You may sometimes receive an email from your Spektrix system telling you that one of your integrated mailings has failed to send. There are a few different reasons why you might receive these messages, some of which are nothing at all to worry about, others which you will be able to resolve yourself, and some which you might need to get in touch with the Spektrix Support team for assistance with.
We've created this article so that if you have received one of these messages, you can find the section below which looks most similar to find out what you should do now. Before reading on it is worth nothing that, if this is the first time you have seen one of these messages then there's a good chance that it will have been due to a temporary blip in the link between Spektrix and dotdigital and so there's a good chance that simply attempting to resend the same campaign will work successfully. However, if you have seen a flurry of these messages - or if you can't see anything that looks similar to the message you received - then don't worry, and please get in touch with our Support team as who will be able to help.
If resending the campaign hasn't worked, then have a look through the rest of this article to see if the message you're receiving matches up with any of the headers below:
- There was an error sending your email '<name of dotdigital campaign>'. Error - failed to upload customers to dotdigital
- There was an error sending your email '<name of dotdigital campaign>'. Error - customers were uploaded to dotdigital but the mailing failed to send
- There was an error sending your email ‘<name of dotdigital campaign>''. Error - something has gone wrong sending this mailing - please contact support
- There was an error sending your email ‘<name of dotdigital campaign>'. Error - Customer List failed to run - please contact support
There was an error sending your email '<name of dotdigital campaign>'. Error - failed to upload customers to dotdigital
Something prevented Spektrix from uploading your list of customers to dotdigital. This is something which can happen due to brief outages in dotdigital's system, so if you try to send the same email campaign again, there's a good chance it will run without issue.
If you resend the campaign and still run into issues, please get in touch with the Spektrix Support team so we can look into this in more detail and help you overcome the problem.
The dotdigital Watchdog
When you receive an email with this subject line, it might sometimes contain this text as well:
“Your list was rejected by the dotdigital Watchdog and has been quarantined - please contact Spektrix support.”
The dotdigital Watchdog is an automated system which is designed to prevent the sending of nuisance emails, and it looks at things like whether the people being contacted in a campaign appear on lists of purchased addresses or have complained in the past to their internet service provider about receiving spam emails.
With Spektrix clients, this is something which only really becomes an issue when sending emails to small numbers of customers (e.g. daily emails to new members), because a single flagged email address then represents a high proportion of the people being contacted in the campaign. In mailings sent to larger address books, the Watchdog tends to ignore small numbers of flagged emails.
If it's one of these small, regular emails which has resulted in you seeing this error and the campaign is something you really want to send out, the quickest way to do this would be to export the Customer List being used for that mailing from Spektrix as a CSV/Excel document so that you can manually send the email to all the people in that mailing. See this article on the Customer List Builder for more information about how to export a Customer List.
If, however, you are seeing the issue very regularly or with particularly large groups of customers, then please get in contact with the Spektrix Support team. We can then identify which email addresses are being flagged by the Watchdog and for what reasons, so that we are able to advise you in more detail on how to overcome the problem.
There was an error sending your email '<name of dotdigital campaign>'. Error - customers were uploaded to dotdigital but the mailing failed to send
This sometimes happens because something has gone wrong between Spektrix and dotdigital after the Customer List has been successfully uploaded. You can try logging in directly to dotdigital and resending the failed campaign manually - find that campaign in dotdigital, then choose the address book which was created from the Spektrix Customer List. If you're not sure which one it is, you should be able to identify it using the Last Modified column.
If you're seeing a lot of these messages then it might be that there's an ongoing or more complicated issue between Spektrix and dotdigital. If this is the case please get in touch with the Spektrix Support team so that we can look into this issue in more detail.
There was an error sending your email ‘<name of dotdigital campaign>'. Error - something has gone wrong sending this mailing - please contact support
This sometimes happens due to communications issues between Spektrix and dotdigital after a Customer List has been uploaded. These issues are sometimes temporary, so you may find if you go and check on your dotdigital account after some time has passed that the campaign was eventually sent successfully. Alternatively, if you try sending the campaign manually it may also send successfully.
If you are still unable to send the campaign or if you're seeing a lot of these messages, then it might be that there's an ongoing or more complicated issue between Spektrix and dotdigital. If this is the case please get in touch with the Spektrix Support team so that we can look into this issue in more detail for you.
There was an error sending your email ‘<name of dotdigital campaign>'. Error - Customer List failed to run - please contact support
This error usually arises because there is an issue within the Customer List that the mailing is trying to use. Most of the time this will be because one or more of the Segments in the Customer List are trying to use a Tag or Attribute that has been deleted or renamed, which will mean the Customer List can't run a search on your customer database.
If you encounter this error the first thing to do is to look through all of the Segments in the Customer List that the mailing is trying to use - chances are that one of them is looking for something that has been deleted. Once this has been amended, update the count on the Customer List - if you are able to produce a count without an error message then the Customer List should now be working and the mailing should send.
If your Customer List Segments are in order and the Customer List runs okay but this error is still arising, then get in touch with the Spektrix Support team who will be able to help.
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If nothing above quite matches what you've seen, don't worry; please get in touch with the Spektrix Support team to look into it further.