Some of the most common questions that our customer support team receives involve Email Sends that didn't go quite as planned. This article covers the most common Email Send issues, their causes and the steps that you can take toward a resolution.
Email Did Not Send
If, upon clicking the Send button and approving the send, your Email Send does not actually send anything, then it is likely that your email contains one or more render errors. Thankfully, email render errors are recorded back to your CRM as Email Events that contain details about the render error in the Message field.
We can see in the example above that the email was unable to send due to a syntax error in line 3, column 43 of the email's HTML, caused by the presence of an unclosed "{". This message saves a lot of potential headache by identifying the source of the render error so the problematic HTML can be quickly fixed.
One important thing to keep in mind is that an Email Send will fail at the first render error it encounters and generate an Email Event with a corresponding message. Once this render error has been resolved, it is possible that another render error will be encountered further down in your email's HTML the next time you try to send it. So, if your email contains multiple errors, it may take a few send attempts to identify and resolve them all.
If your email is not sending, but you are not seeing any render error Email Events in your system, there are three main things to check:
- Did you remember to add recipients to your Email Send?
- If your Email Send contains recipients but still did not send, check to make sure that your recipients are not blocked or unsubscribed by viewing the Email Send's Excluded Emails.
- If your recipients have not been excluded and you do not see any render errors, go to Settings > ClickDimensions Settings and run an Error Trace for email and connection errors. If you have any questions about the errors that appear in here, or if you have checked all of the above and no errors are appearing, open a support ticket so we can give you in-depth assistance.
Scheduled Email Did Not Send On Time
If an Email Send that you have set to automatically send at a future time does not send at that time, there are a few possible causes. The most common is that the Send button was clicked before the "Send on Date and Time" was actually saved to the Email Send record. However, there are some other potential causes.
See this article for detailed information on why a scheduled Email Send may not have sent at the scheduled time.
Email Not Delivered To Internal Recipients
Some email filters are set to automatically block emails that appear to come from one domain but are actually sent by another. If this is the case with your email filter, you will need to whitelist the IP addresses that ClickDimensions uses to send emails in order for your company's internal recipients to receive emails sent through ClickDimensions.
See this article for a full list of ClickDimensions' email server IP addresses.
High Bounce Rate
If your email sends, but you are receiving a high number of bounces, the first thing that you should do is make sure that your domain has a properly configured SPF record. Essentially, an SPF record is used to indicate that ClickDimensions is authorized to send emails on behalf of your domain. Many spam filters will notice that an email that is from sender@yourcompany.com is actually being sent by ClickDimensions, and in order to make sure that this is a valid email, will check your domain's SPF record to verify that ClickDimensions is authorized to send emails on your behalf. If your SPF record is not set up properly, it is likely that any mail server performing an SPF check will bounce your emails.
While this is the most common reason for a high bounce rate, there are many reasons that an email can bounce. So you can do more detailed deliverability analysis, every email that bounces will generate a corresponding Bounce Email Event. This Bounce Email Event will contain the full bounce message sent by the receiving mail server so that you can determine why a particular email bounced. However, keep in mind that the specific bounce message (contained in the Email Event's "Message" field) returned by the server that rejected the email will give you the most detailed information about why a given email bounced. You may also need to search online for details on a specific bounce code and, in some instances, reach out to the administrator of the server that is bouncing your emails to fully understand why an email bounced and the steps required to prevent it from happening again.