Get more of your bulk emails and campaigns into inboxes, and learn what to do when an email bounces.
Why emails land in spam or bounce
Spam filters look at both your content and your sending behavior. Common triggers:
- Large sends to old lists: Outdated addresses bounce and hurt your reputation.
- Spammy language: Words like "Free" or "Buy now," or excessive punctuation (!!!).
- Poor formatting: Too many links or images and not enough text.
- Missing authentication: No SPF, DKIM, or DMARC records for your domain.
- New or inactive domains: Unfamiliar sender addresses or brand-new domains and IPs.
- Spam complaints: Recipients marking your emails as spam.
- Irregular sending: A large batch after weeks of silence.
- Low engagement: People who never open your emails.
Pipeline CRM sends your emails, but how they're received depends on your recipients' email providers and your own sending reputation.
Why emails from your inbox work but bounce from Pipeline CRM
A one-to-one message from Gmail or Outlook looks like normal, low-risk behavior. Bulk emails and campaigns go out in larger batches, so recipient servers and spam filters check them more strictly, and some get flagged or bounced. Your email provider's daily limits also apply to these sends. See Check Your Email Sending Limits.
Authenticate your domain
Set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records for your sending domain. They prove to inbox providers that your emails really come from you.
Keep your list clean
- Remove invalid and inactive addresses.
- Validate new addresses before you add them. The Email Validation add-on checks addresses as they're entered.
- Mark addresses that bounce. See Handle bounced emails.
- Honor every unsubscribe. See Manage Unsubscribed People.
- Segment your lists and focus on engaged people. Quality beats quantity.
Send like a trusted sender
- Warm up new domains and IPs: start with small batches and scale up.
- Send on a regular schedule.
- Personalize your emails with merge tags instead of generic templates.
- Ask recipients to add you to their contacts.
- Use a real reply-to address.
- Get consent before you email people, and follow GDPR and CAN-SPAM requirements.
Monitor your email health
- Track bounce and complaint rates, and adjust based on your campaign reports.
- Test inbox placement before you send, and check where emails actually land afterward, not just whether they were delivered.
- Review your domain and IP reputation regularly to stay off blacklists.
These third-party tools can help:
- GlockApps: Tests inbox placement and spam score.
- MxToolbox: Checks blacklist status and SPF records.
- Sender Score: Rates your sender reputation.
Handle bounced emails
Pipeline CRM doesn't track bounced emails. When an email bounces, nothing changes in Pipeline CRM. Instead, each person has a Bounced field you update yourself.
Pipeline CRM keeps sending to a bounced address until you mark the person as bounced. Repeated bounces hurt your sender reputation.
What marking someone as bounced does
Send type
People marked as bounced
Bulk email
Skipped. The send screen counts bounced and unsubscribed people separately.
Email campaign
Not skipped. Bounced people can still be added to a campaign.
Mark a person as bounced
- Go to People.
- Add the Bounced field as a column in your list view. See Customize Columns, Filters, and Sorting in a List View.
- Find the person whose email bounced.
- Change their Bounced value to Yes.
To mark many people at once, select them in the list view and update the Bounced field in bulk. See Bulk Update Fields.
Keep bounced people out of email campaigns
Marking someone as bounced doesn't keep them out of email campaigns. Campaigns only skip unsubscribed people.
To stop campaign emails to a bounced address, do either of these:
- Mark them as unsubscribed: See Manage Unsubscribed People.
- Leave them out of the campaign's trigger: For example, tag bounced people and filter that tag out of the trigger.
Need help? Contact support at customercare@pipelinecrm.com.