Shopify email send list does not match customer list filters

Shopify Discussion
1

The relatively new “shopify email” allows for targeted marketing by creating a customer list filter. When you go to send the email there is a drop down to pick which filtered group you wish to send to. The number of people is listed.

HOWEVER, for us, in every instance the number of people on the email list is always less than the number on the customer list. At first support insisted that the emails were not being ‘received’ by the customer for reasons such as spam filters and the like. We finally convinced them that the email list represents only those people that they are SENDING TO and they are not sending to some subset of customers.

After much time and discussion with support it was confirmed that this is NOT due to people who are not subscribed. Rather it is due to the fact that shopify eliminates emails from the SEND list:

"The number of subscribers in your customer group in Shopify Email might differ from the number of subscribers in the Customers section of your Shopify admin. To maintain your sender reputation and deliverability over time, subscriber email addresses that consistently bounce back are not able to be emailed using Shopify Email. "

We have no quibbles with Shopify removing problematic emails. The problem is WE DON’T KNOW WHO THEY ARE. If we did, we could contact them (phone, perhaps). (The emails that are in issue are not general mass mailings but rather contacts with customers who are in our ‘club’ and need to find out how to have their product delivered.

We eventually reached a dead end with support who said we were correct and that the developers would be notified and if and when they do something about it it would show up in some news items on their website. It has been quite some time and nothing.

It is obviously imperative that we find out who these people are so that we can contact them. Obviously shopify could add a filter that identifies such people but so far they have not.

So, does anybody have any ideas about how we might go about solving this problem? Is there a way to obtain it from the system?

Thanks!

1 Like
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hey hey!

If you haven’t gotten this fixed yet I might be able to help ya out. You available for a quick chat this week?

3

Afraid I’m only allowed to work through this public forum. Would appreciate any suggestions you have. Thanks!

4

I have the same issue. I want to know why the number of subscribers in the segment of customers who subscribe does not match the number of email in “All Subscribers”. If some email are being left out because they bounce let me know which ones they are.

5

After much discussion with Shopify over several years, the best answer I have is that Shopify does not mail to people who “have bounced” in prior mailings (and maybe some other form of failing). They have never been able to tell us just who these people are. From that I perhaps conjecture that the people on, what I am calling, the “exclude” list are perhaps global to all of Shopify. Since I first asked the question, Shopify has added tools that might help you figure who they are. You can export the customer segment just before mailing. After mailing you can see all the people it has been delivered to. By running a ‘non-match’ query in an appropriate Database program such as MS Access you can ascertain who from the customer list who these people might be, remembering to also exclude people who have bounced, which Shopify now also tells you. We attempt to keep a very ‘clean’ list. When we see these people turn up, we contact them directly and try to figure out what is going on. and/or remove them from the list. I haven’t checked lately, but I haven’t notice any newer tools that will tell us who they are. We also don’t really understand what rules are being used by Shopify to exclude are. We have seen people who have bounced but get mailed to on the very next mailing… It’s a mystery.

1 Like
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I have posted a public reply… Good luck!