Building and maintaining your email deliverability

Safe send limits help you build a stronger sender reputation with mailbox providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, and Apple. These limits determine how many subscribers you can email during a given period, such as over a day or week. The count is based on how many emails are delivered to individual subscribers, rather than the number of campaigns sent. As your sender reputation improves, your safe send limits increase automatically.

Delivery might be paused when engagement is low or when many subscribers mark your email as spam. Emails might also be sent in batches to avoid spam filters.

When you approach or exceed your limit, a warning banner displays on the campaign review page in your Shopify admin, informing you of your remaining capacity and suggesting next steps. Depending on whether you have send volume remaining, you can take the following actions:

• If you have send volume remaining, you can do either of the following actions:
  • Schedule the email for a future date.
  • Create customer segments to split your list into smaller groups. Send to one segment first, then duplicate the campaign for another segment.
• If you've used your entire send limit, then depending on your limit period, you need to wait until the next day or week to send more emails.
• If your customer segment size exceeds your limit, then you can create smaller customer segments that stay within your allowed volume.

For detailed guidance on warming up your sender reputation, maintaining consistent send volume, expanding your capacity safely, and recovering if your sending is blocked or delayed, refer to Email sending volume and warm-up.

On a free Shopify plan, you can send up to 10,000 free marketing emails each month. This limit is noted in the Send email now? and Schedule email dialogs.

After you reach the monthly cap, you must wait until the next month to send additional emails, or upgrade to a paid email plan to continue sending.

Your store might be ineligible to use Shopify Messaging if:

• Your store is on a trial plan that doesn't include this feature.
• Your current plan doesn't support Shopify Messaging.
• Your account is flagged for review due to risk or compliance concerns.

When your store is ineligible, the campaign page displays a message: "Your store is currently ineligible to use the Shopify Messaging app."

To resolve this, verify that your plan includes Shopify Messaging, or contact Shopify Support if your account status has changed.

Shopify authenticates all marketing emails. If you haven't authenticated your own sending domain, then Shopify sends your emails from a fully authenticated shopifyemail.com subdomain, and your sender address is rewritten to that subdomain. This meets the authentication requirements that mailbox providers such as Gmail and Yahoo set for bulk senders.

Authenticating your own sending domain is optional, but recommended. It lets your emails send from your own domain instead of a Shopify subdomain, which improves brand recognition and customer trust.

To authenticate your sender email address, connect your third-party domain and add the following records:

• CNAME records for SPF and DKIM, which let providers verify that Shopify is authorized to send on your behalf.
• A DMARC record, which tells providers what to do with messages that fail authentication and gives you visibility into how your domain is used.

When you start sending from a new address or domain, or resume sending after a long gap, mailbox providers have little recent history for your domain. Sending a large volume right away can lead to deferrals, throttling, or spam placement.

To warm up your sending:

• Start with your most engaged contacts, such as recent purchasers or subscribers who opened or clicked in the last 30 days.
• Increase your send volume gradually rather than all at once. For a recommended ramp schedule, refer to Increasing your email volume gradually.
• Keep a consistent sending schedule as you scale.

Mailbox providers use spam filters to block or divert unwanted messages. Blocked emails count toward your bounce rate, and other emails might be routed to spam or junk folders.

To reduce the chance that your emails are filtered, take the following actions:

• Avoid misleading subject lines, all-capital text, excessive punctuation, or a single large image with little text.
• Send only to subscribers who have opted in and who engage with your emails. Use customer segments to send only to subscribers who actively engage with your campaigns. For example, you can create a customer segment using the following query to target subscribers who were added in the last 6 months, or who placed an order or clicked an email prior to the last 6 months:

email_subscription_status = 'SUBSCRIBED'
 AND (customer_added_date > -6m
     OR (customer_added_date <= -6m
    AND  (number_of_orders > 0
    OR shopify_email.clicked() = true )
    )
 )

Each major mailbox provider publishes sender guidelines. For provider-specific requirements, review the guidelines for Gmail, Microsoft (Outlook), Yahoo, and Apple.

Monitoring delivery metrics helps you catch problems early. For a full view of your campaign performance, check your Shopify Messaging analytics.

Some mailbox providers also offer free tools that report how they score your sending domain:

• Google Postmaster Tools: Reports domain and spam-rate data for mail sent to Gmail addresses. To use Google Postmaster Tools, you need to authenticate your own sending domain, and you need to send at least 5,000 messages per day to Gmail addresses before data is available.
• Yahoo Sender Hub: Provides sender guidance and monitoring for Yahoo addresses.

Spam rate

Your spam rate measures how many messages customers mark as spam out of the total number delivered. To reduce your spam rate, follow the best practices described in Avoiding spam filters.

Bounce rate

Your email bounce rate measures how often your messages fail to reach recipients. Email bounces are categorized as hard or soft:

• Hard bounces occur when a message can't be delivered because the email address is incorrect, inactive, doesn't exist, or the receiving server has permanently blocked delivery.
• Soft bounces occur when delivery fails temporarily, such as when a recipient's inbox is full or the email server is unavailable.

To reduce your bounce rate:

• Before importing email addresses, use a third-party verification tool to check them.
• Review where your contacts are coming from to make sure your acquisition process avoids collecting invalid or mistyped addresses.
• Create a customer segment that includes bounced email addresses, then remove those addresses from your subscriber list.

Open and click rates

Open and click rates tell mailbox providers whether recipients want your emails. These rates are influenced by the practices described in Avoiding spam filters and in Best practices for writing marketing emails with Shopify Messaging.

Unsubscribes

Your unsubscribe rate measures what percentage of recipients remove themselves from your list. To reduce unsubscribes, make sure that your content matches the expectations that you set during signup, and avoid sending marketing emails too frequently. For additional guidance, refer to Best practices for writing marketing emails with Shopify Messaging.