My open rate dropped significantly. How can I debug this?

Seeing a large drop in your last emails open rate?

Take a breather, it's probably not as bad as you think and solvable in a relatively short amount of time.

First start by taking a look at your content and see if you've done anything different in the past 7 days.

The most common issues we see with emails is that they are too long so the tracking pixel gets cut off leading it to load less. You usually can tell this happened to you if you see a "Messaged Clipped" at the footer of your email in Gmail.

We also see an issue where people include too many images in their emails which can reduce how often the tracking pixel fires as images in emails load top to bottom.

Reducing both the image count and the size of those images can help here.

If you can't spot anything different in the content quickly browse your account and see if all your other automations are seeing the same impact and drop in opens.

If you notice that, for example, your welcome series still has a high open rate then it could be possible that it's just a content or intermittent issue that will resolve itself by the next send.

If you notice that there is an impact across all your emails then you can begin testing your domain and IP.

To test an IP simply send a preview of a broadcast AND a sequence to yourself. In Bento, we use different IP addresses for these. If one goes to spam and the other to the inbox (and you used the same content) reach out to [email protected] so we can investigate for you.

If they BOTH go to spam most likely it's your domain causing issues.

Sign up to Google Postmaster and review your domains reputation. If it's low reach out to support and we can help you recover it. Most of the issues at this level are resolved by list cleaning, sending slower, and ensuring your content is compliant within Google's guidelines.