It is vitally important to understand the status of each contact’s email addresses in your Keap database. Sometimes, you may also need to manually edit an email status.
Technical Level: 2 out of 5.
Who should read this?: Any Keap user responsible for optimising Keap mailing list quality.
Email Status Explained
Keap assigns an Email Status to each email address in your contact list. Familiarise yourself with this list as you will encounter most of them in your Keap account.
| Email Status | Meaning |
| Unconfirmed (single opt-in) | This is the default status and indicates you have permission to send email marketing to the contact. |
| Confirmed (double opt-in) | You have sent the contact an Email Confirmation Request in an automation. The contact has clicked the link to confirm they want to receive marketing emails. Doing this greatly helps your emails land in your contact’s email inbox. |
| List Unsubscribe | The contact has unsubscribed from all your email marketing via an unsubscribe option that appears at the top of the email for some email service providers to make it easier for their customers to opt out of unwanted emails. You can send individual emails to these email addresses via the contact record but cannot send any broadcast or automation emails to them. |
| Unsubscribed (Opt-Out: Manual) | The contact has unsubscribed from all your email marketing via an unsubscribe option that appears at the bottom of every email sent by Keap. |
| Bounced | The email no longer exists or it ‘soft bounced’ too many times. For more information on bounced email status, click here. |
| Provide Feedback | This status indicates that the recipient reported your email as SPAM directly to their internet service provider. Each contact that performs this action, hurts your email sender reputation. |
| Reports SPAM | The contact reported your email as SPAM via the unsubscribe feedback form, after clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email. This method of reporting SPAM does not hurt your email sender reputation as much. |
| Unengaged Marketable | This email status is automatically appled to any email address that has not engaged with your marketing efforts in the last 4 months. Specifically, the status will be applied when within the last 4 months all of the following are true: a. the contact has existed for at least 4 months b. the contact has not opened an email b. the contact has not clicked a link in an email |
| Invalid email | The Invalid status indicates the email address is missing characteristics of a valid email address (e.g. an @ symbol, .com/.net/.org, etc.) |
| Opt Out: System | Keap’s automated email scanning service detects an email address as being non-deliverable. This may be flagged because an email address has an invalid syntax or is on an internal ‘restricted’ list. These restricted lists contain email addresses and domains that Keap cannot send to (eg. some organisations and especially government and military email domains do not allow any email to enter their network from Email Marketing platforms). A reason as to why the address is opted out is also provided. |
| Non-Marketable | This is an email status that prevents your Keap app from emailing the contact. It is typically a result of incorrectly adding or importing new contacts and not selecting that you have permission to email the contact. |
Manually Edit a Contact’s Email Status
There are a few circumstances when an email status needs changing or correcting. For example:
- a contact has unsubscribed and their email status is now ‘Unsubscribed’, but would now like to resubscribe; or
- a contact’s email address is marked as ‘Hard Bounce’ but it was a temporary issue and you now need to reactivate the email address to Keap can start emailing the contact again.
I’d love to tell you can you easily edit a contact’s email status on their contact record, but you can’t. You need to navigate to REPORTS > EMAIL STATUS SEARCH (or EMAIL ENGAGEMENT TRACKER in some Keap versions).
Search for the contact name or email address using the search fields. Then click EDIT to mark the email address as valid.
Please also review our article detailing how to Manage email status issues