If you experience a 0% click rate and, in particular, a drop in the click rate to 0% while previous newsletters were registering positive numbers, there are a few things to check.
Trivial: the newsletter doesn’t contain links to click
A pure text newsletter could not contain links to click, or a newsletter crafted to be “just read” cannot collect clicks even if one or more links are present.
Action links, like the unsubscribe, profile edit, and view online, are not counted as clicks but are counted as “open” events.
First check first
Run a test from the plugin Help/Seding page. If an error is shown, probably your newsletter has not been delivered at all. The plugin usually intercepts errors and suspends the newsletter sending, showing a red notice on the admin side.
But there are kinds of errors that cannot be intercepted. For example, if you get a success message but the email is not delivered, the mailing system of your hosting provider is dropping it. In this case, you should have 0% rate both for open and click.
It’s mandatory to ask the hosting provider for a check.
It’s always recommended to install WP Mail Logging to have a log of the emails processed by WordPress.
Both the open rate and click rate are 0%
It could be a database problem. You should be able to identify if there are corrupted tables from the Help/System page, Database tab. If there are corrupted tables, they can be repaired by your hosting provider; ask them.
Corrupted tables are usually of type “MyISAM” and old table format. Ask the provider to convert them to “InnoDB” as well.
Or no email is actually delivered. Assuming the test on the previous step was successful, and you got the email delivered, the provider could be dropping your real newsletter for other reasons:
- They have a spam filter triggered by your content (even if your content is more than safe!): ask them
- They have sending limits triggered when more than one email is sent in a shot (while the test email is a single message and it’s not affected by limits): ask them
- Other failure points
A diagram of the various failure points when sending an email from WP can be found here. Rarely are all emails dropped if they get through your hosting provider.
The open rate is positive, but the click rate is 0%
Assuming there are links to click in your newsletter, the open and click recording is managed by the same plugin’s function; hence, that is a weird condition.
The first thing to check is if the links are working. If you sent yourself a copy of the newsletter showing the issue, try to click the links and see the behaviour.
Links could have been rewritten by a delivery service that is no longer working or by an SMTP plugin you have deactivated (like WP Mail SMTP Pro).
Links created by the Newsletter plugin usually have one of these formats:
- https://www.domain.com?ntlr=(a long sequence of characters)
- https://www.domain.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=tnp&ntlr=(a long sequence of characters)
If you see links like:
- https://track.domain.com….
- https://(a different domain than yours)…
It means the links inside your newsletter have been rewritten by another service, and they mayn’t be working.
In this case, only a detailed analysis can clarify what’s going on. You can open a ticket with us for more support.