Below is my response (slightly amended).
Thanks for contacting me.
The reasons for your Mailchimp campaign open and click rates dropping for Gmail and Hotmail are likely:
- Gmail has significantly increased the effectiveness of its promotions tab this year. I’ve had quite a few clients who have noticed a difference in open/click rates from Gmail due to this. See
- Inbox by Gmail is getting more popular and has the same effect as item 1 above.
- Microsoft Outlook (Hotmail) app: In January this year, Microsoft split messages into two sections in its Outlook app; ‘Focused’ and ‘Other’. It is possible that many of your messages sent to Hotmail aren’t being seen by recipients because the Mailchimp messages are going to the ‘Other’ tab.
- I work with many clients identifying which email addresses Mailchimp will and won’t accept and I have certainly noticed that the ‘value’ of a subscriber with a free email address such as Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo has lowered (i.e. not good).
Regards
Gary
so what can i do as a mail chimp user with gmail clients who I would like to receive my blogs?
Wherever possible try to get email addresses from people that are from a paid domain name.
I use Mailchimp to send email newsletters to my church, my Kiwanis club, and the community chorus that I’m a member of. Several people in the chorus are not receiving the emails, and they all have Gmail accounts. They are not likely to change their email just because they aren’t getting our emails. I have a Gmail account that is receiving the emails, but they go through a forwarding service provided by my university alumni association. The people who are not receiving the emails have looked in their spam folders and not found the emails. We’re not marketing, just trying to communicate within a fairly limited group of people. Are we going to have to give up on using Mailchimp?
Hi Yael,
Please see https://organicweb.com.au/20789/email-marketing/mailchimp-junk-spam/ which should help. Be sure to add SPF and DKIM records per the link.
Hello Gary, I hope you can help.
I am a new-ish blogger. I finally shared my blog with my friends and several told me they did not receive anything from me after subscribing. I am set up with Mailchimp with a verification email then a welcome email campaign. I had previously tested my campaign with no issues, so I was surprised.
So I again decided to test the system with three different gmail addresses of my own,
I discovered that two of the three gmails did not receive anything!
There was nothing showing up in the inbox, spam, trash, social, nor promotions folders. Also there were no bounce-back messages saying it was suspected fraud or spam or undeliverable.
I called and talked with Mailchimp for hours trying to resolve this.
They said they “saw” the emails as delivered. We double checked that my sending email address was a domain name email and that it was properly set up. We did a domain email authentication, and I also did a custom self-verification through my c-panel.
Additionally, I sent an email from my domain name email directly to the gmail and it worked fine. It just didn’t work when it went through Mailchimp.
When I went on google forums to see what to do, I discovered that in 2019 and 2020 there were others that were having similar problems with Mailchimp. No one had an answer. I didn’t see anything written recently about it.
Any help would be appreciated! I just set this all up and I would hate to abandon it.
Once an email is sent from Mailchimp, it is up to the receiving system to ‘do something’ with the message. Unfortunately, the answer in this case lies with Gmail 🙁
P.S. If you can solve this, I’ll send you some money.