All first-time campaigns go through an approval process. This ensures your campaign is within our Terms of Service and meets industry standards. However, even seasoned users may find that their communications must go under a manual review.
If your campaign has a "Pending Approval" or "Pending Review" status, the campaign review and approval process usually takes less than 10 minutes. However, there may be times when we need additional information from you. If this happens, we'll send a message to the "Account" email address on file immediately with the specific information we are requesting and the steps you need to take to get your campaign approved. Your campaign will have an "Analyzing" status at this time.
Note that approvals may also be slower during non-US business hours or outside American business hours.
Your campaign will not be approved to send until we hear back from you. You can respond directly to the email, or, you can log into your Help account page at help.activecampaign.com and respond there. You may also see an alert badge on the top right of your account page that you can click to view this message.
We encourage you to respond to our message as soon as possible. This will prevent an extended disruption of service. After reviewing your reply, we will either approve your campaign, ask for more information, or in rare cases, decline it.
Possible reasons for a manual review can be:
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Poor performance rates
If you have high spam rates, bounce rates, or unsubscribes, we may need more information from you to investigate why and help you to improve these metrics. -
Content that is against our policies
For more information about our policies and what type of content we don't allow, please visit our Anti-spam policy page. -
Invalid content
If your campaign contains filler text, prohibited content (see Policy page above), or does not provide enough content, we will place your campaign back to draft status until your campaign meets our policies. -
Formatting errors (physical mailing address, unsubscribe link)
In order to comply with the CAN-SPAM Act, all outgoing campaigns need to include a physical mailing address and an ActiveCampaign unsubscribe link. If our system recognizes that the physical mailing address provided is invalid or incomplete, we will place your campaign on hold and reach out to you via email. Once you have provided the corrected information, your campaign will be approved to send. If your campaign includes an unsubscribe link that is not our own (ie, if you copy and pasted HTML code from another service that included their unsubscribe link), your campaign will be placed on hold until this is updated. -
List source information needed
When you create a list in ActiveCampaign, we ask you for details about the email addresses you are importing, such as how those addresses were obtained, what website the list of emails is for, URLs of your subscription form(s), the last time you reached out to your contacts, and how frequently you sent communications to them in the past.
If we feel that more details are needed, we will place your campaign on hold and reach out to you via email to request more details. -
Duplicate campaign
If we see that you are sending out a duplicate campaign to the same subscriber list, we will place it on hold and send you an email asking why you are resending this campaign. -
Country Sanctions
Unfortunately, if you're sending from a country we are not allowed to provide services to, we will place your campaign on hold and will not be able to approve your campaign. The list of countries we are not allowed to provide services for at this time are:
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- Cuba
- Iran
- Libya
- North Korea
- Somalia
- Sudan
- Syria
If you have questions about our review process, please contact our Customer Experience Team.