There it is again in big, bright red letters. You know that annoying “Looks like there's a problem,” message on MailChimp? Yeah, that's the one. While MailChimp's services make email marketing a breeze, sometimes users can hit a bump in the road thanks to their omnivore system. So what exactly IS omnivore and how do you work around it?
What is Omnivore?
When adding new email addresses to your usual email lists, or audiences, the omnivore system checks to see how many of those new addresses are likely to be spam traps or generate abuse complaints and hard bounces. The system uses a very accurate algorithm to assign a level of risk to a group of addresses. If the risk level is too high, omnivore will prevent the email from being sent because of those flagged addresses. While the system does stop the email from sending, it will not remove or edit your previous email list.
“Well what’s the point of that?” you might ask. The reason this system is in place is to protect the good email reputation for MailChimp, as well as your own. If an email address reaches too high of a rate for things such as bounces, abuse complaints or spam trap hits, the deliverability of your emails suffers.
So How Do I Fix it?
Clean Your Email and Re-Import it:
In order to fix this error notification and send your email effectively, you’ll have to begin by cleaning your email list and re-importing it. To do this you’ll first want to remove the previous import with faulty addresses, remove the “flagged” addresses on the list, then re-import the improved list once complete. A helpful tip during this step is to look for accounts known as “role” emails. MailChimp will often view email address such as “admin@blog.net” as an unclean account and flag them.
Do Not Try to BCC The Email to Yourself
If you try to send the email campaign out by blind carbon copying (or BCC’ing) all the addresses and see which ones bounce back, you risk lowering your email provider reputation with every bounce back. With a hurt reputation, you could have trouble sending emails in the future as they might automatically go to users spam folders. The best and safest way around the issue is to go in and remove the addresses proven faulty by the system.
Avoid it in the First Place
The best and most time-sensitive way to fix this issue is to do your best to avoid it in the first place. Some ways to do that are implementing a double opt-in verification link to the email. This is done by sending a first email with a link in which they need to click on to verify that they want to receive emails from your business. This will ensure the system that the receiver is not likely to mark your email as spam. Another tip is to keep all data updated and correct to ensure that no emails bounce back due to an incorrect email or outdated username.
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