Meghan Gill

When we sent our first newsletter in Marketo, we saw a major drop off in opens and click throughs. This seemed really odd to me. Not only were our open rates as a percentage half of what they had been when using Constant Contact, but our raw opens were less than they had been four months prior — despite more than doubling our entire subscriber base in that time. 

We immediately started researching the issue, giving ourselves a crash course in email deliverability. Here are a few of the things that we discovered in the process that might be useful: 

Email marketing services often have several clients sharing a single server. The performance of your email campaigns will depend on the reputation of that email server. You can use SenderScore to asses email reputation. 

It turns out that Constant Contact is among the best when it comes to deliverability. This is because they are strict about spam reports, and will frequently freeze customer accounts as a result of abusive practices. A single spam report is enough to get your account frozen. To unfreeze your account, you need to go through an email practices review with a Constant Contact representative. 

By default, Marketo puts clients on shared servers, meaning that our deliverability was affected by the email marketing practices of their other clients on that server. Other Marketo clients may be doing things like buying emails lists and/or sending emails to people who have not opted into email communications, decreasing deliverability.  

To get on a dedicated server, we would need to vastly increase our email volume. You need to be sending a very high number of emails (something like 10x what we were sending at the time) to get a dedicated server; any less and your reputation is affected by the lack of email sent. 

Our email practices are quite good. We don’t send emails to people unless they’ve opted into communications or filled out some sort of web form on one of our web properties. We typically include a message on the top of the emails explaining why the recipient is getting an email (e.g. “You’re receiving this email because you visited our booth at Zendcon” or “You’re receiving this email because you signed up for MongoDB Monitoring Service.”). Lastly, we do not purchase lead lists; like most open source companies we have lots of inbound interest and don’t have any shortage of email addresses. 

What was our solution? Well, it turns out that Marketo has several email servers for “trusted clients” who have good email practices like ours. We were able to move our email campaigns to those servers, and our opens and click throughs quickly went back to our previously high rates.