Alchemer performs several checks when you add contacts to Email Campaigns, SMS Campaigns, or Contact Lists to help ensure that you send your emails to clean lists. These checks are different depending on whether your are adding contacts with email addresses (for Email Campaigns) or mobile phone numbers (SMS Campaigns).
Email Address Requirements
Alchemer performs the below checks when you add email addresses to Email Campaigns or Contact Lists.
This practice ultimately mitigates against a high bounce rate for your campaign and ensures as many messages as possible reach their intended recipients (not to mention, it reduces the likelihood of recipients marking email as spam).
It also helps maintain the reputation of Alchemer IP's and protects the deliverability of emails for all customers.
Alchemer will check your contact lists to make sure that your contacts meet the below requirements. Contacts that fail to meet these requirements will be prevented from being added to your campaign or list.
Contact is a valid email address
Alchemer will make sure that an email address that you are adding/uploading to your campaign or contact list is in-fact, a valid email address.
John.Smith@yourcompany.com is a valid email address, whereas John.Smith@, @yourcompany, orJohn are not.
A valid MX (Mail eXchange) record exists for the domain
An MX record tells senders how to send email to a particular domain. Essentially we want to make sure that if your email is hero@alchemer.com, emails addressed to you are sent to the alchemer.com domain. Not sure if the domain you are trying to send to is a valid? Try a tool like this one: http://email-checker.net/
Email address is not a group email
Alchemer will not send email to any addresses uploaded* to Email Campaigns or Contact Lists that are considered group emails such as sales@yourcompany.com or info@abc.com.
*These group emails will be uploaded if part of your list - if you need to send email to group inboxes such as the above examples, use Alchemer's Custom Email Settings to send your emails via your SMTP server. Sending via an SMTP server is not subject to the above-mentioned group email restriction. Make sure to check with your Email Service Provider (ESP) regarding their policies on group emails.
Group or role-based email addresses are a huge can of worms when it comes to deliverability. These addresses are often unattended; as a result, they commonly result in bounce due to a full inbox. In addition, if they go to many individuals they are likely to result in multiple spam reports all of which affect the likelihood that your next campaign reaches its recipients.
We generally think it is a better experience for survey invites to address the recipient by name; the more personal the better when it comes to participation in surveys! If you have an individual expecting a survey invite to arrive at info@ we recommend reaching out to them obtain their email address.
Please refer below for a list of group emails that Alchemer will not send to:
admin, all, contact, dev, development, donotreply, everyone, hello, help, hr, info, information, it, marketing, remove, removeme, reply, root, sales, service, support, test, testing, unsub, unsubscribe, webmaster
Bounced emails
If Alchemer has sent an email to a specific email address and that email has bounced, that address will be prevented from being added to a future email campaign for 30 days.
Add Mobile Phone Numbers
Alchemer will check your contact lists when you add mobile phone numbers to SMS Campaigns or account-wide Contact Lists. to make sure that your contacts meet the below requirements. Contacts that fail to meet these requirements will be prevented from being added to your campaign or list.
Duplicate Phone Numbers
Duplicate mobile phone numbers are not supported within Contact Lists and SMS Campaigns. If you attempt to upload multiple contacts with the same mobile phone number, only one of these contacts will be added to your campaign.
Invalid Phone Numbers
Phone numbers must have 10 numerical digits, for example 123 123-1234. If you attempt to add a number that does not have enough digits, is missing an area code, or contains non-numeric characters, it will not be uploaded.
US/CA Phone Number
SMS Campaigns currently support sending messages to US or Canadian mobile phone numbers. If you attempt to upload a non-US/CA phone number, you will see the following error message:
Cannot send to mobile numbers in this country
How do I know if contacts were not uploaded?
If one or more of your contacts was not uploaded to your Email Campaign, SMS Campaign, or Contact List due to one of the above reasons, you will be notified by Alchemer.
If you add one contact at a time, you will see a notification on your screen if you attempted to add an invalid email/phone number.
Click the View the log option in the notification message for additional details regarding the error that you received. You can also Export to .csv if you have a number of errors to review.
If you are uploading contacts in bulk, you have the option to have a notification email sent to you:
The contents of the email will provide some additional details to clarify why specific email addresses could not be added:
You will also be notified on the Contacts screen of any failed uploads and will have the option to review these via the View Upload Error Log option.
