The below statements are what determines how and which contacts come into an email marketing campaign. This is just to show that there are a few things that are taken into consideration when creating an email marketing recipient list:
“status = ‘active’"
“email_address LIKE ‘%@%‘”
“unsubscribe_newsletter_date IS NULL”
“is_contactable = 1"
“staff_id IS NOT NULL” // don’t send to unassigned contacts
(email_is_valid = 1)”
grouped by email address to exclude duplicates
restricted to the contacts the currentUser can see
In summary, a contact must have the following:
Be Active
Email address must be correct format
Not be unsubscribed from E-Marketing
Allow contact
Have a team member assigned to them (E-Marketing will not pick up contacts that are unassigned)
Have a valid email address
It will not send a campaign to the same email address more than once (if multiple contacts have the same email addresses)
It will only allow you to send a campaign to contacts you have permission to see (if you are a Master user this will not affect you)
Zenu performs a number of checks on each email address to verify that the email is technically valid and legitimate. The following factors are checked:
- Verify email address format; ensures the email address is in the correct format e.g., [email protected]
- Check MX Records; we check the domain server to ensure that they have a Mailbox set up
- Check for SMTP; SMTP is the standard protocol used between servers and users to allow for the sending and receiving of emails
- Check against a spam score; we use a third-party application to cross-check email addresses that are flagged with a negative spam score. Emails with a bad score are treated as invalid emails. Quality scores are based on appearance, deliverability and whether the email is disposable email or not.
These checks help to ensure that email addresses entered in the system are technically valid emails.
Although you may experience some emails operating functionally, they may not be correctly set up which can cause issues in email routing, hence they would be flagged as invalid due to technical failures.
If an email is invalid, it may have been marked invalid due to a temporary error as per the above checks or perhaps there could have been a hard bounce which would also cause it to be marked as invalid. You may view a list of reasons as to why emails could be invalidated with this error code list. You can view all contacts that have invalid email addresses in the Bounces section in E-Marketing.
To the right of the contact's details is a "Validate Email" button. If you are 100% certain that the email address is valid, you can click this button to re-validate the email in Zenu. However please be cautious as validating invalid email addresses can lead to serious consequences for your domain name in email reputation lists (which can lead you to being blacklisted).
To view contacts that have unsubscribed, you can export all contacts to a CSV and view the column called "unsubscribe_newsletter_date".