Open rates at 98%?

[Tran]

A couple of weeks ago, we had dramatic increases in our opens and click-throughs for our weekly newsletter. No explanation. This week, we have a 98.8% open rate (14,356 opens out of 14,563 successful deliveries). This is clearly not right and has never happened before. For both these anomalies, links to our social accounts and other "boilerplate" links that are usually ignored were allegedly clicked multiple times. I took a quick look at the clicks to see if the emails look legit and they do, but the performance is clearly not legit, based on historic clicks. What's going on?

[Tran]

P.S. On looking more closely at a few recipients' behavior, it looks like each recipient clicked on every link - this never happens, and when I reached out to one person to verify the clicks, they said they had not opened the newsletter this week.

[William_A · Accepted solution]

Hello @Tran ,

If their network or email program uses some kind of security tool that "opens" emails and "clicks" their links to check for malware, it can result in that kind of data. In all honesty, the only suggestion I'd have is to swap your authentication to self-authentication since you have your own domain. This can show the security algorithms that emails being sent through us by you are effectively coming directly from you, and avoid triggering the clicks/opens from bots, but it's unfortunately not a guarantee as some security programs are simply built to function like this.

Beyond that, there's not much else you can do from your end. Our devs are constantly trying to identify the various programs that utilize this functionality, so they can set our system to ignore the behavior and triggers from these particular programs. If, after setting your account up for self-auth, the click rates continue to be inflated or worsen, then it may be worth calling in. That way our general support or higher level technical team can see if there's any further info that can be gleamed from the content of the emails with you live on the phone, or to see if the domains of the contacts that are seeming to bot-click them show any other particular consistencies we can track.

[Tran]

Thanks, William_A, really appreciate it!