Someone contacted me from my listing on the Mailchimp Experts Directory with an interesting question. In short, the Mailchimp user has over 100,000 subscribers and has been sending his email marketing to subscribers for over 18 months. What he has noticed is that during this year, open and click rates of campaigns sent to Gmail and Hotmail subscribers has dropped significantly.
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://www.organicweb.com.au/20789/email-marketing/mailchimp-junk-spam/ which should help. Be sure to add SPF and DKIM records per the link.