I received an email regarding Mailchimp delivery rates as follows.
“We’ve been experiencing some problems in regards to our email reach. Whilst the report shows we’ve sent out an EDM to all 500 recipients, we’ve had clients on the list coming back to us stating they have not received anything at all. We’ve checked for typos, for email lists and their spam folders – which are all at the right settings”.
Here are my findings and recommendations to the client.
Domain Verification
The first step to take in determining why recipients may not be receiving your sent Mailchimp campaigns is to ensure that you have verified your domain and authenticated that Mailchimp may send on your behalf. Verifying your domain is a two step process that does the following:
- It proves that you own or have access to the domain.
- It tells receiving servers that you’ve allowed Mailchimp to send on your behalf (i.e. so that receiving email servers don’t think someone else is using your domain to send spam messages.
To verify and authenticate your domain follow the instructions that Mailchimp provides. You’ll need access to your domain DNS records to authenticate your domain (if you don’t know how to do this then contact your web developer).
Quality of recipients email
When speaking to the client that requested help it turned out that most of the people that didn’t receive the email campaign were on the same domain (a company domain). Through some analysis I determined that the subscribers were all using cPanel email which is almost always provided as a website hosting add-on.
For many reasons, cPanel provided email is a bad choice for sending and receiving emails. You should really use a reliable email service such as Google Apps or Microsoft Exchange. cPanel has various ways of identifying and handling spam (e.g. SpamAssassin and email filters) and the webhost can set various other filters such as blacklisting IP addresses and domain names. Because there are so many ways that cPanel and webhosting email and spam detection can be setup, it is unbelievably difficult to determine why cPanel email may not be receiving Mailchimp sent emails.
Of course, we can’t usually ask our recipients to change their email provider however, if you’ve verified and authenticated your domain for Mailchimp sending, and a cPanel recipient isn’t receiving your campaigns then there is little more that you as the sender can do.
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