The "error" metric that is reported on your campaign metrics page is a combination of recipients whose email provider rejected the delivery of your post, and recipients who marked your email as spam. This is displayed solely for transparency. You didn't do anything wrong and no action is required on your end!
Email Provider Rejected Delivery
There are several reasons why an email provider would reject the delivery of an email to a recipient. These can be broken down into three main categories:
- Blocked — occurs when the content of your campaign contains elements the inbox provider deems “spammy,” or there was a technical issue that occurred between the two servers at the time you attempted to send the campaign
- Bounces — occurs when the receiving server returns to us a code that indicates that the reason for the refusal is a permanent issue with that server or recipient address. The most common reason an address will bounce is that the address in question is not valid.
- Drops — occurs when the recipient has previously marked your emails as spam, unsubscribed multiple times, or has an extended history of repeated bounces
Marked As Spam
This is more straightforward, but email recipients have the ability in their email client to mark incoming mail as spam. This negatively impacts your sender reputation and may cause future mail to be more likely classified as spam.
It's best practice to include a prominent Unsubscribe link in your footer to allow readers the ability to unsubscribe seamlessly, without marking it as spam (we handle this automatically for you). Both unsubscribing and marking an email as spam will prevent the sender from reaching that recipient's inbox again; however, unsubscribes do not negatively impact your sender reputation.
What does this mean for me?
We have built several processes and integrations to proactively vet every single email address on the platform to make sure its legit before sending; however, people do occasionally find ways to submit invalid email addresses.
When you see errors on your campaign metrics page—no action is required. The metric is solely for transparency. After a few failed delivery attempts, we will mark the subscription as inactive to prevent sending to fake emails—this way we can keep deliverability high for legit readers, and ensure your emails are finding your reader's inboxes safely.
This also explains why you may see the error rate decline over time. As the same readers continue to error, we will proactively remove them to optimize your list hygiene.