Email has been one of the great success stories of digital marketing. The opportunity to speak directly to your audience using a platform they can control through a device personal to them is much too great to pass up.

Email volumes shot up 60% in the first two weeks of the pandemic in April 2020 and this volume has become the new normal. It is so ubiquitous that an entire etiquette has built up around it, when to reply, how to sign off, the dreaded ‘all office’ threads and, of course, inbox zero.

But we’re noticing an increasing issue with email actually arriving and, as a consequence, who’s actually seeing it. Not just marketing email which is subject to a whole range of barriers and pressures, but person-to-person email too and sometimes email going into junk when the sender and recipient are known to each other and may even by replying to a sent email. And with our clients, we’ve seen large percentages of an opted-in database apparently not opening a single email over an extended period.

Why is email suffering?

There are a number of reasons why this is happening:

• GDPR has failed to reduce the amount of email being sent. While the intent behind the regulation is good, in practice the advantages of emailing people directly mean that senders routinely ignore the regulations.
• On both a corporate and personal level, phishing scams are endemic and can still reap huge rewards for their perpetrators.
• As a consequence, corporate systems and email clients (Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook) have been introducing their own privacy controls to block suspicious email. These systems (spam filters) look for trustworthy domains and block any they believe to be untrustworthy. Innocent but new domains are often caught in the net.
• Apple took this even further, preventing the pixels added by senders to register activity in an email from firing. This prevented any data from emails sent to Apple addresses being provided to senders.
• Even if an email makes it through the filter, it can be tagged in a way that discourages opening, such as ‘this message is from a mailing list’. Apple Mail even offers the recipient an opportunity to ‘unsubscribe’ without opening the message.
• There are corporate wars being fought, and email is a battleground. My personal email has an icloud.com suffix (which is exclusive to Apple) and I also have a Gmail account. If I send an icloud.com message to my Gmail, it simply never arrives, not even being allowed the indignity of the spam folder.

So what can you do to improve open rates?

• For every domain you send email from, add an SPF (sender policy framework) record. This will help authenticate it for recipient systems.
• Do not ‘scrape’ data or obtain it in other suspect ways. People whose details you’ve captured in his way are very unlikely to buy from you and your domain’s reputation will be affected.
• Don’t email people who haven’t given you permission unless you can strongly argue ‘legitimate interest’. Legitimate interest isn’t simply ‘I want them to buy my product’, that’s not sufficient. Use a legitimate interest assessment form in case you need prove you carried this assessment out at a later date.
• If you regularly send emails to a list, use an email platform like Mailchimp or Active Campaign. Your emails might be tagged as coming from a list but the platforms have much greater credibility with email clients because they use their own assessment tools on your data and domain. Email platforms will warn you about activity you’re undertaking using them if it might affect their reputation, let alone yours.
• Don’t bombard your database. Say something authentic and valuable each time you email and recipients will appreciate this.
• For corporate communications, use a different platform. WhatsApp and Slack work extremely well and are more reliable than email.

But does it actually matter?

Yes, on one level it absolutely does. Even if you can’t rely on the numbers being completely reliable, the trends are. How your database (or sub-sets of it) responds to one subject line but not another or one offer but not another is valuable commercial information.

On another level, its never actually mattered and there is even some debate about what an ‘open’ actually means. Opening email is an indicator, not an outcome. An outcome would be someone clicking a link and you don’t need open rates to know how many people do this. Of course, no-one will click a link who hasn’t seen and opened your email and been motivated by your messaging! There is a detailed summary of email open rate issues by econsultancy here.