Emails

Everything about sending marketing email: configuring your sender, building the email, testing variants, understanding why messages don’t arrive, and passing spam checks.

On this page:

• Configuring email settings
• How emails work
• Creating an email
• Reviewing a sent email
• Email templates
• A/B and multivariate testing
• Sending limits
• Transactional emails
• Drops, blocks, bounces, and throttling
• Tracking signup sources
• Spam check

Configuring email settings

Configure these before creating your first email.

Default email sender

Set a default sender and it populates automatically on every new email, while staying editable per email.

Click the user profile in the upper right, select System Settings, and under Feature Settings select Default Email Sender. Enter the Sender Name, which is what Prospects see, and the Sender Email Address, then click Save Settings.

IP addresses and sending reputation

Sends go out over either a shared or a dedicated IP address.

Shared IP addresses are pooled across accounts that have not bought their own. Because they are shared, one account getting the address onto a deny list affects everyone using it. Insightly is notified automatically when a shared IP is listed and handles the delisting request on customers’ behalf; removal time varies by list.

Insightly allocates accounts to multiple IP pools based on a reputation score computed on the back end.

⚠️ Reputation below 70% produces a warning, and below 50% stops sending entirely. Between 50% and 70% you can still send, but the home page carries “Your email sending reputation is low and must be improved, or email sending will be suspended.” Below 50%, sending privileges are suspended and the message becomes “Email sending has been suspended as your email reputation score is too low.” Recovering from that requires Customer Support.

Dedicated IP addresses are recommended for high volume, or where you want control over the reputation of your own sending. Nobody else’s behaviour can affect it. One or several can be purchased and combined into a pool. Contact Insightly sales.

Blacklisting filters out IPs that look malicious or illegitimate, most often for spam or inappropriate content. A listed IP directly degrades delivery.

Email sending domain

An email sending domain strengthens authentication of outgoing mail and determines whether messages reach Prospects at all.

ℹ️ Have your SPF or DKIM authentication records ready before starting.

1. Click the user profile, select System Settings, and under Feature Settings select Domain Management.
2. Click Add Domain in the upper right and select Add Email Sending Domain.
3. Enter the domain and click Generate Keys.
4. Add the resulting CNAME record to your DNS through your web hosting provider.
5. Return to Insightly Marketing and click Validate. Validation can take up to 48 hours.
6. Once validated, click Close.

⚠️ An unvalidated domain is silently excluded. Until the records validate, the sending domain is not included in outgoing emails at all.

Delivered means the recipient’s mail server accepted the message, not that anyone saw it. That server then decides what to do: inbox, spam folder, or in rare cases drop it entirely, in which case the recipient cannot find it even in spam.

How emails work

Emails are built in the Designer Tool, from a prefabricated template or a custom one. Templates can also be enabled specifically for use in Journeys.

Finish Actions update a Prospect’s record automatically based on how they interact with the email, triggering on Email Open, Email Click (both HTML and text-version links), and Email Unsubscribe.

Where you add them matters: on a draft they apply once the email sends; added after sending they apply going forward only, never retroactively to Prospects who already triggered that event. The same is true of emails scheduled but not yet sent, where finish actions added beforehand will fire normally.

1. Open the email record and go to its Finish Actions tab.
2. Click Add Finish Action and choose an action type.
3. Name the action and set any conditional criteria.
4. Click Save Finish Action.

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ℹ️ Finish actions do not expire and fire every time the action occurs. A Prospect clearing out their inbox two months later, opening the email and clicking a link, still triggers them. Be careful with notification and email actions on large sends.

Who counts as emailable

A Prospect receives an email only if they have a valid email address on their record and are not marked Unsubscribe, Do Not Email, or Opted Out.

⚠️ Respecting an unsubscribe is a legal obligation, not a courtesy. Where a Prospect unsubscribes, is marked Do Not Email, or opts out, their preference has to be respected to stay compliant with the CAN-SPAM Act in the Americas and the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe.

Suppression lists are the reliable way to hold this. Where a Prospect appears on both a recipient list and a suppression list, the suppression list wins.

ℹ️ Access to Emails and Email Templates depends on your Marketing Email and Marketing Email Template permissions. Without them, those menu options don’t appear at all, which is worth knowing before assuming a feature is missing.

Unsubscribe requests sent as replies

Marketing does not only count clicks on the unsubscribe link. With Use Insightly Email Reply Management selected in an email’s Reply Management field, Insightly checks every incoming reply, identifies out-of-office and unsubscribe replies, and forwards everything else to the Reply To address.

