Most migrations don't come with a drop in open rates. If you have noticed one, though, there are a couple of reasons it can happen, and not all of them mean fewer people are reading your newsletter.
The first is reputation. When your newsletters start going out through a new setup, email providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook take some time to build trust with you again, even if nothing about your content or your audience has changed.
The second is about the number itself. An open rate has never been an exact headcount – it's an estimate based on whether a small tracking pixel loads in each email. But that pixel can fire when nobody actually read (Apple Mail loads it automatically for a large share of subscribers) or fail to fire when someone did read your email (if their app blocks images). It's also presented differently from one platform to the next. So if you're comparing your old platform's number to Ghost's, treat it loosely – they're possibly not measured identically. With that in mind, let's review the things that can cause a real drop.
Your sending domain changed
If you previously sent from, say, yourdomain.com and your newsletter now goes out from a different address – even from a subdomain like mail.yourdomain.com – providers treat that as a brand-new sender with no history. They've never seen it before, so they hold back until you've proven yourself with a few good sends. We explain this in our guide on warming up a new sending domain.
Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki
The single most important takeaway is to pick one sending domain and stick with it. If you had a domain with a good sending history before (for examplemail.yourdomain.com), set up that exact same one here. Every time you switch domains, you start the trust-building process over from zero.
Your technical setup
- Authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC). These records prove your emails really come from you – if they're not set up correctly, providers trust you less. Make sure all of these records are added correctly to your DNS dashboard during the sending domain setup in Customer portal. For your DMARC policy specifically: on a fresh domain, start with
p=nonefor the first few weeks, so everything can settle without Gmail and other providers accidentally blocking your own legitimate mail. Once things are stable, move top=quarantinefor stronger protection. - A "noreply@" sender address. Gmail and Yahoo treat
noreply@as a marker of automated bulk mail. Go to your Ghost settings -> Newsletters and change your sender address fromnoreply@to something a reader could write back to –hello@,mail@, ornewsletter@yourdomain.com. - Stray scripts in your email. If you embed something like an ad provider's
<script>tag, email clients ignore it (so it doesn't break anything visually), but some spam filters don't love seeing it.
Take a closer look at your list
Not every inbox on a list stays in use, and there are two different kinds to be aware of. Some addresses are genuinely dead, and when the mailbox no longer exists – the email bounces. Ghost handles that group for you: when an address permanently bounces, it automatically stops sending to it, so they drop off over time without you doing anything. The trickier group is the addresses that still work but that nobody checks anymore – someone moved on but never unsubscribed. These don't bounce, so Ghost keeps sending to them, and they quietly hold your open rate down.
That's the group worth finding and clearing out yourself. In your members list, add a filter for Emails opened (all time) is 0 combined with Emails sent (all time) is greater than 0 – that surfaces everyone who's received your newsletters but never opened one. From there you can click on three dots near the filter icon and unsubscribe all the inactive members.
And if you want to know your bounce rates, spam score or any delivery stats – reach out anytime, and we'll look at the Mailgun data for your domain.
