In June, Gmail and Yahoo enforced new email sending guidelines that changed the email deliverability ecosystem to hinge mainly on individual sender practices, not just an ESP’s overall reputation.
But what does this mean for your creator business?
Put simply, your email sending behavior impacts deliverability.
Naturally, this brings up a lot of questions. A few creators reached out to ask about drops in their open rates, a universal trend seemingly tied to Gmail and Yahoo’s new email sender guidelines.
Let’s take a look at what happened.
The situation
A creator with about 25,000 subscribers saw their open rates drop drastically. We’re talking about a 60% drop.
Their domain reputation with Gmail had slipped from High to Medium (as shown in Google Postmaster Tools), meaning they started seeing unreliable inbox placement. Spam filtering also typically starts at a reputation score of medium and a user-reported spam rate of 0.3%, impacting deliverability.
Additionally, the creator hadn’t made any big changes recently. For example, their subscriber count hadn’t grown much, and they’d kept the same sending cadence.
The strategies
Kit’s Deliverability Team identified the main problem: the creator hadn’t engaged with their subscribers for months.
Our insights noticed a large gap of several months between their last high-performing email and the recent low-performing campaigns.
To help, we shared the following action points:
- Focus on sending emails to currently engaged subscribers
- Re-engage cold subscribers in small batches once their domain reputation with Gmail recovers to High
- Maintain consistent email sending schedules, at least 4-8x a month
Take action: Read our deliverability tips to re-engage subscribers or listen to our podcast episode.
The result
Using our suggestions, the creator’s domain reputation quickly bounced back to High after excluding cold subscribers from their email campaigns, and open rates returned to normal after a few weeks of consistently engaging with their subscribers.
Take action: Learn easy tips and tricks to improve open rates.
Key takeaway
Remember, inbox providers closely monitor your email activity. They take notice when you repeatedly send emails to unengaged subscribers. If this pattern continues, inbox providers may start directing your emails to spam folders due to a lack of engagement (i.e., opens or clicks).
Kit’s Deliverability Performance
Despite significant changes to the deliverability landscape, our delivery and open rates remain strong.
Here’s a quick look at our performance over the last three months:
This quarter, we sent over 7 billion emails (7,047,913,149 to be exact). Our system-wide delivery rate held strong at 99.6%.
When messages are sent, they can be delivered, or they can bounce. For more info, read up on how email deliverability operates. But for the TLDR—the more messages delivered, the better!
It’s inevitable for some messages to bounce due to invalid addresses, full mailboxes, etc., but a good delivery rate indicates healthy deliverability for Kit.
We consider a system-wide delivery rate of 98% and above very healthy.
Our high delivery rate indicates a healthy reputation for Kit, which gives our customers a solid foundation for their email deliverability.
On top of that, our open rates averaged a high 41% this quarter.
Creators often ask how their open rates stack up to others. The truth is open rates can vary greatly depending on your industry and audience type (B2B vs. freemail addresses, for example).
However, you can use a general scale to measure your performance.
In the email industry, a complaint rate of less than 0.1% is seen as healthy. An elevated complaint rate signals that the sender’s quality of mail isn’t good.
We have a team dedicated to ensuring the recipients want the mail sent from Kit. Our complaint rate this quarter was 0.01%, which speaks to the high quality of mail sent by our customers and the healthy reputation of our infrastructure.
Our system-wide complaint rate remains over 10x lower than the industry standard.
For more of a deep dive into all things email deliverability, check out the new season of Deliverability Defined.
If you have questions or recommendations for a new season, send them our way!
Note: Some details in this case study have been altered to protect privacy.
