Terminology
- Email Flow – the automated email sequence that fires when someone does something specific, like leaving items in their basket without buying.
- Open rate – the percentage of people who opened an email, though this number has got murkier in recent years for reasons covered below.
- Inbox placement – whether your email actually lands in someone's main inbox, rather than getting filtered into Promotions, Spam, or somewhere else they'll never check.
- SPF, DKIM, DMARC – three technical settings that prove to email providers your messages are genuinely from you and not someone pretending to be you. Sounds dull, matters enormously.
- Apple Mail Privacy Protection – a privacy feature that automatically "opens" emails on behalf of Apple Mail users, whether they actually read it or not, which quietly inflates everyone's open rate stats.
A friend of a friend, a woman called Julie who runs a small business out of her spare room, spent an entire weekend rewriting her abandoned cart emails because the numbers had quietly dropped off a cliff. New subject lines, new images, a slightly cheekier tone, the works. Open rates didn't move an inch. Turned out, when she finally checked, half her emails were landing in spam because nobody had touched her domain authentication settings since she set the account up two years earlier. The copy was never the problem. The plumbing was.
Why the numbers went quiet this year
The honest answer is that the inbox itself changed underneath everyone, not just the emails being sent into it. Major providers have been enforcing stricter sender requirements, and Google's own guidance confirms that Gmail's bulk sender requirements actively enforce SPF, DKIM, and DMARC alignment alongside one click unsubscribe for promotional email, with noncompliant senders facing harsher rejection than they would have a year or two ago. If your domain settings haven't been reviewed recently, that alone could explain a chunk of the drop, regardless of how good the email itself is. Attribuly Blog
There's also a measurement problem hiding underneath the performance problem. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection means open rates on iPhone traffic have been artificially propped up for a while, since the feature effectively pre opens emails automatically rather than waiting for a genuine read. One agency benchmark report put it plainly, noting that open rates are worth monitoring but don't read too much into them, since Apple's Mail Privacy Protection inflates these numbers and the real signal sits downstream in clicks and revenue. So a flow that looks healthy on open rate alone might actually be quietly failing, and nobody notices because the one metric everyone glances at first is the one that's lying to them. BS&Co
And then there's the Promotions tab, which has always been a nuisance but seems to be biting harder lately, with deliverability research suggesting the Promotions tab can cut visibility by half or more for cart recovery emails specifically. An email that's technically delivered but sat in a tab nobody opens isn't really delivered in any way that matters. Mailmend
Doing the autopsy properly
Before touching a single word of copy, check the boring stuff first. Look at whether SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are correctly set up and aligned, since this is the kind of thing that gets configured once at launch and then forgotten entirely, even as domains age and sending volume changes. Most email platforms will show you a deliverability or domain health score somewhere in settings, and if nobody's looked at it in months, that's worth doing before anything else.
Stop trusting open rates as your main signal
Next, stop trusting open rate as your main signal, particularly for anything with meaningful Apple Mail traffic, and look at clicks and actual revenue per email instead. It's a less satisfying number to glance at because it moves more slowly, but it's the one that isn't being quietly inflated by a privacy feature working exactly as designed.
It's also worth checking how your first email in the sequence is built, because a lot of brands lead with a discount straight away, which trains customers to wait for one rather than buying at full price, and that's a habit that's hard to undo once it's set in. Shifting any incentive later in the sequence, with the first email focused purely on reminding rather than discounting, tends to hold margin better, even if a few people don't come back as quickly.
The slightly uncomfortable honest bit is that a deliverability fix often doesn't feel like progress straight away, because the dashboard won't suddenly light up the next morning, it tends to recover gradually as your sending reputation rebuilds with the inbox providers watching it. That's a hard sell internally if someone's expecting an instant turnaround, and I'll admit I don't have a tidy timeline to offer beyond "it varies, sometimes a few weeks, sometimes longer," which isn't a satisfying answer but is the honest one.
The flows didn't get worse because shoppers changed or your copywriter lost their touch. The inbox changed the rules without sending a memo, and most brands are still writing emails for an inbox that doesn't quite work the way it used to.