On Thursday and Saturday of last week, we sent emails to a list that we have been using on a recurring basis in our mailings. In general, when we have sent to this list, our top email client in the email reporting function is Gmail, over 70%. However, for the Thursday and Saturday mailing, Gmail only weighs in at 0.4 and 0.71% respectively.
However, on Sunday we sent another email to this same base and the metrics are back to normal and gmail is back on top of the list.
Attached are images of Thursday’s performance and the results of a mail with the same characteristics sent to the same base.
Does someone know what could have happened to this shipment (Thursday and Saturday), or if there was any incident or change in Gmail within those days?
Hi @CFerrari9,
I love to read your post, thank you for asking the Community!
I am not aware of any changes as we speak. In terms of deliverability however, if you have not seen it yet, I’d like to share this for important information: “Google and Yahoo have hired a digital bouncer, but we’re here to help you get on the list!”.
I found for you these similar posts that might help you:
- The solution from @danaland on this post “Not all email opens are tracked for Gmail”
- This thread “Optimizing newsletter email size for deliverability”
- The solution from @danmoyle on this post “Open rate drops”
I also wanted to invite a couple of subject matter experts to this conversation: Hi @Phil_Vallender, @Crystal_Hopper and @CHawkins do you have suggestions to help @CFerrari9, please? Do you know of any Gmail updates?
If anybody else has anything to add and/or share, please feel free to join in the conversation 
Thank you very much 
and have a wonderful day!
Best,
Bérangère
That’s quite a drop, @CFerrari9. Yikes! I agree - that’s a surprising turn of events. I don’t see anything in the marketing world’s current state of affairs that points to this being something new. Maybe it’s just an anomaly? Can you look into the email analytics and see what’s been delivered, which contacts have historically shown opens, and what this recent email looks like for those folks? Maybe the previous opens were ghost opens?
I know with the changes @BérangèreL mentioned, we’re all about to see a new world. But if the list you were sending to was active, and the emails were legit, the drop shouldn’t be that sharp. In addition to opens, was that list performing well with clicks and/or replies?
Echoing @danmoyle! This is surprising and I also don’t know of anything that would cause a temporary change like that. I am perplexed that you saw normal response rates following that low email.
I am curious about the topic of the emails. I am wondering if for some reason that email just had a topic that was not of interest. Did the overall email opens/clicks differe from when this list has been used in the past?
@CFerrari9 Just to confirm, you or or anyone on your team didn’t make changes to bot filtering during this time, correct?
Another thing to consider is if you included Unengaged Contacts in any of these sends, when you may not usually. You can see this in the email details but you can also just see if the total contacts the email was sent to on Thursday & Saturday differs significantly than Sunday.
