Teachworks allows you to send automatic email lesson reminders to employees and customers to remind them of upcoming lessons. You can enable this for your employees and customers by following the steps in this article: Lesson Reminder Emails.
The following article will guide you through figuring out why a user is not receiving lesson reminder emails.
Step 1
The first step is to make sure that the user's email address is correct. You should follow up with your customer or employee to confirm that the email address captured on their profile is correct.
Step 2
The second step is to make sure that lesson reminders have been enabled on the user's profile. Lesson reminders are enabled/disabled on each user’s profile separately.
To make sure that lesson reminders are enabled for a user, go to their profile and scroll to the “Notifications” section. The “Lesson reminders” field needs to be set to “On”.
Step 3
Make sure that the user's profile status is "Active" or "Prospective". Lesson reminders are only sent to user profiles whose status are currently set to "Active" or "Prospective".
You can go to Students -> Students/Families and type the user's name in the search field in the sidebar to pull up their profile and look at the "Status" column to verify their profile status.
Step 4
The next step is to check the Notification Logs. You can access them under the "Account & Settings" tab to view the emails that have been sent to customers and employees. You can type the email address of the recipient in the search field in the sidebar to easily find results for them.
“Result” Column
The Result column is very important when you are troubleshooting email notifications as it indicates the delivery statuses of notifications. You can hover over the status to see the error message.
What the statuses mean:
Delivered - The recipient’s email server returned a successful delivery response.
Sent - The message has not been sent to the recipient’s email address, but a response has not been returned yet.
Dropped - The email was not delivered. This could be due to several reasons including:
An invalid email was captured
A permanent error was returned by the server
The recipient has previously marked a notification as spam
Notification Doesn’t Appear in the Logs
If the lesson reminder email doesn’t appear in the logs, it hasn’t been sent to your customer / employee. This could be due to the following reasons:
You’ve Missed the Cutoff - Lesson Reminders are queued and sent at the beginning of each hour, so any lessons that have a starting time in the same hour are sent together at the beginning of the hour.
Example: If your lead time for reminders is set to 24 hours, lessons beginning at 4:10pm, 4:30pm and 4:50pm will all be queued and set the day previous day at 4pm. Therefore, in order for lessons beginning after 4pm to have reminders sent, they must be added to the calendar before 4pm the day before.
You can find this setting in your Account Settings under “Notification Settings”. This setting determines the number of hours before a lesson start time that a notification is sent.
You Don’t Have Lesson Reminders Enabled for the User - Lesson reminder emails will not be sent to users that don’t have this option enabled on their profiles (see step 1).
Verify your Email Address for Improved Deliverability - If you’re using your own email address to send notifications through Teachworks you can maximize deliverability by verifying your email address for sending. You can follow these steps: Verifying email addresses for sending.
Step 5
To prevent future email delivery issues, encourage recipients to add Teachworks emails to their safe sender list or address book. Regularly verify that email addresses in your Teachworks account are valid and up-to-date, and avoid sending emails to addresses that have previously caused hard bounces.
If a user’s email address returns a permanent error, they may be added to a no-send list. In this case, you can contact us to remove them from the list. Suppression lists are maintained by email providers to block emails from being sent to certain addresses due to issues like marking emails as spam or hard bounces. If an email address is on a suppression list, Teachworks will stop sending emails to that address to avoid further delivery problems.
If a user has marked one of your emails as spam, you’ll need to ask them to send you written confirmation that they would like to receive emails from you again and that they will not mark future emails as spam. This written consent should clearly state that the recipient wishes to receive emails from your Teachworks account and will not mark them as spam again. This step is crucial for compliance and to ensure future email delivery. We will then remove the user from the suppression list
Additionally, if the issue is due to a hard bounce, notify Teachworks support to request the removal of the email address from the suppression list. Once the address is removed, Teachworks will resume sending emails to that address.