This can be due to a deliverability issue, or something misconfigured in your account settings.

In this article, we'll walk you through everything you need to check, to diagnose why your incentive email isn't being delivered!

The first question to ask your subscriber, (or check yourself if testing your own opt-in), is whether the incentive email ended up in the spam folder.

If so, our deliverability lead has put together a comprehensive guide on troubleshooting this issue here: Why are my incentive emails going to spam?

The next thing to check for is whether your account is approved. If your account is not approved yet, you'll see this yellow bar across the top of your ConvertKit account:

No emails will be able to send until your account is approved. Click the banner to submit your account for approval and our team will be in touch as soon as possible.

NOTE: For more info on our approvals process, check out this article!

If the email didn't go to spam, and your account is approved, the next thing to check is in the form settings itself.

To check if your form's incentive email is enabled, first click 'Settings' from the toolbar at the top of the form builder:

Then click 'Incentive' from the sidebar, and ensure 'Send incentive email' is checked:

NOTE: The incentive email won't send retroactively — it has to have been enabled before the time of the signup.

If the incentive email was enabled at the time of the signup, the next thing to check is your sending address.

Click the 'Edit Email Contents' button from the incentive email settings (see screenshot above), and in the modal that pops up, check the 'From address'. This is its sending email:

This sending email should be an @customdomain email address like [email protected]. In other words, it should not be a freemail address ending in @gmail, @yahoo, @hotmail, etc. (This is true for all emails sent via ConvertKit — not just incentive emails!)

Using a freemail address as your sending address will harm your deliverability. We have more information on this here.

You can add a custom domain sending email in your account settings here.

NOTE: After adding an @customdomain email address as your sending address, we'd recommend setting it as your default and then deleting any freemail addresses from your settings so they don't get used by accident.

The next step is to check the subscriber's profile. Find this by going to the Subscribers page and using the search bar to search for the subscriber's email address, or your own email address if you were testing your own form.

Once you've found the email address, click it to view its associated subscriber profile.

Do you see the incentive email in their email history? If so, hover over the the icon next to it, to see if it may have bounced or failed to send:

Incentive emails will send only once per subscriber per 12-hour period. So if you signed up to the same incentive email more than once (with the same email address) within a 12-hour period, you'll only receive it the first time, unless you delete yourself as a subscriber from your list in between tests.

☝️ PRO-TIP: If you're testing out your own opt-in multiple times with the same email address(es), you might want to consider using email aliases instead. Check out our guide to that here!

The system won't send an email if it doesn't have an Unsubscribe link. If your default template doesn't have an unsubscribe link, that's probably what's causing your email to be held back. Check out this article for more information on how to edit your unsubscribe link.

Usually incentive emails send very quickly; however, they can sometimes take a couple of minutes to come through.

If you just signed up to your opt-in, the system might just need a bit of extra time to process the send!