It matches these terms to detect a manual unsubscribe request: Unsub, Unsubscribe, Remove, Opt-Out, Leave, unsube, unsu, unsubscribed, unsubsribe, unsubscrabe, unscribe, unsubscribe..., unsubscribe, suscribir, renove, removed, take me off, delete me, opt out, optout, laeve, leaved.

⚠️ Out-of-office and unsubscribe replies are deleted, not forwarded. Nobody on your team sees them. A Prospect who replies asking to be removed, in wording the list above does not catch, gets neither an automated action nor a human reading the reply.

The alternative setting, Forward All Email Replies to Reply To Address, sends every reply through without filtering.

Creating an email

1. Go to Emails. All emails show by default; the list view dropdown changes the view.
2. Click New Email and complete the Setup step.
3. Click Next to reach the Template and Design steps, where the Designer Tool is used.
4. Review at the Summary step, then send.

Setup fields

Field	Details
Email Name	A unique name.
Folder	Categorization, so emails stay findable.
Subject Line	Required. The information bubble offers Merge Tags pulling from the Prospect record.
Preview Text	Shown beside the subject in the Prospect’s inbox. Also supports Merge Tags.
From	The user the email appears to be from.
From Fallback	Used if the original sender becomes unavailable.
Custom Reply To	With Email Reply Management enabled, sets a specific address for recipients to contact. Disabled, replies forward to the dynamic From address, or the From Fallback if no From address was selected.
Reply Management	Use Insightly Email Reply Management, or Forward All Email Replies to Reply To Address. See above.
Recipient Lists	The lists receiving the email.
Suppression Lists	Takes precedence over recipient lists.

⚠️ A blank Merge Tag inserts nothing. If the Prospect record has no value for the tag you selected, the subject line or preview text simply omits it rather than falling back.

Merge tags in content

Text sections dragged in from the template support Merge Tags for both recipient and sender. Recipient tags carry the prefix Prospect, as in Prospect: First Name. Sender tags carry the prefix Sender, and are populated from the contact record of the From user.

⚠️ Using From Fallback narrows the available sender fields to two. Only First Name and Email Address are available as Sender values when sending falls back.

Sending

The Summary step is also where the Plain Text Version, recipient and suppression lists, and custom reply-to address can still be edited.

Send Immediately. Click Send, then Send Now on the popup. The Finish step appears and Exit leaves the process.

Schedule Send. Click the dropdown beside Send and select Schedule Send. In the Email Scheduling popup, set Email Delivery Schedule to As soon as possible, In 3 Hours, or a specific date and time, which must be in the future. Use Send Email in to split delivery across up to 6 batches, then set the minutes or hours between batches. Click Save, then Scheduled in the upper right.

ℹ️ Batching requires at least 200 prospects on the list and is available on Professional and Enterprise plans.

⚠️ A scheduled email cannot be cancelled. It can be deleted up to the scheduled send time, but there is no cancel. It stays editable until then.

Save & Exit. The dropdown beside Send also saves the email as a draft without sending.

Emails can be found by status through the list view dropdown: Recently Viewed, All Emails, Draft Emails, Scheduled Emails, Sent Emails.

Sending an email to one Prospect

Go to Prospects, open the record, click Actions in the upper right, and select Send Prospect an Email.

Reviewing a sent email

⚠️ Sent emails cannot be deleted. Emails are reported on individually, so deleting one would skew email statistics and reporting.

A sent email record carries four tabs.

Details. Basic information and simple statistics. If an email failed to send for any reason, including the sending limit, Email Status shows Send Error.

Message. How the email appeared to Prospects. Where the Message field has content, this tab opens by default instead of Details.

Finish Actions. The actions configured, and where further ones can be added, subject to the non-retroactive rule above.

Statistics. How the email performed.

• Opens. Insightly appends an invisible one-pixel tracking image to every email. If the Prospect has images enabled, opening the email requests that pixel and logs an Open event, visible in the Prospect’s Timeline tab, in reports, and here.
• Clicks. Total clicks on links in the email.
• Unique Clicks. Distinct individuals who clicked.

Related. Each recipient, how they interacted, and whether the email reached the inbox or bounced.

ℹ️ To see all clicks from one Prospect, run an Email Performance report filtered to them.

Bot filtering

Insightly identifies opens and clicks it believes originate from bots and excludes them automatically, with no action required from you. Excluded activity does not appear in Open Count or Click Count on the Details tab, in the Statistics tab, in prospect scoring, or in journeys, and does not trigger finish actions configured on opens or clicks.

