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When you send emails to distribution lists, ContactMonkey may display "1" in your recipient count instead of the actual number of people on the list. This happens when list expansion is not properly configured in your email system.

Why This Happens

Without proper list expansion enabled, ContactMonkey cannot see the individual email addresses within your distribution list. Instead, it only sees the distribution list's email address (like team@company.com), which it counts as one recipient. This affects your overall engagement metrics since open rates and click rates are calculated based on the recipient count.

This issue occurs regardless of which tracking method you selected at the time of sending.

How to Manually Update the Recipient Count

You can manually edit the recipient count to ensure your engagement metrics (open rates, click rates) calculate correctly:

1. Click Emails at the top of your dashboard
2. Click Sent
3. Select your desired campaign
4. Locate the Recipients tile and click the pencil icon
5. Enter the actual number of recipients on your distribution list
6. Refresh the page to see updated percentage metrics

Permissions Required

Your ability to edit recipient counts depends on your user role:

• Basic Users: Can only edit recipient counts for emails they personally sent
• Managers: Can edit recipient counts for any emails sent by members of their Team
• Owners and Admins: Can edit recipient counts for any emails sent across all Teams in the organization 

A Better Solution: Automatic List Expansion

Instead of manually editing recipient counts each time, consider setting up automatic distribution list expansion. This allows ContactMonkey to automatically count recipients in your distribution lists. Learn more below:

• Outlook
• Gmail