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?

You can personalize your emails using a whole host of different solutions within the StoneShot platform. We want to make sure you’re always making the best impression possible so you’ll find some safeguards in place to help.

When you send out a campaign our system checks to see if all the information is available for each contact and if it’s not then it will simply not send them the email rather than them receiving something incomplete.

A notification will appear in the Campaign Summary section of the individual email as shown below and you should get an alert via email too:

You obviously still want to send to these contacts so let’s see what may have caused this to happen.

If your email is pulling in the contact’s First Name or a value from the Salutation field it could be down to this being blank.

If you click on the number shown you can see who these contacts are. You can Export this into Excel (button located in top right hand of the page), add in the First Name or Salutation for each contact and reimport into the StoneShot platform. If it’s a handful of contacts it may be easier to just click into each record, add these in manually and Save.

Perhaps you’re sending from Sales Managers and the system can’t find the relevant information? Again, you can click on the number of contacts dropped…

And then use the Segmentation option to see who they are assigned to:

In some cases they may not have a Sales Manager in which case you will have to assign them to one.

Or it could be that the email is pulling in the Sales Manager’s From Name, From Email and Sign-off details but this hasn’t been set up yet. Don’t worry, this is easy to sort out.

• Go to Options > Segments

• Click on Sales Manager, and navigate to Segments

• Click into the Display Name of the Sales Manager

• Fill in the Dynamic From Name, Dynamic From Email and add in the sign-off (see Updating dynamic sender sign offs).

• Once you’re done click the Save button located at the top right hand of the page

If you’re using other Segments or Custom fields to pull in information into the email you can follow the same steps above to fix the records.

Once you’ve done this you can go back into the Campaign Summary screen and hit the Resend button. This will send the email to only the contacts that were dropped/removed.

Are you still getting the same error? Let us know and we can take a look.

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, find the tracking ID for the link you’d like to update – you can hover over the link in the email and it should show at the bottom left-hand corner of the screen:

Then in the left-hand panel click the Content icon and select Links:

In the Search and Filter field do a search for the tracking ID and once you’ve found it click into the URL:

Change the Source URL and click the Save button. Check that the link redirects to the correct place from a test you sent yourself earlier:

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 allows us to identify a contact, the link they hit and the campaign that was sent.

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. This 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.

Open and Click tracking is added automatically, as long as both options are turned on. You’ll find these options within the Email Builder under “Email Tracking” on the Advanced tab.

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.