Average Email Open Rates by Industry in 2021

Has your average email open rate taken a nosedive recently? There’s a good chance your content is not to blame. If you've started to wonder, "is my email going to spam?", you’re on the right track. Your real problem is probably not content, it's more likely poor email domain reputation causing poor email deliverability.

Did you know that 21% of legitimate marketing emails never make it to the inbox? For senders with the lowest email sender reputation scores, less than 1% of their email gets delivered! So how do you improve your email domain reputation? How do you make sure YOUR emails aren’t the ones that end up in SPAM? Let's find out.

In this article, we’ll first look at what tools you can use to diagnose a domain reputation issue and then how you can fix your issue with emails going to spam.

TOOLS TO CHECK YOUR EMAIL DOMAIN REPUTATION

Google Postmaster Tools - Setting up Google Postmaster Tools is highly recommended for anyone who is serious about email marketing. It allows you to see exactly where you stand with the world’s largest email inbox provider on metrics like spam rate, email domain reputation and authenticated traffic.

The only downside of Google Postmaster tools is it does require your to verify ownership of your domain to see your data.

SenderScore.org - Sender Score by Return Path is probably the best-known service that tracks email sender reputations. The reputation of your email sending IP’s are scored on a scale of 0 to 100 based on data from Return Paths Reputation Network.

According to Return Path: “senders scoring 91-100 (the best possible reputation score) saw 92 percent of their messages delivered to the inbox.” “For senders scoring 70 or below, only a small fraction of messages were actually delivered.”

Talos Intelligence - Produced by Cisco, Talos Intelligence ranks email senders from Good, Neutral to Poor. A Good ranking means there is minimal malicious or threatening traffic coming from your IP.

Reputation Authority - WatchGuard provides email protection and security against most known web threats. Reputation Authority also monitors IP reputation and will score your domain or IP from 1-100.

Barracuda Central - Barracuda Networks has a system called the Barracuda Reputation System that keeps a record of IP Address histories for both spammers and good senders. Using their lookup feature, you can check your domain reputation with real-time results. They will provide ratings of either “good” or “poor.”

TrustedSource - A service run by McAfee, TrustedSource provides a sender reputation score similar to the other tools.

A SIMPLER WAY TO TEST EMAIL DOMAIN REPUTATION

While not very scientific, an easy way to get an idea of where you stand with different email providers is to sign up for your own emails with a new email address. I recently ran an experiment where I subscribed to the email lists of several dozen companies using several different personal email addresses to see where their emails would land.

While some companies’ welcome emails made it to my inbox or promotions, many went directly to spam. Keep in mind, these are welcome emails from well-known companies, and their first email went straight to my spam folder. Not a great start.

I knew from prior research that all these companies use the same well-respected marketing automation platform for email delivery and that none of them had a dedicated sending IP. This means the results I was seeing were likely due to domain, not IP reputation.

TIP #1 - DON’T USE A PURCHASED LIST

In a perfect world, your list would be made of active, engaged fans of your brand. Every one of them would have personally requested to receive your emails and regularly engage with your brand.

Let's be real though, building an opted-in email list is hard, so many email marketers try to take shortcuts. One of the most common is buying a third-party email list. This mistake can quickly lead to a tarnished email domain reputation that can take months to recover.

The quality of the email list is very important in email deliverability. Email providers look at a number of factors when deciding where to put your emails: engagement, bounce rate, and unsubscribe rate are a few of the key ones.

The low-quality addresses on a bought list can end up hurting your chances of landing in the inbox for ANYONE who’s on your email list. Let's take a look at why this happens.

YOUR EMAILS WILL BE UNSOLICITED

If you didn’t build the list yourself, the recipients have no idea who you are. There’s a high chance that they will see your email as spam and mark it as so. With an increase in spam complaints, your domain reputation will decrease. Pretty soon providers may automatically send your emails directly to spam.

In addition, sending unsolicited emails is illegal in many countries. If you’re not careful, you may open your company up to significant legal liabilities.

THE EMAIL ADDRESSES MIGHT NOT BE VALID

You can never be sure of the quality of email addresses you didn’t acquire yourself.

With a purchased email list, the incentive is often quantity over quality. Even if the emails are valid, people switch jobs, companies switch email address formats and change names.

Despite their best efforts, most data brokers aren’t able to keep their lists 100% up to date. This means you will likely get hard bounces every time you add emails to your list. If your bounce rate spikes, your deliverability will suffer.

THE ODDS ARE AGAINST YOU

To summarize, purchased email lists can be filled with out-of-date, or even spam trap email addresses. Even if the list is 100% valid email addresses, these people didn’t ask to be emailed by your brand. They’re not very likely to open your emails, and if they do, they are likely to be put off that they are receiving an unsolicited email.

