Why Your Members May Not Be Receiving Your Emails

Understand common reasons why emails from your club or association may not be reaching members, including issues with spam filters and email bounces. Learn how to diagnose and prevent deliverability problems to maintain a strong sender reputation. Implement email best practices, such as managing a clean subscriber list and addressing hard bounces, to ensure your important communications consistently land in members' inboxes and avoid the spam folder.

Emails are an excellent form of communication, allowing you to easily reach large groups of people. In fact, over 375 billion emails are sent every day. However, not all emails reach their intended recipients; approximately 31 billion emails bounce, and an additional 160 billion go straight to the spam folder. This means that nearly half of all emails sent do not arrive in the recipients' inboxes.

Fortunately, there are several steps you can take to ensure your emails to members successfully reach their destination. Today, we'll explore some common reasons why emails get marked as spam or bounce, what to do if this occurs, and how Member Jungle helps with this. 

Why Emails To Members Aren't Landing: Common Deliverability Issues

Why Emails Get Marked As Spam 

Emails land in spam for two main reasons; either the recipient marks them as junk, or their email provider automatically flags them. Here's why email providers often flag emails:

• Low Engagement: If your members consistently don't open or click on your emails, providers learn these messages aren't wanted.
• Too Many Emails/Irrelevant Content: Sending too many messages, especially if they don't seem relevant to the recipient, can quickly lead to disinterest and spam complaints.
• Lack of Authentication: Email providers need to verify you're a legitimate sender, not a spambot. Member Jungle helps by providing essential authentication to prove your emails are genuine.
• Spammy Keywords & Formatting: Certain words, excessive capitalisation, and too many exclamation marks in subject lines or body text trigger spam filters. For example, a subject line like "WIN FREE EVENT TICKETS!!! CLICK HERE!" is a major red flag.
• Poor Sender Reputation: If your emails have frequently been marked as spam in the past, email providers will be much more likely to filter your future messages. It's far easier to maintain a good sender reputation than to repair a bad one.

The impact of these issues is significant; if your emails consistently trigger spam filters due to poor content, frequency, or reputation, your messages will simply disappear into junk folders. This means your members aren't receiving vital communications, no matter how important they are.

Why Emails Bounce

Unlike emails marked as spam, which might reach the inbox but end up in the junk folder, a bounced email never reaches your member's inbox at all. It’s a classic return-to-sender, address unknown situation. 

 

 

There are two main types of bounced emails, soft bounces and hard bounces; neither is good, but hard is worse. 

Soft Bounces are temporary delivery issues. This can be because a recipient's inbox is full, the email server is temporarily down, or your email is too large. In most cases, your system will automatically attempt to resend the email. If the problem persists, you might need to adjust your email size or content.

Hard Bounces indicate a permanent delivery failure. This usually means the email address doesn't exist, or the domain name is invalid. Hard-bounced emails will not be resent and should be removed from your mailing list. Do then reach out to your member and clarify what their correct email is. 

Too many bounced emails can damage your sender reputation with email providers. This makes it more likely that even your valid emails will be flagged as spam in the future. Regularly cleaning your list of incorrect addresses is crucial for maintaining good deliverability.

Workplace and Institutional Blocking

Emails from your club or association can also be blocked by strict workplace or institutional email systems. If a member uses a work email to join your organisation, there is a chance that the stricter, more advanced workplace firewalls will filter out external communications more aggressively than personal inboxes.

The best way to deal with this is to ask your members to use a personal email address when signing up as a member of your organisation, and if they do sign up using a work email, ask them to “whitelist” your email address with their IT department. 

For more information on why emails get blocked, have a look at Blocked and Bounced Email Addresses.

Member Jungle's Role in Boosting Deliverability

Member Jungle actively helps your club or association ensure emails reach their destination. Emails sent via Member Jungle are compliant with current authentication requirements and email sending best practices, crucial for allowing you to send bulk emails without automatically being flagged as spam.

Beyond this, our newest feature, the Email Bounce Report, provides even more powerful insights. Introduced in our recent May Product Release, let's explore how this tool helps you maintain a clean and effective mailing list.

Member Jungle’s Email Bounce Report Feature

The Email Bounce Report provides a clear overview of your email delivery. You can access it anytime to see which emails were delivered successfully and which bounced. It also tells you why an email couldn't be delivered and identifies any accounts that have been blocked by the system.

Member Jungle automatically blocks accounts after a hard bounce to protect your sender reputation. Repeatedly sending to a bad address is considered email abuse which then hurts your overall email deliverability. 
 

 

To help you stay informed, administrators can also subscribe to a weekly bounced email report, delivered every Monday. The report summarises all new bounces and blocks from the previous week. You'll also see if an individual's email has been blocked directly on their member profile.

 

 

These features allow you to proactively manage your mailing list, ensuring the vast majority of your emails reach their intended targets. You can now easily identify problematic addresses, remove them, and ensure your list stays healthy, keeping your sender rating high and reducing the chance of ending up in spam folders.

Unblocking Members’ Emails

While you can easily unblock a member's email address from the new bounce report, don't do it blindly. The system blocks emails for a reason. Before unblocking, you should reach out to that member and confirm their correct email address or resolve the underlying issue (like a full inbox or strict workplace firewall). If you unblock an address without correcting the problem, your emails will likely continue to bounce, and the account will be blocked again. Always clarify the issue and update the member's profile before unblocking their email.

More Email Deliverability Tips 

In this article, we barely scratch the surface of email deliverability and what affects it. So, if you would like to know more about it, please read Email Delivery Best Practice.

If you want to know more about how to use the new Email Bounce Report, check out Email Log Module.