Communic8’s platform involves sending emails to recipients. It’s not unusual for emails to not be delivered. Reasons for this can include:

To avoid these situations and maintain a high delivery rate for campaigns and broadcasts, we recommend the following:

Communic8’s primary focus is employee engagement. Most clients use the platform in the context of employers sending corporate communications to employees. In this scenario, you do not need to obtain consent for each employee who will be communicated with, because the messages concern the activities of the organisation, and are directly related to the employment relationship.

If you have recipients in your address book who are non-employees (their email address is from outside of your organisation), you need to obtain their consent before sending them communications via Communic8’s platform. Failure to obtain consent before emailing non-employee recipients is a violation of Communic8’s Acceptable Use Policy. Further, in most countries around the world, the sending of unsolicited messages via email is a violation of the law.

Different legal requirements exist for obtaining consent, depending on the geographic location of the recipient. Despite this variation, all country-specific legislation has one main point in common: you need to get permission from anyone you send marketing emails to.

However consent is obtained, it should be documented. If you wish to document consent within the platform for individual recipients, you can use the “Notes” feature, attached to individual recipient records (displayed as a clipboard icon on the view recipient dialog). Any recipient records for non-employees should be deactivated on creation, and only activated if you have obtained consent. If consent is withdrawn by a non-employee (either by request or via an implied activity such as an unsubscribe event or a spam report) then the recipient record should be deactivated.

Communic8’s address book can be kept in sync with a client’s HR system via a custom integration. Doing this can reduce the likelihood of sending emails to addresses that no longer exist. Send an email to support@communic8.com if you’d like to know more.

Communic8 collects analytics about email delivery. There are several ways to view this data.

Method 1 - Check a campaign’s delivery tab

On a sent campaign with email enabled, there will be delivery data available on the “Analytics > Delivery” tab. The page shows boxes for “Bounced”, “Spam Report” and “Unsubscribe”. Click these boxes to view a list of emails that have had delivery issues for this campaign. Each email displayed can be clicked to show more details about the delivery issue.

Method 2 - Check the email events page

On the Admin menu, there is a link to the “Email Events” page. This page is only visible to super users. The page lists a mix of different email event data (e.g. clicks, opens, etc) for all emails sent from the platform. There is a search on this page that allows you to filter by “Bounced” emails (Event equals bounce). For each row displayed, there’s a “Show” link for viewing more information about the event.

Method 3 - Email Communic8 support

Communic8 support can quickly generate a CSV report for a client’s platform which contains all the email addresses that have bounced, etc.

If you have discovered bad email events, you should deactivate the recipient records attached to them.

One way of doing this is by creating a recipient group specifically for problem emails (e.g. “Email Suppression List”). You can then add recipients to this group either via the Communic8 address book or via CSV import.

Within the Communic8 address book, you can easily add individual recipients to a group by clicking the ellipsis menu on the table row and clicking “Add to Group”. You can also do this in bulk by ticking the checkbox on multiple rows and clicking the “Add to Group” icon at the top of the table.

If you have pre-existing list of email addresses outside the Communic8 platform that you wish to add to a recipient group, you can convert the list to CSV and import it via the group details page. CSV imports only require a single “email” column to be imported into a group. Simply create a new spreadsheet and add the text “email” to the cell at A1. Then paste the list of email addresses below this cell, and save the file as CSV. Then in Communic8, go to the target recipient group, click the ellipsis menu top-right of the page, and select “Import”. Then from this page, you should be able to select your file and click upload.

Once you have a recipient group for problem emails, you can deactivate all the recipients in this list in bulk using the address book. Simply go to “Address Book > Recipients” and use the search to filter by the recipient group. Then tick the checkbox at the top and “Select the total [..] recipients?”. Then click the “Edit” option (with a pencil icon). This should open the “Bulk Edit Recipients” dialog box. At the bottom is an “Active” dropdown field, and an option for “Inactive”. Select this and click “Submit”, and now every recipient on the list will be deactivated, and no longer receive emails.

If you notice a high number of bounced email events for a campaign, particularly for recipients you know to be currently employed, contact Communic8 support about the issue immediately, Unexpected delivery issues could occur because emails are being rejected by the client email service. This might happen because the email content has accidentally triggered a spam filter, or because of a configuration change in the client’s email gateway. Communic8 support can help you identify the problem, and facilitate the resolution.