Improving your Shopify Messaging email delivery and deliverability

There are two factors that contribute to your email campaigns successfully reaching your customers' inboxes:

Email delivery refers to when an email is successfully delivered to your customer's email server. Emails that aren't delivered are bounced by the receiving server or email provider. A good email delivery rate for an ecommerce store is 95%. Emails sent to large subscriber lists can take a few hours to send completely.
Email deliverability refers to the ranking of your email after it's been successfully delivered to your customer's email server. Optimal email deliverability means that your email reaches your customer's primary inbox, or the appropriate tab (for example, the Gmail "Promotions" tab), rather than their spam folder.

This page includes best practices to improve your email delivery and your chances of landing in subscribers' inboxes instead of their spam folders.

Safe send limits

Safe send limits determine how many subscribers you can email during a period of time, such as over a day or week. The count is based on how many emails were delivered to individual subscribers that day, rather than the number of campaigns you sent.

The system might pause delivery when engagement is low or when many subscribers mark your email as spam. This protects your sender reputation. Improving your sender reputation can increase your limits and deliverability. Shopify Messaging might also send emails in batches to avoid spam filters.

If you encounter an email limit, then consider one of the following options:

Schedule an email for the next available date.
Create customer segments to target specific subscribers or split your list into smaller groups. You can send to one segment first, then duplicate the email and send to another segment later.

Building your sender reputation

When you start using Shopify Messaging, you need to establish a strong sender reputation with Internet Service Providers (ISP) to ensure high email deliverability.

Consider the following best practices to improve your sender reputation and increase your send limits:

Build trust with ISPs by sending warm-up emails to your most engaged contacts.
Improve and maintain the quality of your subscriber list.
Send emails consistently to maintain a steady volume of emails and keep your domain active.
Monitor your email delivery metrics and promptly address any declines in engagement and overall performance.
Take steps to avoid spam filters and reduce your spam complaints.
Authenticate your sender email address by adding CNAME and DMARC records to your third-party domain.

Sending warm-up emails

Warm-up emails are a series of emails that you send to your subscribers at gradually increasing volumes to help ISPs recognize and trust your email sending behavior. This reduces your risk of emails being flagged as spam by email providers, and improves your email deliverability.

If any of the following circumstances apply to your email marketing strategy, then consider sending warm-up emails:

You're new to email marketing and are sending emails to subscribers for the first time.
You're sending email marketing through a new email address or domain.
You've recently made changes to your email marketing strategy.

Best practices for sending warm-up emails

Review the following best practices for implementing a successful email warm-up plan:

Start with a small group of your most engaged contacts who frequently open and interact with your emails to help ensure initial engagement.
Increase the number of recipients gradually over time. For example, send at least one email per week and add more recipients each time. This can take several weeks depending on list size.
Monitor your delivery metrics such as open rates, click rates, complaint rates, and bounces, and adjust your email strategy based on feedback. For example, if you notice lower engagement with your emails, then reevaluate your subscriber list and adjust accordingly.

Maintaining a high quality subscriber list

Engagement from your subscribers, such as high open rates, helps providers treat your emails as wanted mail. A high-quality list increases engagement and lowers spam complaints, bounces, and unsubscribes. Customers who unsubscribe, bounce, or mark your emails as spam are automatically suppressed from future campaigns.

The following suggestions can help you maintain a high quality subscriber list:

Verify that you have opt-in consent for all emails added to your database.
Update customer contact information as required.
Evaluate your email acquisition sources. If you're receiving many spam complaints or bounces on emails from a particular source, then remove or replace that acquisition source.
Never purchase or rent email lists. If you've purchased or rented lists in the past, then ensure those emails are set as "not subscribed".
In the Marketing opt-in of your Checkout settings, deselect the Preselected checkbox for email marketing to ensure that customers don't accidentally opt in.
Use customer segments regularly to filter and remove subscribers who have previously bounced, are unengaged, or who signed up long ago and have never made a purchase. Learn more about creating customer segments.
Prevent bot-generated email subscribers in your subscriber list.

Preventing bot-generated email subscribers

Bot-generated subscribers are email addresses added by automated software, not real customers. Bots use signup forms to submit random or invalid addresses, or real addresses without consent. Sending to them can lower engagement, increase bounces and spam complaints, and raise send costs.

