Emails delivered but little to no opens

The receiver may not see Emails for several reasons:

Most ISPs use filters to sort the legitimate email from junk or spam for their users. More than 300 spam-filtering companies exist and vary significantly in their filter logic. Most common spam filters attempt to filter those sending unwanted email based on sending reputation and deliverability statistics, meaning that it’s important that your mail is easily identifiable as being wanted and not being unsolicited. Elevated bounce rates, elevated complaint rates, or low open rates are all indicators that recipients may find your mail to be unwanted, and ISP spam folders are more likely to consider your mail as spam as a result.

Marketo considers an "open" to be when the images in the email are downloaded, specifically a single-pixel tracking image. The recipient may be receiving the emails and viewing them, but not downloading the images. This would not count as an "open."  Please note that since text-only emails have no images, so they will never log an Open activity.

Security measures or strict settings for the filter

Tip: Ask your followers to add your email address to their whitelist.

Do you have names that you haven't mailed to in six months? How about customers that haven't opened an email or clicked a link in that same time period? These are indications to purge these old or inactive addresses. These customers cost money to mail, reduce your ROI, and are more likely to complain.

"delivered" means the email has hit the server of the recipient, but it doesn't mean it will show up in their main inbox. It's important to keep making changes to your plan to make sure that your emails not only get sent but also get read. If an email with a Delivered activity (and no subsequent Bounce activity) never arrives in an inbox, that means 

• it's been summarily dumped by an anti-spam layer that doesn't even care to give feedback to the sending server.  It's something we see, for example, when domains have blacklisted Marketo IPs and/or envelope senders because marketing email is broadly prohibited by company policy, regardless of individual end-user interest. 
• Another possibility is you've messed up your DKIM config or have another major DNS issue (like sending from a domain that does not exist) and the recipient server is unfortunately unable to reject the email at envelope time (envelope = initial connection), but they dump it as soon as they realize how bad it looks.

Don't forget that if the email browser has auto download of images turned off there will never be a response to the server that the email is opened.

Black listings are usually caused by sending mail to a spam trap email address. The email doesn't get outright rejected from the mail server, it's delivered to the server and then not delivered to the recipient.

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I had expected a slow drop off this fall when Apple said their new privacy policy would block the ability to see whether consumers open emails.

Apple‘s Mail Privacy Protection has the exact opposite effect. It doesn’t cause a dropoff in opens (i.e. pixel downloads). It causes every email to register an open, regardless of whether the end user ever saw it. So it’s 100% sure that isn’t causing a dropoff in opens.

@k2843seegers ,

Unless you believe that all of those people are using Apple, then it is unlikely to be that.

More likely you've turned tracking off, broken HTML, or Marketo is having an issue of some sort.

Cheers

Jo