Deliverability and metrics

This guide explains what happens to a newsletter after you hit send: how it goes out, how the issue moves through its stages, and how opens, clicks, bounces and complaints come back to you as numbers you can read and act on. It also covers what helps your emails actually land in the inbox.

Steeren delivers your newsletters through an established, professional email provider, so the underlying sending and reputation handling is taken care of for you. The rest of this guide is about what you see and control.

The life of one issue

Every newsletter issue moves through a handful of stages. Knowing them helps you understand what a status badge is telling you.

You can delete drafts, scheduled issues, and failed issues. Once an issue is sending or sent, it stays - that's your audit trail.

You start a send in one of two ways:

• Send now - the issue goes out as soon as you confirm. You'll need both a subject and some content.
• Schedule - you pick a date and time, and Steeren sends it for you when that moment arrives.

If you scheduled an issue and change your mind, you can unschedule it. That moves it back to draft and clears the send time, so you can keep editing or pick a new time.

[!NOTE] A scheduled send can take a short moment to leave after its scheduled time - it doesn't fire to the exact second. If you've scheduled a large batch for the same minute, they go out in waves rather than all at once. Nothing is dropped; the rest simply follow shortly after.

After you hit send: the metrics

Once an issue is on its way, the people on your list start interacting with it - and that activity flows back to you as live numbers on the issue. You don't need to refresh a report or wait for an overnight job; the figures update on their own as activity comes in.

Here's what each metric means and how to read it.

A couple of things to keep in mind when you read these:

• Recipient count is your true reach - the total number of people the issue was sent to. Use it as the denominator when you're working out open and click rates.
• Each recipient is counted once, at the furthest point they reached. Someone who opened and then clicked shows up under "clicked", not under both. So treat your open and click numbers as a floor: at least this many people got that far. The headline reach is the recipient count.

[!TIP] Watch the trend across issues more than any single number. A steady or rising open rate means your subject lines and timing are working. A creeping bounce or complaint rate is your early warning to clean your list - see "Keeping your emails landing" below.

Sending from your own domain

By default, Steeren sends your newsletters from a verified sender that's ready to go - you don't have to set anything up.

If you'd rather send from your own address (for example news@yourcompany.com), you can add and verify your domain first. This is required before Steeren will send from a custom address, because mailbox providers expect a sender to prove the domain is really theirs.

How it works:

1. Add your domain under Newsletters -> Settings -> Sender domains.
2. Steeren gives you a set of DNS records to publish at your domain registrar or DNS provider. Copy these in exactly as shown.
3. Steeren checks for them automatically and flips the domain to "verified" once they're in place. DNS changes usually take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour to take effect, so the green "verified" badge may appear on its own a little later.
4. If you don't want to wait, hit Check now to re-check immediately.

If you try to send from a custom address whose domain isn't verified yet, the issue goes straight to Failed without sending to anyone - and Steeren tells you why right on the issue (for example, the domain still needs to be added, or it's added but not yet verified). Fix the domain, or clear the custom address to fall back to the built-in sender, and send again.

A few practical notes on managing domains:

• You can't delete a domain while one of your newsletters is still set to send from it - change that newsletter's from-address first.
• You can't delete a domain while a send from it is in progress - wait for that send to finish.

Keeping your emails landing

Deliverability is mostly about sender reputation, and the biggest thing in your control is the quality of your list. Steeren handles a lot of this for you automatically, but here's what helps and what you can do.

Steeren protects your reputation automatically. When an address bounces or someone marks an email as spam, Steeren stops sending to that address - both for the newsletter it happened on and across your other newsletters in the same account. A bounced or complained address also can't quietly re-subscribe through a different signup form. This keeps the bad addresses from dragging down how mailbox providers see you.

Use double opt-in if your signup supports it. Confirming new subscribers by email keeps fake and mistyped addresses off your list before they ever cause a bounce.

Watch your bounce and complaint rates. For your verified domains, Steeren shows reputation figures over the last 7 and 30 days - delivery rate, bounce rate, and complaint rate. A fresh domain shows a dash rather than a misleading "0%" until it has real sends behind it.

[!IMPORTANT] These reputation figures are there for you to watch, not a tripwire. Steeren won't automatically pause your sends because a rate climbed. If you see your bounce or complaint rate trending up, that's your cue to investigate and clean your list - remove stale addresses, double-check where new subscribers are coming from, and make sure people genuinely opted in.

Honour unsubscribes - automatically. You don't have to manage this. Every issue Steeren sends includes a working unsubscribe link and the one-click unsubscribe controls that Gmail, Yahoo and other major providers now expect from bulk senders. You can't accidentally send an issue without them.

Handling problem subscribers by hand

Sometimes you'll want to act on a subscriber yourself rather than wait for the system to:

• Unsubscribe someone manually - for example, on request. This opts them out without sending them an unsubscribe confirmation email.
• Flag a complaint manually - mark a subscriber as having complained, which stops future sends to them.

Quick answers

My scheduled issue hasn't gone out - what should I check? First confirm the send time is actually in the past and the issue is still marked Scheduled. If you scheduled a very large batch for the same moment, the rest go out in waves shortly after the first - give it a little time. If it's well past time and still hasn't moved, reach out to support.

Why did my issue fail immediately, with no recipients? A custom sender domain that isn't verified yet is the usual cause. The issue tells you the specific reason - most often the domain still needs to be added or finished verifying, or the from-address is mistyped. Add and verify the domain, or clear the custom from-address to use the built-in sender, then send again.

A subscriber bounced - will they get the next issue? No. Steeren stops sending to a bounced address automatically and won't let it re-subscribe through another form. You don't have to do anything.

Do opens and clicks update on their own? Yes. The numbers are recalculated from live activity whenever you look at them - there's no report to run or rollup to wait for.

My bounce rate looks high - will Steeren stop sending from that domain? No. The reputation figures are shown so you can keep an eye on them, but Steeren won't pause your sends for you. Bad individual addresses are suppressed automatically; the bigger picture is yours to manage. If the rate is climbing, clean your list.