Why is my marketing email bouncing with Shopify's email app?

[ndanzeisen]

I recently attempted to send a marketing email with Shopify's email app to our entire subscriber base. We previously used Hubspot, and Active Campaign before that, to send our weekly marketing email. The subscriber email list was not imported to Shopify, it originated from our Shopify customers. After sending less than 10% of the emails, delivery stopped and the email failed, displaying this message: "Delivery stopped due to a high bounce rate from subscriber emails. A low quality subscriber list can damage your reputation with inbox providers like Gmail or Outlook and cause delivery problems in the future. If you recently expanded your subscriber base, consider creating a new subscriber group and sending a welcome email."

The Shopify live chat was unfortunately unhelpful. I am wondering if there are any simple things I could troubleshoot to see why the emails were bouncing. We have 11,000 subscribers so starting from scratch and getting people to re-subscribe really isn't an option (I wouldn't know how to do this anyway). I am brand new to all this and my superiors are expecting me to have it fixed already. Any suggestions or help that a beginner could understand are much appreciated. Thank you!

[OneMobile]

Dear @ndanzeisen 

Based on what you went through, here are some of my suggestions:

1. Clean up your mailing list: This is something you want to do regularly. This includes removing non-existent users, checking for dormant addresses, properly formatting emails, etc. Services like NeverBounce can help you with that.
2. Ensure that your domain's reputation hasn't been damaged. You can check your domain reputation using sender score tools like senderscore.org
3. Authenticate your email-sending domain using standards like Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and DMARC can help. These tell the email services that your emails are genuine and not spam. Check out this help doc by Shopify to do so.
4. Some spam filters might interpret certain words/ phrases used often by spammers, leading to blocks/rejections/bounced backs from servers (even for legitimate businesses). So, avoid overly salesy language, multiple exclamation marks/punctuation symbols- anything potentially crossing the line into appearing 'spammy'.

I hope that this helps!

[Sabes410]

I had the same thing happen again yesterday.  It’s random for me when it does this and that’s what is frustrating.

[Jazminda]

Hi

I found the same thing with a mailing list of 4000 people, after the first 500 or so it would stop because of a high bounce rate. 

I have since broken my email list into smaller segments using filters - one for each main email domain  ( gmail, hotmail, bigpond, etc ) and then a group for miscellaneous domains. So  Instead  of sending out one email to everyone, i send out 6 duplicate emails to smaller segments (just be sure to remove ‘copy’ from the title of the duplicate and change the customer segment) . 

My bounce rate has virtually disappeared as smaller email lists mean my email doesn’t get flagged as spam and my campaign doesn’t suddenly stop sending midway thru! its also easier to  monitor who actually bounces and unsubscribe them or possibly follow up to see if their email is incorrect, with smaller segments. Hope this helps!