.

Basically you can break it down into 3 areas.

Backend setup: rdns, spf, dkim, etc.

IP / domain reputation: any ip or domain anyway connected to the message

Content: any part of the message body, including the template

Anyone that makes their living mailing or aspires to, should be doing this!

Thanks, Diabl0. Very good tips. I do have some accounts setup on gmail, hotmail and yahoo which I check with but obviously not often enough. This client doesn't broadcast, just an automated series (with logic based on what they do on the site and with the emails) over 14 days so I'll have to setup a seed list to broadcast to and check more often. It's been a wake-up call. There hasn't been an issue for 10 months with nearly 100k emails sent so thought I was all good... that's my bad and lesson learnt!

I wasn't aware of the backend setup requirements when using a marketing automation service which is frustrating and I'm a bit annoyed that their support hasn't mentioned or checked that either.

As a Gmail user, in recent days I've noticed a higher than average number of messages I want going to the spam folder.

This happens every 2-3 months and then it seems to resolve.

That's just a guess at what may be happening for you but it's something I've noticed this week.

So I finally got out of Sharpspring support that they migrated us over to a different sending server (Sendgrid) and failed to let us know (or at least run some tests first). I noticed that we did actually go through the DKIM setup when the account was first created but the new server meant those settings were now wrong.

Any recommendations for a marketing automation service that includes workflow logic (based on what they do on the website/data they submit etc) for 20k email sends per month? Leads grow by 100-150/day but I realise these will have to get purged more often with certain providers. My logic is that they've already moved us to a new server so we may as well change provider now to one who will provide better support - I don't know if that's right or not. I think we're paying about $800/mo currently.