Take action to improve low performance
By now, you should understand why each of these metrics is critical to your overall deliverability. So what should you do if you notice poor performance in one or more of these categories? Learn which corrective actions to take if you see performance start to dip.
Low open rate
- Be sure you are only ever sending to contacts who have explicitly opted in to marketing emails.
- Ensure that double opt-in is enabled on your main list. This helps weed out bots, typos, and spam traps, all of which can lower your open rate.
- Clean your list by suppressing unengaged contacts.
- Narrow your typical audience segment down to a more engaged group.
- Create a long-term engagement-based campaign sending schedule to avoid over-emailing folks who are consistently not engaging with your messages.
Low click rate
- Make sure your CTA (call-to-action) button is big, clearly visible, and above the fold (no scrolling needed). Every single message you send should contain a clear CTA that matches the subject line.
- Set up dedicated click tracking to increase confidence in link destinations.
- Make sure your messages are relevant to the selected audience. If your click rates are low, consider tailoring messages more specifically by sending more specific campaigns to smaller segments based on behavior or historical interest.
- Try using dynamic personalization in your emails to make content feel more relevant.
- Use the Gmail clipping estimation tool in the email editor to make sure your messages are not at risk of being clipped.
High unsubscribe rate
- Review the all sources where you are collecting email consent. Be sure that subscribers are explicitly being told what they are opting in for at every sign-up source.
- Make sure to clean your subscriber list.
- Take a look at your email campaign strategy and evaluate how you could make your content more engaging or relevant to the audience.
- Make sure that the global unsubscribe setting is enabled for all of your lists. This ensures that when someone unsubscribes from an email, they are suppressed from every list in your account, not just the list the email was sent to.
- Use an engagement-based campaign sending scheduleto avoid repeatedly messaging and possibly annoying less engaged subscribers.
High bounce rate
- Ensure that double opt-in is enabled on your main list. This helps weed out bots, typos, and bad contacts, all of which can increase your bounce rate.
- Make sure to clean your subscriber list to avoid sending to spam traps or highly unengaged profiles.
- Create a segment of contacts who have soft bounced in the last 90 days, and exclude that segment from all future campaign sends.
- Set up a sunset flow to help programmatically identify unengaged subscribers and make list cleaning easier.
High spam complaint rate
- Ensure that every single email that you send contains a clearly visible link to unsubscribe. This should be easily clickable and not hidden at all.
- Make sure that the global unsubscribe setting is enabled for all of your lists. If someone already unsubscribed from a previous email and they continue to receive emails from your brand, they will mark you as spam.
- Review all of your active sign-up forms to make sure each one is explicitly clear about what subscribers are opting in to.
- Review your email content to ensure that it accurately represents your brand and looks high-quality (no typos, high-quality images, text-to-image ratio that is more text than image, high-quality logo, and proper links to your website).
You can use a free tool like MailGenius to see how likely your message is to land in spam, and to get specific recommendations on how to improve your message quality.
Check your understanding
Knowing the fix matters less than knowing what the number is telling you. Match each metric problem to the underlying cause it usually points to.
Match each metric problem on the left to the underlying cause it most often points to. Select a problem, then select the matching cause. You can retry as many times as you need.
What you are seeing
High bounce rate: messages are failing to be delivered at all
High spam complaint rate: recipients are marking your messages as spam
Low click rate: people open the email but do not act on it
Low open rate: fewer people are opening your messages than expected
High unsubscribe rate: more people than usual are opting out
What it usually means
People who want out cannot easily find the unsubscribe link, so they reach for the spam button instead
Your list contains people who never genuinely opted in, or you are sending too often to subscribers who stopped paying attention
The content or call to action inside did not deliver on what the subject line promised
Invalid, mistyped, or long-dead addresses are making it onto your list and staying there
The expectations you set at sign-up do not match what you are actually sending, or how often you are sending it