When sending emails to your recipients, you might notice that some emails don't send to certain recipients as expected. To work out why you can investigate in a number of ways.
Below you will find a list of the most frequent reasons why an email wasn't sent to one or more recipients.
Common reasons for emails not being sent:
- The recipient wasn't in the Target Group at the time of the Flow execution
- Your Flow's Email Step has Conditions set
- The recipient doesn't have an email address to send to
- Agillic has blocked the recipient
- The email doesn't have a subject line
- Alternative sending method
- The email and/or Flow used for the send out isn't published to Production
- The email contains invalid HTML that's broken the email
- 'Max Repetitions per Recipient' is set to 1 for a Flow which has run in the past
- The Flow is set as paused or deactivated
The recipient wasn't in the Target Group at the time of the Flow execution
As Target Groups can be dynamic, the recipients included change. This might mean that a recipient wasn't part of a given Target Group at the time a Flow was executed. If you executed your Flow recently, you can investigate if the recipient is currently in the Target Group used for the execution.
You can learn more about how to check if a recipient is in a Target Group here.
Your Flow's Email Step has Conditions set
As you can set Conditions on Steps in your Flows, it might be the case that not all the recipients passing through your Flow meet the Conditions. If a recipient doesn't meet the Conditions of an email Step, the recipient will skip it.
You can find out if a recipient skipped an email Step due to conditions by investigating the Flow.
The recipient doesn't have an email address to send to
If the recipient doesn't have an email address, Agillic won't be able to send emails to the recipient.
To check if your recipient has an email address, you can either:
- Check your recipient's Person Data to check if the recipient has a valid email address.
- Investigate the recipient.
Agillic has blocked a recipient
Agillic can mark a recipient as blocked for different reasons, in which case the recipient cannot receive any emails. You can read more about how recipients are blocked here.
To investigate if Agillic has blocked the recipient, you can either:
- Investigate the Flow that attempted to send an email to the recipient.
- Find the recipient in a Target Group and check the Person Data fields that can block recipients such as 'UNSUBSCRIBED' and 'MALFORMED_EMAIL'. Check if any of them are set to TRUE.
The email doesn't have a subject line
We stop emails from sending out if they don't have a subject line. In this case, the email won't be sent to any of your recipients.
To check if an email failed because of a missing subject line, you can either:
- Check the email used for the send out and verify if it has a subject line.
- Investigate the Flow that attempted to send an email to the recipient.
- Investigate the recipient.
Alternative sending method
When setting up a Flow with an email Step, you can set up an alternative sending method to also send an email to external email addresses.
If this setting is set to 'Only send to alternative email address(es)', Agillic will only send to the filled-in email addresses and not any of the recipients going through the Email Step.
You read more about enabling alternative sending method here.
The email and/or Flow used for the send out isn't published to Production
When doing a live send out of a Flow created on Staging, you'll always need to do a Publish to Production in order to make your content ready for live execution.
If you haven't published your Email to Production, the Email won't be able to send. You can find out if this was the case by investigating the Flow with the Recipient ID of a recipient who went through the Flow.
If you haven't published your Staging Flow to Production, the email won't be able to send. If the Flow does exist on Production but hasn't been fully updated with a new Publish to Production, the Production Flow might have run with an old version of your Staging Flow.
Log into Production and check if your Staging Flow does exist on Production and check if it's a mirror image of your Staging Flow.
Read more about our best practice on workflow here.
The email contains invalid HTML that's broken the email
If an email contains invalid HTML, the email can break and fail to send. To test if this is the case for your email, you can test your email in the Content module. Remember to include a recipient ID when testing for this issue.
If you get a pop-up saying 'Unable to send', then the email most likely contains invalid HTML which you need to correct.
Learn more about investigating the 'Unable to Send' error here.
'Max repetitions per Recipient' is set to 1 for a Flow which has run in the past
When a Flow has set 'Max Repetitions per recipient' to 1, it means that the same recipient can only go through the specific Flow once.
If you execute a Flow for a recipient who has already gone through the Flow, the recipient will not be able to enter the Flow again.
You check your 'Max Repetitions per Recipient' setting by opening the Settings panel for your Flow. Learn more about Flow Settings here.
The Flow is set as paused or deactivated
A Flow which is set as 'paused' or 'deactivated' won't be able to send any emails.
If your Flow is set as 'paused', the Flow will have a pause icon next to its name and the Steps in the Flow will turn dark grey. Learn more about Pausing Flows here.
If the Flow is set as 'deactivated', the Flow will have an icon next to the Flow's name which says 'Deactivated on Production' and the Steps in the Flow will turn dark grey. Learn more about Deactivating a Flow here.