Details
Was your email send, or test send, not received? Or perhaps it just took a while to arrive? Thankfully in 99.99% of cases, this can be resolved fairly easily. Let's run through a few things to check.
Things To Check
Check the Junk Folder
Check the junk and / or spam folder of your email client. Sometimes your email client won't like the content of the email that you're sending, and it can be something as simple as not enough text compared to images.
Send Your Test To a Different Email Address
Are you sending to your company email and also using a company email as your sender email address? If so, this could be stopping emails from being delivered to you.
Some companies have security settings that prevent a third party system from sending you emails on your company's behalf - which is essentially what our platform is doing. This is particularly common if you have not authenticated your domain.
A simple way to test this is to send the email to your personal email address (Gmail or Outlook.com) and see if it comes through or try changing the from address to a personal email, then re-sending to your company email address, can help to narrow down if this is the issue.
If you change the address and the email is delivered, make sure you let your IT team know so they can resolve the issue.
Ask Your IT Team for Assistance
So you've tried everything else and now you have to get in contact with the team who makes everything work the way it should.
If you have a fairly large IT team, you should really be looking to contact a System Administrator or Mail Server Administrator. Otherwise, this information is quite generic and should help them either way. Here's an email we've prepared for you to copy and paste to make things as pain free for you as possible:
Hi there,
We are using a new email marketing system and I'm trying to test some emails to my email address [email here].
The test emails aren't being delivered, and I've tried some basic troubleshooting but with no luck.
I sent the test email at approximately [date] and [time]. Below is some information from their support which they asked me to pass onto you.
Can you please take a look and see if there is anything preventing these emails from being delivered to me?
The IP address ranges which the email marketing system uses for sending:
[refer to our System IP Address article]
Are You Sending From a Freemail Address, or Your Own Domain?
Sending from a freemail address (such as a Bigpond, Xtra, Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo-style email address) can affect your email deliverability and thus, your open rate.
Freemail Email Domain vs. Your Own Professional Email Domain.
Did You Send To a Gmail Account?
If so, you may want to check the 'Promotions' tab at the top of your inbox. If your email is going to Promotions, here is what to do:
- Minimise the number of links in your email (to one link only).
- Have little or no images (we know... its a marketing email right?).
- Personalise your email to include the readers name.
- Don't include promotional or spam-like language.
Did You Send To a Outlook or Hotmail Account?
A few things to try include;
- Minimise the number of links in your email (to one link only).
- Have little or no images (we know... its a marketing email right?).
- Personalise your email to include the readers name.
- Don't include promotional or spam-like language.
Try improving your sender reputation;
- If you have Outlook.com / hotmail.com contacts on your list who consistently don't open your emails? Stop sending to them & remove them from your list. This can improve your sender reputation.
- If you consistently get complaints in your reports, start using a double-opt in process where people confirm that they want to receive emails from you.
Further Reading
Firewall & Whitelisting Issues