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 such as delivery rates, bounce rates, and how engaged your subscribers are.

Emails sent to large subscriber lists can take up to four hours to send completely.

What is a good delivery rate?

A good delivery rate for an ecommerce store is 95%. Emails that aren't delivered are bounced by the receiving server or email provider. Bounces occur for a variety of reasons, including invalid customer email addresses, full mailboxes, or messages being blocked by spam filters.

Following the best practices for Shopify email can improve issues related to spam filters, unsubscribes, open rates, and bounces. This will improve how fast email providers will accept your emails, and also improve your chances at landing in your subscribers’ inboxes instead of their spam folders

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

Avoiding spam filters

Receiving email servers use spam filters to prevent unwanted emails from being delivered to a recipient's inbox. Some emails will be blocked by the receiving server and count towards your bounces. Other messages might be delivered but end up in the recipient’s spam or junk folder.

Many mailbox providers provide requirements or best practices that help senders achieve better. The following links are some examples:

• Gmail
• Microsoft (Outlook)
• Yahoo
• Apple

Invalid customer email addresses, spam complaints, and engagement from your subscribers can all affect whether your email is viewed as spam by an email provider.

Refer to our best practices guide to improve your statistics and achieve better delivery.

Improving the quality of your subscriber list

Maintaining a high-quality subscriber list helps spam filters recognize your messages aren't spam and deliver the messages to the inbox.

A high-quality list begins with acquisition. The following suggestions can help you maintain a high-quality list at acquisition:

• Ensure you have opt-in consent for all emails added to your database.
• Evaluate your email acquisition sources. If you are receiving many spam complaints or bounces on emails from a particular source, then your subscriber list might be doing more harm than good.
• Never purchase or rent email lists. If you have purchased lists in the past, then ensure those emails are set as “not subscribed”.

After your subscriber list is created, a high-quality list needs to be maintained. This minimizes spam complaints, increases open rates, and can result in more email going to the inbox. The following suggestions can help you maintain your subscriber list:

• Use segmentation to filter out customer email addresses that haven't been opening your messages.
• Consider unsubscribing customers that were added long ago and have never made a purchase.

Note

Customers who click unsubscribe or mark your emails as spam are automatically suppressed from being included in future marketing email campaigns.

Emails stopped delivering

The delivery system might stop delivering an email campaign when subscriber engagement is low, or when there are other negative performance indicators, such as a high number of your subscribers marking your email as spam. This safeguard is in place to protect your sender reputation and to ensure that future email messages are delivered.

Improving your delivery metrics

If your email campaign is canceled, then you need to improve your delivery metrics.

Bounces

Low-quality subscriber lists can often result in high bounce rates, which in turn have a negative impact on the deliverability of your emails. The following suggestions can help with your bounce rate:

• Bounces indicates there might be an issue with how customer email addresses are being collected at signup, such as typos or people providing you with false addresses to take advantage of a one-time discount. Review where your customer email addresses are coming from to determine why invalid emails are being collected.
• Before importing a list of customer email addresses, ensure the email addresses are valid. There are third-party email verification tools on the market for this purpose.

Opens and clicks

The following suggestions can help with your opens and clicks:

• Verify that the subject line of the email is accurate, concise, and compelling.
• Send your emails at a time that makes sense for your subscribers. You can compose an email in advance and schedule the email to go out at a time that you think it's more likely to be opened by your subscribers.
• Create a segment to limit your campaigns to a smaller audience of more engaged subscribers. Examples of segments that could help:
  • Subscribers who have made a previous purchase or opened previous emails.
  • Exclude customers who subscribed over a year ago and have never purchased or opened an email.

Unsubscribes

You can review the number of customers who unsubscribe from your email in your email tracking and analytics.

The following suggestions can help with your unsubscribes:

• Review your email acquisition process and make sure you're collecting emails with proper opt-in consent. If you have any subscribers in your database that might not have opt-in consent, then you can Bulk Edit your customer list to uncheck Accepts email marketing.
• Activate double opt-in to help ensure that your subscribers want to receive your emails. With double opt-in activated, customers are emailed a link to confirm their subscription. Double opt-in is required by law in some countries and ensures you have engaged subscribers. You can activate and customize this in your Shopify admin under Settings > Notifications.

Spam complaints

Note

As of February 1, 2024, Gmail and Yahoo will enforce a complaint rate of less than 0.3%. It's recommended that you maintain a complaint rate of below 0.1% to prevent your emails from getting filtered into customers' spam folders.

A spam complaint rate calculates the number of emails that customers mark as spam against the number of emails that are delivered to their inbox.

Tracking your spam complaints

You can track your spam complaints on a per-campaign basis by viewing your email tracking and analytics. These numbers represent the spam complaint reports provided by email providers such as Outlook and Yahoo, and can help you track which email providers or customer list segments might submit higher complaints.

Gmail doesn't provide Shopify with spam complaint reports. If you're authenticated, have a DMARC record, and are sending more than 100 emails per day to Gmail users, then you can track your Gmail spam complaint rate by setting up Google's free Postmaster Tools.

Reducing your spam complaint rate

Consider the following strategies to reduce your spam complaint rate:

• Review your email acquisition process to determine whether there are any particular sources that are complaint prone with low sales conversions, and consider removing or replacing them.
• In the Marketing options of your Checkout settings, consider deselecting the Preselected checkbox for email marketing.
• Use customer segments to send marketing emails only to subscribers who positively engage with your emails, and contribute to your store revenue. You can create a customer segment by using a filter such as the following example:

email_subscription_status = 'SUBSCRIBED' AND (customer_added_date > -6m OR (customer_added_date <= -6m AND (number_of_orders > 0 OR shopify_email.clicked() = true ) ) )