It's best to consider your open rates and view rates separately when troubleshooting lower engagement. Roughly speaking:
Open rates are influenced by:
Timing - send you message within 4 hours ideally, otherwise 24 hours for best open rates based on our own data analysis of sends.
Use case - the colder your recipients are the lower your open rates are going to be.
Inbox placement - primary vs promo or updates etc. This is a complex issue and email providers don't share a lot of information about how they decide on placement. Some things that we know are important - email address, domain and IP reputation, recipient engagement behavior to your previous messages. Don't use a generic email address when sending personal messages and don't use an email address you use for email marketing.
Sending email address - how recognizable and legitimate this is to the recipient
Subject line - a compelling, easily understood subject line that is instantly recognizable to the recipient.
View rates are influenced by:
Your thumbnail image / Gif - make sure this is a friendly, warm visual greeting. When using the Gif option recipients can also tell if you say their name.
Email default message text - a clear, concise message that gives context and makes it clear the recipient just has to watch the video.
The factors in bold above are those that we control directly on the platform. The rest are determined by your sending behavior and preferences. There is also a big change coming in email open tracking with iOS 15. This update includes a feature called Apple Mail Privacy Protection. With Apple Mail Privacy Protection enabled, it is likely that all email sent to or handled by Apple Mail will be reported as "opened" regardless of the contact's activity, resulting in inflated and inaccurate open rates on average. The feature needs to be enabled as an option by iOS 15 users - so it will not affect the entire user apple base. Around 16% of messages sent by Bonjoro are opened by Apple Mail.
1. Make sure your email integration is set up
Until you set up your email integration, we send your Bonjoros from [email protected] on your "behalf". Any replies to those messages are re-directed to your correct email, however we cannot guarantee that spam filters will not filter these.
When you have set up email integrations, all your Bonjoros will be sent via your email account. This means higher open rates and lower spam filters because:
You're email is already in customers address books
As only you use your email, its likely to be pretty healthy
Customers will recognize your email address at a glance
2. Check your domain spam rating
You can check your spam rating of your email account (that you've integrated with Bonjoro) with a bunch of free tools - our favourite is https://www.mail-tester.com/
Depending on your rating, follow their advice to increase your score and ensure maximum delivery for ALL your email.
3. Re-Send un-viewed messages in plain text email
If you haven't discovered it yet, head here, and you can resend any of your messages that don't get opened or viewed. Here you can set up workflow to resend unviewed messages as a plain text email after an interval of your choice (we resend ours after 3 days).
You can also use the manual 'Resend' button on individual Bonjoros from your results tab - just hover your mouse of the tile and click the resend button.
Again - please make sure your email is integrated as there's not much point of setting up this workflow if you email is not delivered from your own address.
4. Make sure your profile is filled out correctly
Your profile image, name and title are included in the Bonjoro email, so make sure you have these filled out correctly so people recognise you. Access this via settings or click on your profile image in the top right hand corner: https://www.bonjoro.com/settings/profile
5. Thumbnails and messages
Some of your Bonjoros may simply being looked over. Make sure you include fun thumbnails, try the "Zuza Wave" and personalise the little message (that shows in your email).
ok maybe not the last one...mitch doesn't know we put that here though so shhhhh
7. Keep nice and warm, don't go cold
Though our own experience shows that we get a better reply rate to cold Bonjoros than cold emails....its still not great, and we generally disagree with cold outreach anyway. Bonjoros are really meant as at least a 2nd touchpoint - make sure people know who you are before you send them.....or it can just be a bit weird! Talk to the team if you are considering where to use Bonjoro in your customer journey and want to bounce some ideas around.
8. Strike while the iron is hot
Once you have your integrations set-up the quicker you send Bonjoros when someone signs up...the higher the response rate. If you wait a long time opens will drop off as any with email. We've crunched the numbers and the fist 4 hours after a customer performs the trigger action is the sweet spot - with an open rate 5-10% above average. We also saw a steep drop off for Bonjoros sent past the 72 hour mark.
9. Subject lines and GIFs
Customise the subject line of your delivery email to boost open rates. See here for how to do it and consider testing subject lines in relatively large batches of 40-50 bonjoros a piece to test their impact. User your brand name and reference the action the recipient took to be receiving the message to make it recognizable.
We can also turn the first few seconds of your bonjoros into a gif that will play in the recipients inbox. There are a few things to consider with gifs - not all email clients support them as default, they can be a bit harder to get right, but if they are done well they can boost your results. See more here
10. Test plain Text Emails
You can send your Bonjoros in a plain text email, rather than our HTML template. We've found that the results vary with audience type so we recommend testing with at least 50-100 Bonjoros in both formats to check the impact in your context. To enable plain text emails head to: Settings > message templates. You can set all messages sent in a given template as HTML or plain text. You can set up identical templates and set one as plain and the other HTML to A/B test.
11. The Promo folder
If you find that some of your recipients are receiving their Bonjoro delivery emails in the promo folder it's worth keeping in mind that Gmail will treat your messages differently for each recipient. In our testing we have had messages land in primary inboxes and promo folders depending on the recipient. We do have one key piece of advice:
DO NOT use an email address to send Bonjoros that you also use for mass email campaigns, newsletters or automated message sending of any kind. Using an email address that Gmail knows is used to send mass messages makes it much more likely that your Bonjoros will end up in the promo folder.
If you think something else is happening, then just click the little support bubble in the bottom right and let us know and we'll help you out:)