Question: OPEN RATE DECLINE My newsletter (we are 20+ issues in) has seen a big drop in our open rates - from 50%+ to approx 40% and it happened in our 17th newsletter. We are trying to figure out what happened and why? It has stayed now at 40% for the past weeks. Can you help me determine why this might have happened? Also looking at how to improve that moving forward so any advice is helpful.
Has your audience seen a large growth spurt too? If so, where did most of them come from? In my experience, large increases in audience usually leads to an immediate drop in opens. Because they're not engaged. And depending on where you get those leads from, they may be of pretty low quality. Ways to get your open rate back up: Focus on starting new subscribers off right with a great, targeted welcome series. Perform list hygiene. Start by finding everyone who hasn't opened any email in the past 30 days (or a different time based on how often you send), and try to re-engage them. If they don''t re-engage, clean them off your list. Then set up an automation that automatically does this for you going forward. Ask your most engaged readers for feedback. What's working? What's not? Try A/B testing subject lines to see if you can determine what approach works best.
well there wasn't a huge growth between those weeks which is why we thought there was something greater at play.?? These are great suggestions and will definitely look into doing some of these.
It could also be tied to that specific emails and their content. You may need to dig in a bit more and see if there was a shift in topic/focus from the higher performing issues to the lower performing ones. Even subtle differences can have an impact. Also, if you sent them at a different day/time, that could play a role.
It could be related to deliverability or domain reputation issues. May be worth checking how many of your emails are landing in spam using Google postmaster tools
also i wonder if i should have double opt in?
Jill G., 1. If you have your own brand associated with the newsletter (Newsletter as in one of the products/services) then you should think about using your domain for a better reputation. 2. beehiiv does provide a Dedicated IP address as an extra service. Comes with heavy pricing as with every other tool as there is a price to its core. Mostly used by enterprise customers. For the double opt-in, that's a choice based on your source of audience. If you are spending money to acquire subscribers from 3rd party tools like, Sparkloop then having the double opt-in does help to ensure a clean list. Otherwise, sometimes, it can work against you. So unless it's needed for the clean entry list, you don't go for double opt-in. IMO
I would note that it's not wrong to use the beehiiv domain, it just means that you are on a shared network with others and their reputations can work for you or work against you.
Ryan S. ah.... so interesting. Thank you so much. Would it be bad to switch to using my own brand's domain at this point? I hate seeing that our IP reputation is bad... Thankfully domain is high. We do ads to a lead generation piece that ultimately get added to our newsletter lists. So far it's been going great as far as quality but to see our open rates drop 10% in one week and then continue to stay. We are heavy on quality so just weird. and frustrating. How do you know so much!! ???
For the Open rates, I would not be much hesitant these days as the stats are constantly changing/affecting due to policies detect by email clients like Gmail, iOS and all.
yeah we were at 50+ for awhile before it just dropped to 40% - was pretty disappointed.
you can try to figure out on who didn't open your emails in the last couple of sends.
and see what source was that and if they are still engaged in other ways like automated emails or anything.
ah. interesting. Do you have an opinion offering boosts to other emails is turn-off for people opting into yours? I have been SO hesitant to keep everything "less salesy".
Well, that's a debatable question for sure. But in my opinion, the boosts and everything comes after they signup for your newsletter. That shouldn't harm much for your honest subscribers, who know why they are subscribing.
just checked out your agency... wish I would have known you when we built the whole newsletter!
also, it shouldn't be the case for your drop in the open rate, because technically they both are different events and can produce different action item. Such as if I don't like you pushing me other newsletters or ads, I would unsubscribe.
makes sense
sign me up!
you can subscribe for that here: https://unbeelievable.beehiiv.com/
hearing about your use case, I think you might want to do something like this: https://unbeelievable.beehiiv.com/p/onboarding-automation-for-a-different-segment-with-a-new-opt-in-email
I'm singing up for yours now - and my team member. I love how you did a paid model. I haven't done that yet. I'll sign up for that to see what a paid level looks like. I have to start monetizing this damn thing
well we use our own landing page on our website... we are waiting for beehiiv to launch their website builder for our scale level (I think that's our level). We didn't like the other one for our audience https://calmmamarevolution.com/newsletter
beautiful website.
thank you. We are trying to figure it all out. Understanding analytics has been challenging for me. Ultimately want to build the go-to spot for anything related to highly sensitive children. a good 20-35% of the population believe it or not.
totally. I got 6 years and 6 months (both boys) may be not highly sensitive yet but highly energetic for sure 🙂
i get it. that's what I thought i would have when i knew i was having a boy. He has energy but not like what i expected. The highly sensitive part comes with lots of challenges in life but also amazing things that are super special. I changed my career entirely because of it. Was producing a hug health technology show at CES for over a decade.
well, gotta get back to writing, but hope some of the things above helped you. There are so many brilliant minds in this community. Shoot your questions any time, and we will help.
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