Skipped contacts explained: How to make sure every email reaches its audience
Ilse Borbolla
October 23, 2025
Even the best-crafted campaigns can fail to reach their intended audience if a large portion of contacts are accidentally skipped. “Skipped contacts” are subscribers who exist in your database but don’t receive your message.
Some skipped contacts are intentional, such as unsubscribes, spam complaints, or hard bounces, and should stay excluded to protect your sender reputation. But what if the skip is unintentional? These are contacts who should receive your email but are being filtered out inadvertently.
If your send reports show a high number of skipped profiles, it’s a sign that something in your logic, data, or setup is preventing valid subscribers from getting your campaigns. Below is an actionable guide to diagnosing and preventing those accidental skips.

What are skipped contacts?
In most ESPs (Klaviyo, Braze, Iterable, HubSpot, and others), “skipped contacts” are users the platform chooses not to send to.
Picture this: a marketer finishes setting up a campaign, hits send, and later checks the report, only to see a huge chunk of contacts marked as “skipped.” None of them unsubscribed, and there aren’t any obvious bounces. So why didn’t they get the email?
While some skips are expected and intentional, many of the skipped contacts you see in your reports are actually valid subscribers who were excluded by mistake.
Intentional skips should be segmented out of your active lists to keep engagement data clean and to protect your reputation. Unintentional skips, however, are silent performance leaks, and those are the ones to focus on fixing.
Why unintentional skips happen (and how to fix them)
Here are the most common causes of accidental skips and how to address them:
Segment rules and logic errors
Overly strict segmentation or miswritten logic within templates can push contacts into a “no match” or default skip path. When using “if/then” conditions or multi-branch logic in flows, make sure every possible contact has a path forward.
Fix: Audit segment logic carefully. Confirm every condition has an outcome, simplify complex filters, and test edge cases. Write your templating language to handle empty or null user properties so no one gets dropped unintentionally.Overlapping suppression or misconfigured filters
Sometimes a suppression list or “exclude” rule captures more people than intended. For example, a global suppression list might include recently re-subscribed users or contacts that were migrated incorrectly during an ESP switch.
Fix: Regularly review your suppression and exclusion lists. When migrating systems, ensure suppression data is imported cleanly and synced accurately. Avoid blanket exclusions that might unintentionally suppress engaged contacts.Engagement thresholds
Some ESPs automatically skip contacts based on inactivity thresholds (for example, “no opens in 180 days”) to protect deliverability. While this logic can be useful, it may also prevent you from re-engaging valid subscribers.
Fix: Create reactivation segments for inactive users instead of letting them be skipped indefinitely. Adjust inactivity windows to fit your brand’s engagement cycle, and test re-engagement campaigns before removing contacts completely.Smart Sending or message frequency rules
Some ESPs, like Klaviyo, have smart sending features that automatically skip contacts who have received another email from you within a certain time window. The goal is to prevent over-messaging and reduce unsubscribe risk, but it can be confusing when those contacts show up as skipped. If someone is already in a flow or just received a campaign, your ad-hoc send may not reach them.
Fix: Review your ESP’s smart send time settings and message frequency limits. Adjust the time window if you’re running multiple overlapping campaigns, or temporarily disable smart sending when it makes sense, such as during a product launch or key promotion.Bounced or invalid addresses (when mislabeled)
While true hard bounces should remain suppressed, sometimes valid addresses are marked incorrectly due to temporary issues like DNS errors or inbox provider throttling.
Fix: Use email verification tools to confirm invalid flags, especially if skip counts suddenly rise. Monitor bounce rates closely and investigate any unusual patterns.
How skipped contacts hurt your program
Unintentional skips might seem small at first, but they add up. They distort open, click, and conversion metrics by reducing your true denominator. They shrink your reachable audience, which means lower engagement and slower growth. And they can hide deeper list hygiene or integration issues that might turn into deliverability problems later.
Think of it this way: every skipped contact is a missed conversation. The more you can minimize those misses, the clearer and stronger your email program becomes.
How to debug skipped contacts
When you first spot a big skip count in your send report, it’s tempting to panic–but debugging skipped contacts is mostly a process of elimination. Here’s how to tackle it step-by-step:
Pull skip reasons from your ESP’s send or skip report. Most platforms label why a contact was skipped.
Compare your segment definitions against your intended audience. Make sure your filters actually match the contacts you expected to include.
Review suppression lists and confirm no over-suppression or accidental overlaps.
Run a test send with minimal filters to see if messages go through.
Simplify or rebuild segments to test boundaries and eliminate logic errors.
Track skip trends over time. If skips spike after a data import, flow update, or ESP sync, that’s where to look first.