Email templates

A template is a reusable layout, useful for anything sent repeatedly in the same shape such as a newsletter. Templates are built in the Designer Tool and become selectable at the Template step when creating an email.

Create one from Email Templates in the left menu, clicking New Email Template. The Add New Email Template popup takes the same core fields as an email, plus two of its own:

Field	Details
Template Type	Checkboxes for what the template can be used for. A template for a Journey email needs Customer Journey Emails enabled or it cannot be used there.
Permissions	Which Marketing users can view, edit, or delete this template. Read-only users see it but cannot change it.

Save, then design it in the Designer Tool.

ℹ️ The version history feature at the bottom left of a template rolls back to a previous version, alongside the back button.

Template actions are reached either from the three-dot menu in the list view or from the Actions dropdown inside an open template: edit, clone, preview, change record owner, and delete. An existing email can also be saved as a template through Save as Template.

ℹ️ Template access is governed by the Marketing Email Template permission on your profile, set by admins under System Settings > Security > Profiles. Without it, the Email Templates section does not appear and the template actions do not show.

A/B and multivariate testing

Test type	Variables	Combinations	Plans
A/B test	One	Up to 3	All plans
Multivariate test	Multiple	Up to 8	Professional and Enterprise

Both send different versions to different groups of Prospects. You choose which lists take part, but not which version any individual Prospect receives.

What can be tested

• Subject Line. Wording, limited-time offers, emojis.
• From Name. Whether Prospects respond better to a company or a person, across combinations of sender name and sender address.
• Content. Different templates, or variations of one template.
• Send Time. Which days and times get opened.

⚠️ Send Time produces no winner. Selecting send time as a tested variable means no winning combination is declared, and every recipient is scheduled to receive a test combination rather than a fraction being held back.

⚠️ Insightly account users cannot be added to test email lists. To include your own team, create Prospect records for them and add those to a static or dynamic list.

Creating a test email

1. Go to Emails, click the dropdown beside New Email, and select New A/B Test Email or New Multivariate Test Email.
2. Complete the Recipients step: Email Name, Folder, Recipient Lists, Suppression Lists.
3. At the Variables step, select the variables to test. The plus and minus buttons increase the number of combinations, summarized in Email Test Summary.
4. Use the slider below that summary to set what percentage of recipients receive test combinations.
5. Choose how the winner is decided, by open rate or click rate, and the wait time in hours or days before deciding.
6. Apply the content at the Setup step, which shows options according to the variables chosen.
7. Choose a template at the Content step. Custom templates appear at the end of the prefabricated list.
8. Customize in the Designer Tool, click Save Design, then Next.
9. Review the Summary step and click Send, then Start Campaign at the Finish step.

The wait time also determines when the winning combination reaches the rest of the list. Selecting a whole day means the remainder do not receive the email until the next day.

Test email statuses

Status	Meaning
Draft	Not sent or scheduled.
Scheduled	Scheduled to start, nothing sent yet.
Sending	The first test email has gone out.
Determining Winner	The last test email has been sent. The winner is chosen automatically on open rate or click rate, per the configuration.
Sent	All test emails including the winner have been sent.

⚠️ If no winning criteria are met within the test period, the first combination wins by default and the remaining segment receives it. That is not a neutral outcome; it is the first variation being sent because nothing distinguished itself.

Test emails cannot be edited once sent. Before that, open the record, click Actions, and select Edit This Email.

The winner appears on the Details tab. The Statistics tab has a Combination dropdown for comparing how each variation performed.

Sending limits

Monthly send volume on paid plans is a multiple of the Prospects purchased; see Marketing Plan Level Limits.

ℹ️ At 90% of the monthly sending limit a message appears at the top of every page in the instance, and again at 100%. It can be closed but returns on every page refresh and every page visited.

Transactional emails

Transactional emails reach Prospects even if they have unsubscribed, because they carry information the recipient needs rather than marketing content. Legitimate uses include legal notices, shipping confirmations, internal company emails, invoices, password resets, terms of service changes, and critical system changes requiring action.

To enable:

1. Go to System Settings > Transactional Emails.
2. Check Enable Sending Transactional Emails.
3. A popup warns that improper use will result in account deactivation. Check I understand and agree to this policy.
4. Click Enable, then Save Settings.

Transactional Email then appears in an email’s Content Type dropdown. Disabling it later removes the option but does not affect emails already scheduled.

⚠️ Misuse of transactional email deactivates the account. That is the warning Insightly puts on the enabling checkbox, not an inference.

