Campaign cancellation: reasons and solutions

Reasons for cancelling a campaign shipment

If your shipment has been cancelled, it is because one (or both) of the following reasons have occurred:

High number of hard bounces

When we detect that a campaign has a high number of non-existent emails (hard bounces), typically because the email has some error or has ceased to exist (common in old or purchased lists), we cancel it as soon as possible to avoid greater evils. We explain what these greater evils are:

• Email providers (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.) have a way of categorizing incoming emails through filters. These filters, which determine whether an email campaign goes to spam or not, take into account these factors:
  • The behavior of your subscribers (if they open your campaigns)
  • The reputation of the email domain you use as sender 
  • The content and links of your campaign

We are going to focus on the second point, the reputation of the email domain you use as sender, that is, if you send your emails with the address comunicaciones@yourcompany.com.

Sending a high percentage of emails to non-existent addresses (hard bounce) activates the spam filters of email providers, which automatically subtract reputation from your sending domain. This means that, the more addresses you send to that do not exist, the more likely you are to systematically reach spam. This is why we automatically pause campaigns if they have a very high percentage of hard bounces, to give you the opportunity to clean the list of non-existent emails. 

You have more detailed information on how to avoid reaching spam in this article, in which we give you a more detailed explanation of how spam filters work. 

High number of complaints

When a large number of subscribers manually mark your shipment as spam, it means that you are not sending the content for which the subscribers signed up for your list. It may be that you are using a pre-existing list to send other content or, in the worst case, that you are sending to a rented or purchased list.

The only solution in this case is that you verify that you are sending the appropriate content, and to subscribers who are really interested and who have given you their explicit consent for it. For this reason, having a quality mailing list is essential. 

Solutions to the cancellation of a campaign shipment

The solution is to clean your list to eliminate those email addresses that do not exist. For this you have two options:

Clean lists with Acumbamail (NEW)

Now when a campaign is cancelled for having many hard bounces, we are offered the option to clean on the campaign report page.

This service is the only one that performs a real cleaning by making calls to the server of each email to see if it exists or not. For this reason, it has an extra cost and is not included in any of the rates or plans. Making calls to check if an email exists or not, is also a costly service for us. Even so, the price we offer as a product only for our own customers, is well below the price offered by external companies. This process, being carried out email by email, can take up to 1 hour for every 1000 subscribers.

After this cleaning, you can ask our technical support to consider the possibility of reactivating the cancelled campaign.

Clean lists with Acumbamail PRO

With our PRO and Enterprise plans you can use the list cleaning tool that will eliminate those email accounts that are not currently active. This cleaning uses our database of hard bounces, mailtraps or low quality emails. As it does not make real calls to each email, this cleaning is ideal to increase the quality of our list, but it is not recommended to clean low quality lists.

Clean lists with an external service

You can also use an external service dedicated to list cleaning. We recommend not trusting tools that offer this service at a reduced price, this service is costly so offering it at a reduced price is not viable for any company. A low price cleaning will never work because it will not be real.

Resume the shipment

Once you have carried out this cleaning and review of the list, you should duplicate the campaign, choose the new clean list and resend the campaign. We recommend sending it again even to those who received the first campaign, as having had a high number of hard and low, it is very likely that the first campaign reached them in the spam folder.