Once you have published a campaign, it is good to monitor its send volumes on the Email Analytics page. Monitoring a campaign after it starts will help diagnose any low send volumes, or will help you identify halts soon after they occur.
This article describes common issues that may prevent campaigns from fully delivering, or for halts to occur.
Q: What is low send volume and why does it happen?
- A: Low send volume is when an email campaign does not send as many emails as expected. Volumes can be affected by frequent halts, problems with identifying customers, or emails aren’t being properly generated and sent.
Q: What is a halt and why does it happen?
- A: A halt is the complete stoppage of an email campaign because emails cannot be delivered to customers. Usually, an email campaign can still identify customers, add them to the audience, but then the campaign gets blocked from delivering the actual email. This can occur because of audience filters, pages in the Bluecore product catalog are not working, etc.
Q: How do I identify a potential volume issue or halt?
- A: If you notice issues with your product catalog in Bluecore – like email proofs are not rendering correctly, contact your Forward Deployment Engineer (FDE) to investigate and prevent any issues.
If your proofs look good but the audience looks small, then you might consider looking at making your audience filters more lenient.
Q: How do I determine the cause of a halt?
- A: Contact your FDE. Your FDE will investigate the issue and work with you to optimize your email campaign.
Q: How do I minimize the number of halts that occur?
- A: Keep frequency cap settings simple. Set a frequency cap hierarchy, but make it simple so you don’t complicate things and affect other campaigns.
Since frequency caps are set within each campaign, make sure the timeframe is short enough so it doesn’t halt other campaigns. The suggested frequency cap is 20 hours or less, and around 2 caps (i.e., “have not received emails”) per audience.
Q: What will limit my send volume?
- A: Audiences are restrictive when they are created with very specific filters. The more specific the rules, the smaller the audience base. For example, if a clothing company is filtering for shirt buyers, jeans buyers, and jewelry buyers, but the latter two audiences don’t exist, then the audience is 0.
Q: I just created an audience for the second email in a sequence and it’s zero. Is something wrong?
- A: No, this is expected! An audience for the second (or third, fourth, etc.) email in a sequence (i.e., a second touch) will always be 0 when you are first creating the campaign, until Touch 1 emails start being sent.
Q: Why does my audience size seem smaller than expected?
- A: The audience size that you see in the audience preview is based on the time window size (e.g., an Abandoned Cart audience with a 1 hour window from 3 to 4 hours ago). In this case, when you preview your audience, you are not previewing the entire audience– just the audience within that time window.
Q: What are best practices to keep volumes up?
- A: Start simple with your base audience: keep filters simple and add a global frequency cap. Make adjustments after this base audience has been established.
Create an audience that is based on a certain window size first. If you are happy with that audience base, then you might want to keep that as the audience. If you feel that you can get more specific, you should add one property at a time to see how your audience base gets smaller with your rules.
Q: How can I create a good audience?
- A: Use the audience library to easily create audiences. Once you have created the audience with the pre-populated filters, you can add a simple frequency cap. After adding filters, click Preview to update the query and to see how your audience size is affected.