What happened after I sent my email campaign?

Reading the status

• Draft means nothing has been approved for an audience.
• Held means the final quote was approved and the cancellation hold is still running.
• Scheduled means it is waiting for the approved future time.
• Sending means provider delivery has started.
• Sent means the campaign’s messages were accepted for sending with no failed outcome in the campaign settlement.
• Partly sent means some were accepted and some failed, were refused or have an uncertain outcome.
• Failed means the campaign did not complete cleanly.
• Cancelled means it was stopped before provider delivery began.

Reading the results

Under a sent, partly sent or failed campaign you get one line of five plain facts, for example:

142 delivered · 3 addresses retired · 2 unsubscribed · 0 complaints · 1 still unknown

• Delivered is how many the receiving mail server accepted.
• Addresses retired is how many bounced permanently. Bernard removes those addresses so they are not tried again, which protects your ability to send.
• Unsubscribed is how many people used the unsubscribe link in that campaign.
• Complaints is how many marked it as spam. Even one matters, because mail providers watch this closely.
• Still unknown is how many have no result yet. Delivery reports usually arrive within a few hours.

Tests you sent to yourself are not counted anywhere in these numbers. They were not part of the campaign your audience received.

Two more appear only when they are not zero: still being tried (a temporary problem, such as a full mailbox, that Bernard will retry) and could not be delivered (the provider refused it outright).

Under the line, Bernard writes one sentence saying what, if anything, you should do about it. Most of the time it says there is nothing for you to do.

A note arrives two days later

You do not have to remember to come back. About two days after a campaign finishes, Bernard sends the account owner one short email with the same breakdown line, the same next-action sentence and a link straight back to the campaign. Two days is long enough for the delivery reports to arrive, so the numbers in that note are settled rather than half-formed.

It waits until the campaign has really finished, so a campaign still going out is not summarised early. It comes once per campaign and never twice. It is not sent for a campaign you stopped before it went out, because nobody received that one. It carries the same opens and clicks sentence the page carries, in the same words, so the note and the page can never tell you two different things.

Why some did not arrive

If anything did not reach its reader, open Why some did not arrive under that campaign. Each one gets a reason in plain words and what Bernard did about it, such as:

• “That address does not exist. Bernard retired the address, so it will not be included next time.”
• “Their mailbox was full. Bernard will try again.”
• “They marked this as spam. Bernard retired the address, so they will not be emailed again.”
• “This one has not arrived yet. Bernard is still trying, and will keep trying for a while before giving up.”

Very large lists show the first hundred; ask Bernard in the Workshop if you need more.

Sending it again

Duplicate on a finished campaign copies its exact subject, words and audience into a new draft and opens it for editing. Nothing is sent by duplicating, and the new draft gets its own audience count, preview and approval, exactly like any other campaign.

Opens and clicks

Bernard records opens and clicks only for the readers who agreed to it, and only on a site whose owner has accepted the addition to the Terms. Recording is on for every site by default, so if your site is not recording yet, the card on the Email campaigns tab names the one thing missing - usually the Terms. You can switch it off whenever you like. When there is something to show, one sentence sits under the breakdown:

218 of 312 people had agreed to be counted. 118 opened, 41 clicked, and another 64 were fetched by a mail app and may not have been read.

The number who agreed comes first on purpose, so the opens are read as a count of those people rather than a rate over your whole audience. Under it, a small table lists each link in the message and how many people pressed it; see Who clicked the link in my email?.

Three sentences replace that line when there is nothing to show, and they mean different things. “Opens and clicks are not recorded for this site” means recording is not running here at all - the addition to the Terms has not been accepted, somebody switched it off, or bernard switched it off for the site - so nothing was recorded for anybody. “Nobody in this campaign had agreed to opens and clicks being recorded” means recording is on but not one recipient of this particular campaign had agreed. “Opens and clicks were not recorded for this campaign” means this particular campaign went out before bernard could record them at all, even though recording may be on today - it says nothing about whether this campaign’s readers would have agreed, only that nobody was watching yet. You never get a row of zeros instead of any of these, because zeros would read as “nobody opened it”, and that is a claim about people bernard never watched.

The opens a mail app fetched on its own are disclosed in that sentence rather than hidden or deleted, and bernard will not turn a missing record into “they did not read it”. Can I see who opened my email? covers the whole thing, including how somebody agrees.

What the results still do not say

Delivered means a mail server accepted the message. Bernard cannot see inside anyone’s mailbox, so it is not proof that the message landed in the main inbox rather than a spam or promotions folder.

A campaign sent before Bernard kept per-recipient records shows the counts saved at send time instead of the breakdown, and says so.

A campaign you stopped before it went out says so too, rather than reporting a delivery it never made.

If the result looks wrong, report the campaign and site to Bernard support rather than making another send to investigate. A repeat would be a new campaign with a new count and approval, not a retry hidden inside the old one.

Send an email campaign to my audience explains the hold and cancellation boundary before sending. How does unsubscribing from my emails work? covers what happens to the people who leave. For the full preparation path, start with How do email campaigns work?.