Improving your marketing campaign delivery and deliverability

The following factors determine whether your Shopify Messaging marketing campaigns successfully reach customers:

Delivery refers to whether a message is accepted by the recipient's email server or mobile carrier. Email messages that aren't accepted are bounced, and SMS messages that aren't accepted are marked as undelivered.
Deliverability refers to where your message ends up after it's delivered. For email, this means landing in the primary inbox instead of the spam folder. For SMS, it means passing through the carrier without being filtered.

The built-in delivery settings in the Shopify Messaging app help protect your delivery and deliverability rates automatically. You can also follow the best practices on this page to maintain a healthy subscriber list, strengthen your sender reputation, and improve your delivery metrics across email and SMS marketing.

Shopify Messaging delivery settings

Your delivery settings control how your subscriber list is filtered before each send. To review or adjust them, go to Settings > Delivery in the Shopify Messaging app:

Smart delivery: Helps protect deliverability and reduce costs by filtering your campaign audience so that your message is sent only to engaged subscribers. For example, customers who haven't interacted with your recent marketing emails or SMS subscribers with inactive phone numbers are filtered out of your campaign audience. You can turn Smart delivery on or off.
Bot filtering: Removes bot-generated subscribers before each send.
List health: Removes subscribers who have bounced, unsubscribed, or filed a spam complaint from future campaigns.

Turn Smart delivery on or off

Smart delivery is turned on by default and applies across both email and SMS marketing when you have more than 1,000 subscribers in your send list. When it's active, a Smart delivery is on banner is displayed in the email or SMS editor before you send.

If there are 1,000 or fewer subscribers in the customer segment that you're sending a marketing message to, then your campaign audience isn't filtered, and the message is sent to all of the subscribers in the list, even if the Smart delivery setting is turned on.

Steps:

From your Shopify admin, go to Apps > Messaging.
Go to Settings > Delivery.
Turn the Smart delivery setting on or off. If you turn the setting off, then a dialog displays. Click Turn off to confirm.

Safe send limits

Safe send limits determine how many subscribers you can email during a given period, such as over a day or week. The count is based on how many emails were delivered to individual subscribers, rather than the number of campaigns sent.

Delivery might be paused when engagement is low or when many subscribers mark your email as spam. This protects your sender reputation. Emails might also be sent in batches to avoid spam filters.

If you encounter an email limit, then consider one of the following options:

Schedule the email for the next available date.
Create customer segments to target specific subscribers or split your list into smaller groups. You can send to one segment first, then duplicate the campaign and send to another segment later.

Building your sender reputation

A strong sender reputation helps ensure that your messages are delivered and not filtered. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) evaluate your domain and IP reputation based on engagement, bounce rates, spam complaints, and authentication.

In addition to maintaining a high-quality subscriber list, monitoring your delivery metrics, and reducing your spam complaint rate, the following best practices can also help improve your sender reputation:

Send messages consistently to maintain a steady volume and keep your channels active.
Authenticate your sender email address by adding CNAME and DMARC records to your third-party domain. Authentication is required by Gmail and Yahoo to meet their sender requirements and is one of the strongest signals of a legitimate sender.
When you start sending email marketing through a new address or domain, or after a long gap in sending, send warm-up emails to your most engaged contacts before expanding to your full list.

Maintaining a high-quality subscriber list

A high-quality subscriber list is the foundation of strong delivery across both email and SMS. Engaged subscribers signal to providers and carriers that your messages are wanted. Customers who unsubscribe, bounce, or mark your messages as spam are automatically excluded from future campaigns.

The following practices apply across all marketing channels:

Make sure that you have opt-in consent for all contacts in your database. For SMS compliance requirements in your region, refer to the requirements for sending SMS marketing campaigns.
Update customer contact information as needed.
Evaluate your acquisition sources. If you're receiving many complaints or bounces from a particular source, then remove or replace it.
Never purchase or rent contact lists.
Use customer segments regularly to filter out subscribers who have bounced, are unengaged, or signed up long ago without making a purchase.
Activate double opt-in to confirm subscriber intent before adding anyone to your marketing lists.

Preventing bot-generated subscribers

Bot-generated subscribers are contacts added by automated software, not real customers. Bots submit random or invalid addresses, or real addresses without consent. Sending to bot-generated subscribers increases bounces, spam complaints, and costs.

In addition to the built-in bot filtering setting in Shopify Messaging, take the following steps to prevent interactions with bot-generated subscribers:

Activate hCaptcha on your store to prevent bots from subscribing through your store's forms.
Regularly remove inactive or suspicious contacts from your lists. For example, check for email addresses with unusual domains and customers who've never made a purchase or opened a message.

Avoiding spam filters

Receiving email servers use spam filters to block or divert unwanted messages. Blocked emails count toward your bounce rate. Others might be routed to spam or junk folders.

Many mailbox providers publish requirements and guidelines for senders. Review the guidelines for the major providers:

SMS

Carriers filter SMS messages based on content and opt-in compliance. Do the following actions to reduce the risk of your SMS messages being filtered:

Make sure your campaign clearly identifies your store as the sender and includes an opt-out option.
Select Shorten links when creating a campaign to reduce character count and avoid spam filtering.

Improving your delivery metrics

Monitoring delivery metrics helps you catch problems early and maintain strong performance. For details on your campaigns, check your Shopify Messaging analytics.

Reducing your spam rate

Your spam rate measures how many messages customers mark as spam out of the total number delivered.

Consider the following strategies to reduce your spam rate:

Include an easy-to-find unsubscribe link in every email.
Use customer segments to send only to subscribers who actively engage with your campaigns. For example, you can create a customer segment that filters customers subscribed to email marketing who were added in the last 6 months, or who placed an order or clicked an email prior to the last 6 months:

email_subscription_status = 'SUBSCRIBED'
 AND (customer_added_date > -6m
     OR (customer_added_date <= -6m
    AND  (number_of_orders > 0
    OR shopify_email.clicked() = true )
    )
 )

Reducing your bounce rate

Your bounce rate measures how often your messages fail to reach recipients. Email bounces are categorized as hard or soft:

Hard bounces occur when a message can't be delivered because the email address or phone number is incorrect, inactive, doesn't exist, or the receiving server has permanently blocked delivery.
Soft bounces occur when delivery fails temporarily, such as when a recipient's inbox is full or the email server is unavailable.

Take the following actions to reduce your bounce rate:

Before importing email addresses, use a third-party verification tool to validate them.
Review where your contacts are coming from to make sure your acquisition process avoids collecting invalid or mistyped addresses.
Create a customer segment that includes bounced email addresses, then remove those addresses from your subscriber list.

Improving your open and click rates

The following suggestions can help improve your open and click rates:

Write subject lines for email and message copy for SMS that are accurate, concise, and relevant to the recipient.
Send at a time that makes sense for your subscribers. In the Shopify Messaging editor, you can choose the Suggested send time, which is the optimal time based on your store and industry trends.

Reducing unsubscribes and opt-outs

High unsubscribe or opt-out rates signal that your messages aren't meeting subscriber expectations. The following suggestions apply across email and SMS:

Make sure that your content is relevant to the segment you're sending to and matches the expectations you set during signup.
Avoid sending too frequently.

For additional email-specific guidance, refer to the Shopify Messaging email best practices.