Have you ever sent an email through Virtuous CRM+ Marketing and wondered what all those delivery status labels are trying to tell you? You're not alone! Between "bounced," "deferred," "expired," and everything in between, you'll encounter various delivery status labels that indicate how your messages are performing. This guide provides explanations of each status label and how to find them. So whether you're troubleshooting delivery issues or simply want to better understand your email performance metrics, this guide will help you understand what each status means and determine any necessary next steps.
Where Can I See the Delivery Statuses?
To view the delivery status of a sent email, navigate to the Marketing tab and select Email.
From here, press the Actions button in the top right, then select Manage Sent Emails or View Activity.
Manage Sent Emails will display a list of all of your sent emails. Click into any email using the blue hyperlink for the email name.
Here, you can see overall delivered, open, click, and unsubscribe rates at the top. Scroll to the bottom to view all of the recipients of your email along with their delivery status.
If, instead, you prefer to view all recipient engagement and delivery statuses across all emails, select the View Activity from the Actions button on the Emails home screen.
In addition to these two options, you can also view delivery statuses by viewing the Versions and then Activity within any single email or using the Sent Email Query type in the Query tool.
Email Status Descriptions
There are a range of delivery status values, which may be tricky to parse. Use the information below to help decode the delivery status labels:
- Blocked: A block occurs when your IP address is blacklisted, an ISP or messaging organization blocks the message, or a filter on the recipient’s server flags the message content. Blocks don’t create permanent suppressions, so CRM+ still attempts to send to the address. If an address is blocked on 3 total send attempts, it’s flagged in the Data Health Tool for you to review.
-
Bounced: A bounce means the receiving server couldn’t or wouldn’t accept the message. Bounces fall into two types:
- Hard Bounce: a permanent delivery failure, such as an invalid email address.
-
Soft Bounce: a temporary delivery failure caused by conditions like a full inbox, a server outage, an oversized message, or too many recent emails to the recipient’s server. CRM+ keeps attempting delivery for up to 72 hours after the initial send, so an email may eventually show both Bounced and Delivered statuses.
If an address soft bounces on 3 total sends without delivering, it’s flagged in the Data Health Tool as an Undeliverable Email Address. You can use the tool to review, update, or delete these addresses. Learn more about the Data Health Center here.
- Cancelled: An email that was scheduled to be sent was cancelled by the sender.
- Deferred: The recipient mail server asked Virtuous CRM+ to stop sending emails so fast. Similar to a soft bounce, a Deferred email will attempt to send again within the 72 hour period.
- Delivered: The accepted response generated by the recipients' mail server.
- Dropped: An email will be dropped when the recipient of that email is unsubscribed, the recipient email previously (hard) bounced, or that recipient has marked your email as spam.
- Expired: Expired means that an email has soft bounced, but it is a specific type of bounce. If an email bounces, we will retry for up to 72 hours. If the email is unable to be delivered within the 72 hour window, it will expire and be marked as Bounced - Expired.
- Failed: Your email data could not be sent to our email server. If this occurs, contact Virtuous Support for additional troubleshooting and recommendations.
- Processed: Your email data has been successfully sent to our email server and is ready to be sent.
- Processing: Your email data is currently being sent to our email server to be sent. The timeframe for an email send to process depends on the size of your email. Once finished, the status will update automatically to Processed and then, Delivered.