Can we talk about the before and after of our email open rates after GDPR?

Two years ago we were cruising at 28% open rates on our B2B campaigns. Now we're lucky to hit 12% on a good Tuesday. It's not just the list cleaning either. I think people got trained to ignore anything that looks like a newsletter after all those consent popups. We changed our subject lines to be more direct like actual sales intros and it helped a little but not much. Has anyone else seen this drop or found a format that actually gets past the spam filters?

2 comments

2 Comments

jamesf2625d ago

Whoa holy crap 28% down to 12%? That is brutal no way I would have guessed it dropped that hard. We went from like 22% down to maybe 14% and I thought that was bad. But 28 to 12 is wild that means almost everyone just stopped opening. I wonder if it's the spam filters getting smarter too not just the consent popups. My team tried shortening subject lines to like 4 or 5 words max and it helped a tiny bit but nothing like the old days. Makes me wonder if people just got so sick of email in general after GDPR.

matthewkim25d ago

HOLD UP I gotta jump in here. James my man spam filters got NOTHING to do with GDPR, those are two totally SEPARATE things. Consent popups and spam filters are like apples and engine blocks, they just don't mix. What actually happened is GDPR forced everyone to clean their lists properly, so now you're only emailing people who actually gave you permission instead of that guy who bought a thing in 2015 and forgot you existed. Plus the consent popups trained people to look harder at who's emailing them before opening. But spam filters are just looking at your sending reputation and content rules, not checking if someone clicked agree on a checkbox last year.