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A customer says they did not receive an email
A customer says they did not receive an email

Email insight and guidance.

Ned Creed avatar
Written by Ned Creed
Updated over a week ago

At some point a customer will email you and say, “I did not get my order email confirmation” or “I did not receive the Wine Club Member sign up welcome email” or “the Reset Password email never came through after I clicked the button” or "I did not receive the offering email for the new vintage."

Please do contact our team when this happens so that we can check your settings. You can also review the customer details page in the Offset/Figure platform, where on the "Marketing" tab, you can see all the transactional messages sent to the customer, plus your marketing emails if you are using Campaign Monitor. If a message to this customer has bounced, it will show up on that Marketing tab.

However, if all the settings in your account are properly configured, our response as to why they didn’t receive the email in question, with a smile, will be… 

All emails—direct, transactional, or marketing—are functions generated when triggered by their respective systems. 

Whether the person on the receiving end actually receives the message is up to numerous factors once that email leaves its respective system.

Those factors can be a combination of:

  • Personalized spam filtering levels or security settings.

  • Their email provider's inbox segmentation features (automated or pre-set).

  • What email program they're using (it appears Outlook and AOL are slipping behind the times)?

  • Have they added your company email address to their contacts list?

  • If they are using a personal email address or work email address, in which the work address may have more strict levels of filtering outside of their control set by company administrators at a server level. Some companies will delete an email if it comes from a mass marketing program, so the message never has the chance to reach your customer's inbox, even if they have added your email address to their contact list.

    >>Options: Customers can whitelist the email address your messages come from and IT teams at companies can even whitelist IP addresses...

  • Are they willing to do a search for your company domain in their email and see if any emails have ever been delivered?

  • Could they just have missed an email among the dozens of other emails that came through their inbox that day?

If you really want to solve the issue for your customer, it is wise to take them through that entire process of questions above. Time consuming indeed, but any of those could be causing the issue.

You could send a message direct from your email and it will likely, but might not, get to your customer. A marketing email gets sent out and customers might not receive it, a transactional email is sent and again, it might not be received.

The situation we have noticed over the past decade, over 99% of the time, it is receiver related. Which means you will have to work with your customer to determine which of the factors mentioned above could be contributing to the missed email.

The other 1% of the time is when the servers hosting the Offset/Figure platform go offline and you in turn receive several dozen or several hundred calls/emails from customers over a short span of time. Which usually means our team has also received a couple dozen calls/emails about the system as well.

Sometimes people will not receive an email. An unfortunate reality.

If it seems these situations are cropping up more than expected, there are also some pieces your team can adhere to when sending email campaigns....

  • In the subject line of the email, stay away from any punctuation (besides dashes or hyphens)

  • Strings of all caps are a no-no.

  • Emojis can cause problems with deliverability.

  • Don't affix too many photos into the body of the campaign that are large files.

  • Don't create one integrated JPEG or PDF style image that contains the entire message of the email.

  • All body copy should be actual text, not an image of the text.

Please do remember...nothing in the world of email marketing is a silver bullet...and that is a challenge we will all continue to battle.

Warnings about Cox.net, Earthlink.net, OptOnline.net, and RoadRunner.com (or rr.com) email addresses...
With a bit of fury and past headaches, yet in the most kind way possible, we will say that email addresses from Cox.net, Earthlink.net, OptOnline.net, AOL, and RoadRunner.com (or rr.com) are notorious for bouncing. Our winery and retail customers, plus members of our team, have spent hours on the phone with customer service teams from those companies trying to get both sides on the same page. However, we have come to the conclusion that success with getting emails through the filters from these providers will only be effective if your customer, the one that has the email address, contacts the email service department themselves and demands that messages come through from your company domain name. Good luck. It is a very frustrating process. We have all been there.

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