Over the past 90 days, we have seen an insane amount of changes. One minute you can get tracking, the next you can't so you make a change, and then that change doesn't work anymore. It's been a "grey hair" period for me and on top of that, most of the people we employed to help fix the problem - could not.
So, let me give you some information about what is going on because mailers like Aweber, Getresponse, and others will not give you the information. Some of them will just close your account due to their AI not knowing what to do. Trust me when I say that, as we had an account closed that was only sending legit email and all the members of that account were 100% double opted in - it was one of our eCommerce accounts.
Recently, Apple made some changes that allow you to turn off your tracking availability inside email specifically. What it essentially does is turns off the IP ADDRESS and informational stuff that we use to fire off pixels. When I say WE that reference is to all email platforms. So, when an email is open, there is no pixel to track if that email is opened or not. Meaning when the email providers check on your account - it looks like you suck at email and they may or may not flag you as a spammer. Recognize, this is for all emails being opened inside of an iPhone, using the mail app, or even apps that are on the iPhone.
Now, if that wasn't bad enough there has been an email provider-wide update, across basically all the email providers unless it is a host email type where you host your email on your hosting. In this update, they now don't send back information via the headers and/or pixel fires for stuff that ends up in the spam folder. Which hurts everything, for most of us, we are okay with getting sent to the spam folder. Right now I am getting spam folder emails from major companies - it is just something that happens.
Specifically for our email platform, you may notice the opens list isn't growing and your opens on the bulk email don't exist, this is the reason. We are working hard to fix these and overcome them, but that is the name of the game with email marketing - if you are a big mailer - then a lot of your time is spent fixing problems.
So, if you logging into your account with us or even your outside mailers and your stats are not making sense, I hope this has helped you out. You can also google this type of stuff and you'll see it for yourself.
** Important Part **
This has directly affected our ability to properly send out email for our managed group, and those outside of that group would have seen odd looking numbers. It isn't over, we are still working on it but it looks like we may have found some fixes. Another thing that makes campaigns looked weird is, some member use "text only" emails, please do not do that. That's old school - anyone how teaches that should be kicked out of marketing, its 2021 and text only doesn't anything for anyone. There is ZERO tracking ability inside of a text campaign, so you will contact us and upset when it was done by you but turning on TEXT ONLY.
In the image below you will see an example of a campaign that was sent with text only, zero tracking and actually forced a lot of bounces do to ISP issues.
Also, we have had some support tickets about SENT and DELIVERED numbers; so I want to claim this here a lot bit.
SENT : the amount of emails from the list that actually got sent, doesn't mean they were "delivered" or "relayed" but the system attempted to push them to the email addressed.
DELIVERED : the actual number of emails that were able to get through the system and processed to the relay system. If this number is less than the sent number, than you can reference the bounce logs to see why. We also sometimes blocked or get blocked on a open suppression from the relay system, this is something we can not control.
When you log into your account and see the different numbers, they are going to be all over the map from time to time. Unlike other mailers, we provide you with all the information available, which can be bad and you may overthink that data, but don't.
