Email campaign delivery

If your email list has over 1,000 subscribers, then emails might take some time to reach your entire subscriber list due to a process called batching. Shopify Email automatically sends out emails in batches to help avoid spam filters and improve delivery rates. The time it takes for your emails to send varies by online store, based on factors like delivery rates, bounce rates, and how engaged your subscribers are.

If your email has not finished sending within 72 hours, then contact Shopify Support.

What's a good delivery rate?

A good delivery rate for an ecommerce store is 95%. A major contributing factor for this is the bounce rate of an email. The bounce rate indicates how many of the emails that you send out are "bounced" or returned to you. Ideally, you want these rates to be low. One of the most common reasons that an email bounces back is because the address that it was sent to no longer exists. That's an example of a hard bounce, which means you can't fix that issue and the email will never be delivered to that address. Soft bounces might be caused by an issue with a server, or the email you tried to send was too large.

Following the best practices for Shopify email can improve issues related to spam filters, unsubscribes, open rates, and bounce rates. This means that the time between batches tends to decrease, allowing you to send more emails faster.

To find out which subscribers had your email campaign bounce, refer to your email campaign analytics report.

Avoiding spam filters

Bounce rates, abuse complaints, and engagement from your subscribers can all affect whether or not your email is viewed as spam by an email provider. Making sure your emails include relevant content can make a difference, too. See our best practices guide to improve some of your statistics and avoid these issues. If those rates improve, then time between batches also generally tends to decrease, allowing you to send more emails, faster.

Improving the quality of your subscriber list

Managing who does and who does not receive your email marketing is a good way to increase engagement, which in turn has an impact on the delivery and batching success rate of your emails. If you want to send email campaigns that are tailored to a specific set of customers, then you can create a customer segment. To edit individual customers profiles, click their name on the Customers page in your Shopify admin.

Remove a subscriber from your subscriber list

1. From your Shopify admin, click Customers.
2. Search for the customer, and then click the customer's name to open their profile.
3. In the Email Marketing section, click Edit status.
4. Uncheck Customer agreed to receive marketing emails.
5. Click Save.

If a customer clicks Unsubscribe in an email from you, or marks the email as spam, then they'll be automatically and immediately removed from your list.

If an email address bounces back, then that email address is not included in future email marketing email campaigns.

Emails stopped delivering

The delivery system might stop delivering an email message if subscriber engagement is low or if there are other negative performance indicators to protect your sender reputation and to ensure that future email messages are delivered.

There are several factors that might have a negative affect on an email's performance.

List quality and high bounce rates

• Low-quality subscriber lists can often result in high bounce rates, which in turn have a negative impact on the deliverability of your emails.
• When an incorrect or nonexistent email messages prevent a message from being delivered, then the corresponding email address is removed from the subscriber list automatically. Before you import a list of email addresses, review the address list and fix any typos or errors.

Low open rate

• Send your emails at a time that makes sense for your subscribers. You can compose an email in advance, and then schedule the email to go out at a time that you think it's more likely to be opened by your subscribers.
• Verify that the subject line of the email is accurate, concise, and compelling.

High number of unsubscribes or frequently flagged as spam

• When subscribers manually mark your messages as spam, the delivery system might stop delivering your messages. This often occurs when the recipients didn't explicitly subscribe to your email marketing. Enable double opt-in to help ensure that your subscribers want to receive your emails.