"Send Test Email Failed" notifications should include a Reason

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

We recently ran into a strange error when trying to test out an email for an upcoming blast. We tried sending a sample, but instead received an automatic notification that the email failed.

Marketo send test failed.

Send Test for 'Example Email 1' failed unexpectedly. Please try sending the test email again. If this problem persists, please contactMarketo Support.Thanks,The Marketo Team

We tried sending the test again, and the problem persisted, at which point we looped in Marketo support. We were told that it was an issue with errors in the HTML of our email, which we promptly fixed and still got the same error. Super frustrating!

Today I revisited the email and noticed that one of the tokens used in the From Name field had been edited and broken by extra text. I replaced it with the correct token, which allowed the sample to go through. This seems pretty obvious (and I've seen errors before about invalid tokens), so I don't know why the notification wouldn't just include the error.

Please consider adding a little more info to these notifications. This is a pretty rare case, but it wasted a lot of time recreating the email from scratch, even with Marketo support's eyes on the job.

I think there might be two ideas in one here - it is way too easy to accidentally edit a token and break the intended functionality of the email. Some sort of validation (red highlight for broken/unrecognized tokens) would also help us identify potential issues with an email send.

Thanks for your time!

[Dan_Stevens_]

I'd also like to see some sort of notification when the email fails to send to test recipients as a results of forgetting to include the "unsubscribe" link in the footer; or forgetting to add a subject line.

[Anonymous]

Agree with this idea. I just cloned an email and I had a Token placeholder for a field I'm going to create which was causing this error. But had the email included the error reason, I wouldn't have wasted time trying to find the issue in the code.

[Anonymous]

This just happened to me too! Thanks for writing this comment, it helped solve my problem - I googled the error and got nothing...

[Anonymous]

PS don't forget to update the text field with the fixed token... six failed emails later...

[Anonymous]

This just happened to me three! Whilst trying to work out what was wrong I tried to approve the email and got a error message that token was invalid and then that enabled me to go and fix it. Would be great if it gave the same error message when you try to send a sample as would have saved me abit of time.

[Anonymous]

Almost two years later and a member of my organization just got the same useless error message while testing an email. Any update from Marketo? Thanks in advance.