Drops, blocks, bounces, and throttling

Term	What happened
Drop	Insightly withheld the email to protect your sender score. It never reached the recipient’s inbox.
Block	An ISP or messaging organization refused it, typically because the sending IP is on a deny list.
Bounce	The message was returned to the sending server.

Bounces come in two kinds. A soft bounce reached the recipient’s mail server but was not delivered onward, for instance because the mailbox is full. A hard bounce was returned because the address is invalid, either the domain does not exist or the recipient is unknown.

ℹ️ Insightly allows seven soft bounces before treating the address as a hard bounce.

Throttling limits how many emails go to one ISP at a time. ISPs treat sudden high volume as a spam signal, so if part of a campaign appears not to have sent, throttling is a likely cause rather than a failure. Staggering delivery also spreads out the response, which matters if your call to action is something a team has to staff, such as a phone line, or if a promotion will put load on your website.

There are no fixed throttling rules; they vary by recipient list and content.

Tracking signup sources

Replacing subscribers who lose interest keeps results accurate and campaigns aimed at people who want them. The most valuable subscribers tend to be frequent visitors to your site, so a signup form on a landing page or a discount offered for joining a list are reasonable acquisition tactics.

Four metrics are worth tracking per signup source: unique open rate, hard bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, and spam complaint rate.

ℹ️ Review these over months rather than days. A source can look unpromising early. Removing uninterested Prospects also keeps account costs down, since Marketing is priced on Prospects.

Spam check

When you build an email in the Designer Tool, Marketing scans its content and subject line for characteristics that trigger spam filters, and reports each issue with an error value.

⚠️ A total error value of five or more blocks the send entirely. This is a hard stop, not a warning.

Sender score

Your sender score, or sending reputation, is how mailbox providers judge your mail, driven by how recipients react to it. Spam complaints worsen it and make future delivery harder; positive engagement strengthens it.

No single score is used by all providers. Six tools for checking:

• Senderscore.org, a 0 to 100 scale on a rolling 30-day average, ranking your IP against others.
• Barracudacentral, IP and domain reputation lookup.
• TrustedSource, run by McAfee, covering a domain’s email and web reputation, affiliations, DNS and mail server information.
• Google Postmaster Tools, for high-volume sending into Gmail: IP reputation, domain reputation, Gmail delivery errors.
• Microsoft SNDS, covering IP reputation, Microsoft spam traps hit, and spam complaint rate.
• Postmark’s spam check, which scans a sample email against a spam filter and returns a score with specifics on what triggered it.

Common spam errors

Error	What to do
Refers to a muscle relaxant	Check for soma, cycl (cyclobenzaprine), flexeril, skelaxin, zanaflex.
Sender email is commonly abused end user mail provider	Do not send from a freemail provider such as @gmail or @yahoo.
No description available	Look for “Gold Dust”, “Your...acount”, “Dr.”, “Your Compensation”. Also check you are not on a freemail provider.
BODY: No description available	Check for “Reply to this email...”.
BODY: HTML has a low ratio of test to image area	Disregard entirely.
BODY: Message is 10% to 20% HTML obfuscation / 20% to 30%	Balance image and text. Often a false positive caused by the Designer Tool’s generated code.
URI: Uses %-escapes inside a URL’s hostname	Usually a merge field being flagged. Disregard; it populates at send time.
relaxant Make lots of money!	Remove “lucrative” and “profitable”.
You use too many tags in your code	Generally a false positive from the Designer Tool’s complex markup.
Subject has exclamation mark and question mark	Remove “!” and “?” from the subject line.
Subject contains “Your Family”	Remove the phrase.
Accessing a blacklisted URL or obscuring source of	Usually custom HTML. Check image URLs. A cached image pasted from Gmail is sourced from googleusercontent.com and reads as spammy. Upload a JPG or PNG through the Designer Tool instead, or host on your own domain.
Your message contains characteristics similar to those used by scammers	Remove “your compensation”.
A URI hostname has a long (6 characters or more) hexadecimal sequence	Check links for long number sequences, such as oddly formatted phone numbers.
Your message claims to be a “marketing partner” of the recipient	Remove “marketing partner” and “network partner”.
RAW: Message contains Dear but with no name	“Dear” followed by a merge field the check cannot see populated.
BODY: Incorporates a tracking ID number	Check for a very long link or a hyphenated word.
Subject talks about losing pounds	Check for “lose pounds”, “lbs”, “weight” in the subject.
UC_GIBBERISH_OBFU	Often a false positive from long non-English words.
BODY: HTML: images with 2000-2400 bytes of words	The email is very short with little text.
BODY: One Time Rip Off	Check for “one time”, “rip off”, or a combination.