What open rate can be expected with low domain reputation in Gmail?
Summary
What email marketers say9Marketer opinions
Email marketer from Litmus suggests monitoring deliverability metrics and addressing reputation issues to maintain healthy open rates. They suggest that if your reputation is low you will see a considerable reduction in open rates.
Email marketer from Mailjet Blog explains that high bounce rates are a clear indicator of deliverability issues, which directly correlate with low open rates. The relationship means that when more emails bounce, fewer make it to the inbox, resulting in reduced visibility and lower engagement from recipients.
Marketer from Email Geeks shares experience of a customer with a 'Bad' reputation still seeing up to 10% open rates, excluding iOS 15 opens. They believe Google is more forgiving than we think in some cases. Significant portion of mail can still reach the inbox. That portion of mail decreases over time the longer the reputation remains poor.
Marketer from Email Geeks shares an analysis showing an average of 17% Unique Open Rate for customers sending across an IP address Gmail saw as “low” reputation pre-Apple MPP. Suggests using the low reputation as a signal to make positive changes before performance decreases further.
Marketer from Email Geeks notices a week or two delay between changes in IP/domain reputation in GPT and what's reflected in reporting.
Email marketer from Neil Patel's Blog shares that a low open rate is a sign of poor email deliverability. This highlights the importance of improving the domain's reputation through strategies such as authentication, consistent sending volume, and list hygiene to achieve an improvement in email open rates.
Email marketer from Reddit User on r/emailmarketing responds that if your domain reputation is really low, you can expect open rates to be below 5%, or even 0% if you're consistently landing in the spam folder.
Email marketer from EmailOversight Blog shares that consistent deliverability problems stem from a poor sender reputation, which subsequently causes emails to miss the inbox altogether, leading to severely reduced open rates as recipients don't even see the emails.
Email marketer from GlockApps Blog highlights that sender reputation is a key factor in deliverability. Low reputation leads to most emails landing in spam, significantly impacting open rates and overall email marketing performance. However, no specific rate is given.
What the experts say1Expert opinion
Expert from Word to the Wise explains that sender reputation is critical for deliverability, and a low reputation means that messages are much more likely to be filtered as spam or blocked. The open rate, if any, will be very low if mail is going to spam.
What the documentation says3Technical articles
Documentation from SendGrid Documentation highlights how poor sender reputation significantly harms deliverability. This results in a noticeable decline in open rates, as a larger percentage of emails are diverted to spam folders, thereby preventing recipients from seeing and opening them.
Documentation from Google Postmaster Tools Help explains that low sender reputation can lead to emails being marked as spam or not delivered at all. Open rates will likely be very low or nonexistent, but it depends on how low the reputation is and other factors like content quality.
Documentation from Microsoft Support explains that factors affecting if email ends up in junk or not include the senders reputation. A low reputation will increase the chances of being filtered into junk and a low open rate.