Troubleshooting Campaigns

Creating and launching your email campaign should be a smooth process, however sometimes things don’t go to plan. These things happen and where we can, StoneShot is here to help! This guide will go through some of the most common issues encountered when managing your campaign.

To learn about the main campaign reporting available within StoneShot, please look at the articles in the Reporting section.

Why does my campaign have contacts removed?

In your summary report you may see a notification that contacts have been removed from your campaign. The most common reason for this happening is that the campaign includes dynamic content in the email, but not all of the contacts in the list had their dynamic information filled in. Dynamic content could be a custom field such as Custom1 (Salutation), or a segment such as Relationship Manager.

To determine what is missing, check your template for a custom field (it will be in this format {Custom1} ) and for dynamic fields/segments (it will be in this format {DYNAMIC:SEGMENTNAME:FIELDNAME} ).
You can click on the number to export the contacts into Excel.

Here you can then fill in the missing details and import them back into StoneShot. Once the import has finished, hit the Resend button and they will be sent the campaign and be included in your campaign report.

I’ve sent out a tracked email with an incorrect link. What now?

Once a campaign has gone out from StoneShot there is no way to recall it. If you find any errors in the email, you’ll need to fix them in the email template and then resend the email to your list, perhaps with an apology. There is one element however of an email campaign that you are able to change after launch – tracked links.

Due to how tracked links work, the contact will always come through to StoneShot first (so that we can register their click-through) before visiting the final destination (e.g. the website or pdf). This means that you can update the link so that even recipients that have already received the email, will be redirected to the correct destination. This can happen where a pdf has needed to have been updated or simply a typo in the URL.

To fix it yourself, navigate back to your email in Content and Emails and once inside your email, go to step 5 (Test). Scroll to the bottom of the page and you will see a list of all the links that are part of your email. Find the one you need to change, click on edit and change the URL in the window that pops up. This change is instant so as soon as you hit Save, you’ll be able to click through on your version of the email and see the new link.

One of my contacts has a lot of opens. Is there an issue with the tracking?

First, we’ll explain how our two types of email tracking work – Link tracking and Open tracking.

Link tracking allows you to track which of your email recipients have clicked on a particular link. A code called ‘MemberURLID’ is added to the end of every link, and this communicates the IP address of the person clicking on the link back to the database. When tracking is added to your link, “?id={MEMBERURLID}” will be added to the end of each link in your email. Without this we are unable to tell you who has clicked on anything in your email.

Open tracking allows you to monitor the number of opens, or “Reads”, your email is getting. This is done by inserting a tiny 1px by 1px graphic into the very bottom of your email, known as a web beacon which is downloaded by our servers, once the recipient has opened the email and downloaded images. Every time this unique graphic is downloaded, this is counted as an “open” on your campaign report against the contact.

To add both link tracking and open tracking to your campaign, remember to click Add in the Test screen when setting up your email.

It’s important to keep how the tracking works in mind when looking at a high number of opens or clicks against a single contact. It could be entirely genuine with that contact accessing the email many times. What can happen is that a contact forwards the email on to colleagues for them to view the email and its content. The issue is that the email will still have the original contact’s ID.

The StoneShot Platform will not recognise that this is a different person clicking or opening the email and will record the stats against the original recipient. Whilst this is something to be aware of when reporting, it can only be seen as a positive, as it is still genuine that people are interacting with your content.

We’d recommend including an easy way for people to sign up to receive your content in this situation with a link to a sign-up form or preference centre in the email, something such as “Want to receive this newsletter to your own inbox? Sign up here”.

If you need any assistance, please contact the Agency Team who will be able to help.