When you send any email from Pianola or ACBL Marketing Solutions, you can get a detailed delivery report* which will help you identify any problems with one of your players' email address.

In Pianola, you can see this information when you:

• review a sent email in the admin area
• review an uploaded game in the admin area
• visit a player's record in the admin area

In ACBL Marketing Solutions you can see this information when you view a sent email (if you chose to add delivery stats when you sent your e-blast).

Here's what each status means:

Processed

The email was processed through our system and sent to the recipient's email address.

Delivered

The recipient's email server accepted your email for delivery to their customer. Sometimes, however, a recipient’s email server may have sent your email to their spam/junk folder. If someone is reported as “delivered” but they don’t see your email in their in-box, please ask them to check their spam folder.

Opened

In the headline stats we show the number of different people who've opened your email. In the table below the headline stats, we show you a list of every occasion someone opened your email (many recipients will open your email more than once).

Each time you send an email, we include a tiny invisible graphic at the bottom of your message. This “web beacon” is unique for each recipient and each email you send. When someone opens your email, that beacon is downloaded from our server, which is how we record it as an “open”.

This method of tracking is the industry standard and will give you a general idea about the performance of your email. However, there are limitations. As it relies on loading an image (albeit invisible) from our server, this won’t work if a recipient has set their email program to not download and display images.

So, although everyone you see on this report definitely did open your email don’t assume that someone who’s not on this list didn’t - they may have opened it without images showing.

Clicked

In the headline stats we show the number of different people who've clicked a link your email. In the table below the headline stats, we show you a list of every occasion someone clicked a link in your email (many recipients will click  more than once).

When you send an email with links, we append those links with unique tracking data. When a recipient clicks one of your links, the tracking information redirects them through our server, which is how we’re able to track links.

Bounced

A bounce is when the recipient’s email server returns an email as undeliverable. This can happen for a variety of reasons, but the most common cause is that the recipient’s email address doesn’t exist. This might be because they’ve closed their email account, or there’s a typo in their address. But there are also occasions when recipients’ email servers encounter a temporary error and bounce an email that was sent to a valid address.

If you're using Pianola and you see a bounce that was definitely sent to the correct address you can reinstate emails to that player by visiting their membership record (Admin > Members).

If you're using Marketing Solutions and you spot a bounce to an address you're sure is correct, please contact support@pianola.net.

Dropped

When you send an email to a player whose address has bounced in the past, or to an address that previously reported you for sending spam, we drop them from the e-blast. We do this to protect your (and our!) reputation with email servers. (If we continued to send to bad addresses, it looks to recipients’ email servers that you are a potential spammer and this will harm your ability to send to other players’ addresses.)

If we drop an email because of a previous bounce, please carefully check the player’s email address. If it’s definitely correct, we can reinstate their address for future emails. Please contact support@pianola.net in this case.

If we dropped an email because of a spam report, we are unable to reinstate their address unless they undo their spam report. Please see the ‘spam’ section for more information.

Spam

These are recipients who marked your email as spam in their email program. Often, this happens inadvertently, because many email programs put the spam button right next to the delete button and some people don’t understand the implications of marking as spam instead of just deleting an email.

What can I do about it?

Please contact the player and ask them if they intended to mark your email as spam. If they did so accidentally, please ask them to undo their spam report so that we can reinstate emails to go to them.

We have help articles for how to undo spam reports in some of the major email programs: AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail.

Please also ask the player to contact support@pianola.net once they have completed all the steps in the help article or if they need help.

*Delivery reports are free for Pianola users but cost an additional half a credit per recipient for ACBL Marketing Solutions users.