Causes of email delivery failure
When sending a newsletter, some of the emails may not be delivered to the recipients. This is because they get bounced or go to the spam folder. In Convead you can see which emails are undelivered and why.
The reasons for the failure of any newsletter can be found in the “Analytics” step. There are 3 types of failures: email bounces, spam reports from the server, and complaints from recipients. To see a breakdown of the reasons for the failures, click on the corresponding number on the funnel and in the list on the right you will see the reason for the failure for each email:
The table shows the reasons for the failures in the form in which the server sends them to us. Let’s look at what it all means:
1. Denied (bounced)
This section contains emails that the receiving server refused to accept for various reasons unrelated to spam suspicions.
2. Automatic spam reports
This section includes emails that the receiving server refused to accept on suspicion of spam.
3. Complaints from recipients
In this section are emails that have been delivered to the recipient’s mailbox, but they pressed the button “This is spam!” in the mail service interface.
It should be noted that due to technical reasons not all complaints will be delivered to Convead. That is, the actual number of complaints may be higher than that displayed in the mailing analytics.
If your business needs to have the most accurate information about the number of complaints about your emails, we advise you to learn about the feedback loop mechanism. Please note that the configuration of this lies outside the area of Convead’s responsibility and you will need to perform it yourself. To use it with Convead’s mailings, you will need to connect an additional “Dedicated IP address” package to your account.
Why some of the numbers are not visible on the funnel
In some cases, you may notice that the numbers on the funnel in the newsletter do not match. For example: 100 emails were sent and 90 were delivered. At the same time there are no emails showing in the “Denied” and “Spam” reports; it is not clear where 10 emails are “stuck”.
This is normal. It can be observed within 72 hours from the date of the email.
The fact is that some mail servers may delay the delivery of your email for various reasons or temporarily limit it by responding “Try again later”. In such a situation, Convead will attempt to send your letter 20 times within 72 hours. This procedure should end with either a successful delivery (the email will appear in the “Delivered” section) or rejection (the email will appear in “Refused”).
Recommendations for the elimination of errors
Error correction for “Denied”
A large number of errors fall into the group “Denied” – a good reason to think about how you collect your database and how to validate the addresses of recipients.
Most likely you will not check the validity of the entered address and immediately use it in your mailing list. It is common practice to send an automatic confirmation email after a subscriber enters an email address. For example, when registering on the site, the user must activate their account by clicking on the link in such a confirmation email. Thus, we get a guarantee that the email address is real, written without errors, and belongs to this user.
If we talk about the methods to manually validate an existing database, we can recommend the following steps:
1. Download all addresses with errors from Convead.
2. In the resulting file, carefully review the “Email” column and try to eliminate the following common errors:
a) Errors and typos in the addresses of known mail servers:
- lizst.ru – list.ru
- gmail.ru – gmail.com
- etc.
b) Typos caused by the replacement of Latin letters in the address with similar Russian characters. For example, the letters у, к, е, о, х, а, р, and с look almost the same in Russian and English character sets; this often results in typos. This can be done using the “AutoCorrect” function in your XLS editor.
3. Corrected addresses can be loaded back into Convead through the “Newsletters” interface. This procedure is described in detail in the article How to import my recipient list.
Reducing the number of automatic spam reports and complaints
A large number of spam report errors indicate that your emails look like spam to mail servers.
When dealing with complaints, the recommendations above will also be very useful.
Try to understand what exactly prompted the recipient to mark your email as spam. Perhaps you send emails too often. Or your emails look like spam. Or the user did not consent to receive emails from you.
One of the most effective ways to reduce the number of complaints is to confirm the subscription (double opt-in). In many countries, this procedure is required by law for all mailings.
The prohibition of re-sending emails to rejected addresses
Convead will not re-send emails to any address that has ever fallen into the group “Denied”, but these will appear in the statistics of newsletters and will therefore reduce the overall percentage of conversions.
To solve this problem, you can unsubscribe such email addresses from all your mailings in your Convead account. Unsubscribed addresses will no longer appear in the statistics for the mailings.
To do this, prepare a file with a list of addresses and upload it to Convead as described in the article How to download or upload a blacklist of unsubscribed clients.