Take the following steps to prevent interactions with bot-generated email subscribers:

Activate hCaptcha on your store to prevent bots from subscribing to emails on your store.
Regularly remove inactive or suspicious email addresses from your email subscriber list. For example, check your customer list for email addresses with unusual domains and customers who've never made a purchase or opened an email.
Activate double opt-in to ensure that subscribers confirm that they want to receive email and SMS marketing from you.

Filtering bot-generated subscribers

Shopify automatically filters bot-generated subscribers from email subscriber lists on stores that have been flagged by email providers for having a high number of bot-generated subscribers.

When you send an email to your subscribers, these bot-generated subscribers are filtered out at the time of email delivery, but remain in your Customers list. If your store is part of early access for filtering bot-generated subscribers, then you might notice a decrease in the number of email subscribers that your Shopify Messaging campaigns are sent to, compared to past emails.

In addition to this filter, you should also take measures to prevent interactions with bot-generated email subscribers.

Avoiding spam filters

Receiving email servers use spam filters to block or filter unwanted emails from being delivered to a recipient's inbox. Blocked emails count toward your bounce rate. Others might be delivered to spam or junk folders.

Many mailbox providers publish requirements and best practices for senders. To learn more about provider specific guidelines, refer to the following resources:

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 the Shopify Messaging best practices guide to improve your statistics and achieve better delivery.

Improving your delivery metrics

Improving your delivery metrics, such as spam rates, bounce rates, opens and clicks, and unsubscribes, helps build your sender reputation and reduces the risk of campaigns being paused. For details, check your Shopify Messaging analytics.

Spam rate

Your spam rate, also referred to as your spam complaint rate, calculates the number of emails that customers mark as spam against the number of emails that are delivered to their inbox.

You can track most spam complaints per campaign in your email tracking and analytics. However, 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.

Consider the following strategies to reduce your spam complaint rate:

Maintain a high quality subscriber list.
Include an unsubscribe link that's easily found in your emails to prevent recipients from marking your email as spam.
Use customer segments to send marketing emails only to subscribers who positively engage with your emails and contribute to your store revenue. For example, you could create a customer segment that filters customers subscribed to email marketing who were added in the last 6 months, or who placed an order or clicked an email prior to the last 6 months:

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

Bounce rate

Your bounce rate is the measurement of how often your emails are either not successfully delivered, or are rejected by a recipient's inbox provider, such as Gmail or Yahoo.

There are two types of bounces that are included in your bounce rate:

Hard bounces occur when emails can't be delivered because the recipient email address is incorrect, doesn't exist, or the receiving server has blocked delivery permanently.
Soft bounces occur when emails can't be delivered temporarily, such as when a recipient's inbox is too full, or the email server is temporarily unavailable.

A high bounce rate increases the likelihood of your emails being filtered as spam. The following suggestions can help you improve your bounce rate:

Maintain a high quality subscriber list.
Before you import a list of customer email addresses, use a third-party email verification tool to ensure that the email addresses are valid.
Ensure that your email size isn't too large, as larger emails might be rejected by some email servers. For tips to keep your emails short and concise, review the best practices for Shopify Messaging.
Review where your customer email addresses are coming from to ensure that your acquisition process avoids collecting false email addresses or email addresses with typos.
Create a customer segment that includes bounced email addresses, and then remove those email addresses from your subscriber list.

Segment and remove bounced email addresses from your subscriber list

From your Shopify admin, go to Apps > Messaging.
Click the sent campaign that you want to create a customer segment for.
On the Bounce rate metric card, click the View segment icon.
Select the checkbox next to Customer name to select all customers.
Click Bulk edit.
Uncheck the Accepts email marketing column for each customer.
Click Save.

Opens and clicks

The following suggestions can help improve your open and click rates:

Verify that the subject line of your 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 the Suggested time in Shopify Messaging, which is the optimal send time based on your store and industry trends. You can also set your own custom date and time.
Create a segment to limit your campaigns to a smaller audience of more engaged subscribers. For example, create a segment of subscribers who have made a previous purchase or opened previous emails.

Unsubscribes

You can review your unsubscribes in your email tracking analytics.

The following suggestions can help reduce the number of customers who unsubscribe from your emails:

Maintain a high quality subscriber list.
Ensure that your email content is relevant to the customer segment that you're sending it to and meets any expectations that you set during acquisition.
Review the Shopify Messaging best practices to ensure that your email content is engaging, effective, and well-designed.
Avoid sending emails too frequently so that subscribers don't feel as though you're spamming their inbox.