TIP #2 - HEALTHY EMAIL LIST = HEALTHY DOMAIN REPUTATION

Building a strong domain reputation takes time and there really is no easy shortcut. Yes, sending from an IP address with a low reputation is sure to drop your deliverability. However, using a clean IP is no guarantee of high deliverability if your domain reputation is poor.

Going back to the little experiment that I described earlier in this post, there was one common thread I noticed between the senders with the poorest deliverability in the pack. They all sent a LOT of emails. Even though I hadn’t opened a single message, the emails just kept coming.

BE RELEVANT

Recipients that personally opted in to join your mailing list are interested in your brand or service. Provide them with high-quality and relevant content.

By gathering data on where your prospects heard about your brand, and which of your content they have engaged with, you can segment your audience so each person receives content that is relevant to their interests.

Badly-coded emails can get filtered out by ESPs. Even if your email makes it past ESP filters, a poorly designed email may make your readers more likely to mark it as spam if it renders poorly. Poor email formatting can give a poor impression, leading to lower engagement and a lower domain reputation.

If in doubt, in most cases a plain text email will perform better and make it through spam filters easier than a poorly formatted one.

STAY COMPLAINT-FREE

Spam complaints are one of the quickest ways to tarnish your email domain reputation.

Good marketing automation platforms may not even let you send emails if your complaint rate gets too high. HubSpot for example will revoke email sending for accounts with a complaint rate higher than .1%, just 1 in 1000.

STAY CONSISTENT

Sending inconsistent volumes of email over time can be viewed as suspicious by ESPs. Try to keep to a consistent email sending schedule and send volume to stay in good graces with inbox providers.

STAY OUT OF SPAM TRAPS

Email service providers (ESP’s) and anti-spam groups use fake or abandoned email addresses as a way to “trap” spammers (or marketers with poor email list hygiene).

These addresses won’t bounce, because email service providers are purposely keeping them open. Don’t get caught in this email marketing equivalent of a police sting operation. You will not win. There are two types of spam traps:

THE RECYCLED SPAM TRAP

The recycled spam trap used to belong to an actual user but has since been abandoned. Email service providers will keep an abandoned email address open as a way of catching senders that have poor list hygiene.

THE HONEY POT SPAM TRAP

The second type is called the pristine spam trap, or “honey pot.” It is an email address that was never used by a real person and was created for the sole purpose of identifying spammers. Honey pot addresses are placed online in hidden places where only bots are likely to find them.

Sending to just a few honey pot addresses can have a very negative effect on your domain reputation.

Email service providers know that no business reaching out to real contacts and customers would ever send to a non-existent person using a fake email address that was hidden on a page only a web crawler would visit.

KEEP BOUNCE RATES LOW

Email bounces can be classified into two types: hard and soft bounces.

Email addresses that hard bounce should be removed. Chances are, these are email addresses that are out-of-date, fake or misspelled or senders who have blocked you. It is pointless to continue sending to hard bounces since you’re not likely to get any engagement from them. They will only hurt your sender reputation and lower your overall deliverability.

Soft bounces happen when the email addresses are valid but delivery failed for some reason. This could be due to several reasons like a full inbox, the email server being down at the time the message was sent, and so on. If this was a previously active address, you can try resending, but if it keeps bouncing, it’s best to take it off your list.

TIP #3 - MAKE SURE YOUR EMAILS ARE PROPERLY AUTHENTICATED

Authentication protocols are one of the many different ways ESP’s verify email senders and prevent hackers, spammers etc from reaching your inbox.

Emails that don’t pass authentication are more likely to be classified as risky or spam by ESPs. It’s worth investing the time to make sure your marketing emails are being sent with proper authentication.

The three primary authentication methods are SPF, DKIM and DMARC. We could easily write a whole article on each of these, but here are the basics on each:

-SPF (Sender Policy Framework) - this lets you, the sender, specify which mail servers are authorized to send emails for your domain.

-DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) - DKIM makes use of an encrypted digital signature to verify that the emails are actually coming from the domain they say they are, and not “spoofed,” faked or altered in transit.

-DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, & Conformance) - provides the receiving server with options on how to handle your email in the event it fails SPF and DKIM authentication. It also provides reports that tell you who is sending emails from your domain.

KEEP YOUR RECIPIENTS INTERESTED

The success of your business is dependent on your customers, make it the goal of your email program to maintain their interest.

Unlike social media followers, you own your subscriber email list. There’s no gatekeeper that charges you every time you send an email, but subscribers are only valuable if you can reach them. Send out emails with evergreen, valuable content at the right time for each subscriber. This keeps them happy and satisfied with your product or service long after the initial transaction.