Here we list a few tips that might explain some unexpected behavior in Emarsys when working with email campaigns.
Contents:
Testmails are not delivered
Since testmails are not sent using our regular campaign launch mechanism, they are not tracked in the same way. If you find that a testmail is not being delivered you can work around this by launching it as a regular campaign.
- If you are using an email address that you entered manually, save this as a list or segment.
- Copy the email campaign and launch it immediately to your testmail list or segments.
- After a few minutes, check the email analysis for that campaign to see if it bounced.
- If there is no bounce, this means that the emails were delivered to your servers, and you must check with your own email administrator to find out why they did not reach the right inboxes.
Invalid characters in email addresses
Generally speaking, the local part of an email address (the part before the @ sign: example@emarsys.com) supports any ASCII character. However, most clients, forms and providers will not allow them. It is therefore recommended never to use any special characters except for underscore (_), dot (.) and dash (-). The domain part (the part after the @ sign: example@emarsys.com) is even more restrictive.
Here is a simple graphic showing which characters can reliably used.
Emarsys checks all email addresses before launching an email campaign. If an address contains an invalid character, it will appear as Wrong email address syntax in the Number of emails not sent table on the Results Summary page of the email analysis. There are too many invalid characters to list, but below is a list of all valid characters supported by Emarsys. If a character does not show up, it is invalid.
You may want to create a segment of contacts with such email addresses and try to engage them on another channel, and obtain a valid email address for them.
Local part
| Character | Valid in Emarsys | Valid globally (in theory) |
|---|---|---|
| _-+%&/'= | yes | yes |
| $!#|{`^?}~* | no | yes |
| ß | no | no |
| ÄäÖöÜü | no | no |
| ÁáÓóÉéÍíÚú | no | no |
Domain
| Character | Valid in Emarsys | Valid globally |
|---|---|---|
| Aa-Zz | yes | yes |
| 0123456789 | yes | yes |
| - | yes | yes |
There are efforts to start allowing non-ASCII characters in email addresses due to the increasing number of people using non-latin-based languages (RFC 6530 standard that would allow UTF-8 characters), but this has not yet had any impact globally.
‘Counted’ Sections
This is a safety feature in the VCMS editor which ensures that no contacts can receive an email which contains no meaningful content. It does this by checking that every contact in the launch list is eligible to see at least one section that has been marked as counted for sending.
The counted sections are defined in the Emarsys template, and are typically those section groups which contain the core message of the email (i.e. not the header or footer). Every template must have at least one such group.
With this feature, you can highly personalize your emails and target different segments within the same launch list with tailored content. If a recipient fails to qualify for this content, they are excluded from the launch and listed in the Results Summary under No content.
If no contacts at all qualify for this content, for example if you have selected the wrong launch list or made a mistake in the segment criteria, the entire launch will be stopped and you will be notified.
Conflicting Placeholders
There must be no conflicting placeholders used in an email campaign. If the new Emarsys Scripting Language placeholders and the old percent-based placeholders are used at the same time in the same email campaign to refer to external data for personalisation (e.g. eventData and %%eventData%%), we prevent the campaign from being launched.