More Than You Ever Want To Know About Communication Limits

[Amy_Goldfine]

Communication limits are a hot topic in Marketo. Turns out that many Marketo pros were incorrect about several aspects of communication limits, so we wanted to make sure everyone knew how they actually work!

What’s the TLDR?

If you read no further, here’s what you should know:

1. Operational emails do not count towards communication limits.
2. The “Default behavior if a person has reached communication limits” checkbox only applies to smart campaigns created from scratch after the setting is changed. 
3. Email mailbox programs and engagement programs from scratch will have the “block non-operational emails” checkbox checked by default.
4. Any smart campaign, email program, or engagement program that’s cloned from an existing one will inherit the checkbox value from the source.

Want to learn more? Read on...

What Are Communication Limits?

Communication limits prevent you from over-emailing people in your database.

When you have “If a person is over communication limits, block non-operational emails” checked in a smart campaign, email program, or engagement program, if someone hits their communication limits for the day or week, and they are in the audience to receive a marketing (non-operational email), Marketo will not send that email.

A "day" in communication limits is midnight-to-midnight in your instance's time zone.

What is an Operational Email?

In Marketo, you can mark critical emails and auto-responders as operational to designate that it should always be sent regardless of whether the person is marketing suspended, unsubscribed, or over communication limits. 

How Does Marketo Count Emails for Communication Limits?

Until today, I was under the impression that operational emails “count” towards communication limits. It turns out that they DO NOT. Yes, you heard that right. Several of us have tested this! 

Here’s an example where we have a 1 email per day limit. You can see in this smart campaign's settings that if the person has reached communication limits, it will not send a marketing email.

I sent myself an operational email, and then sent a marketing email. The marketing email was sent!

You heard it here folks. Spread the news. Operational emails do not count towards communication limits!

How Does the “Default Behavior” Checkbox Work?

Saddle up, this is a bit of a ride.

When you set up communication limits, you set the default behavior for how smart campaigns (and smart campaigns only) treat communication limits when created t from scratch (i.e. New > New Smart Campaign within a program). If you check the “Default behavior” checkbox in Admin, smart campaigns created from scratch will respect Communication Limits by default. If you don’t check the box, they will not. 

Email programs (mailboxes) and engagement programs that are created from scratch (New > New Program from Marketing Activities) will always have the “If a person has reached communication limits, block non-operational emails” checkbox true by default, regardless of your Admin settings.

Things get interesting when you clone from program templates or cloning an existing program or smart campaign. Regardless of what is in your Admin settings, the cloned email program, engagement program, or smart campaign will inherit the settings from the source asset.

Remember, you can always change the checkbox for any individual engagement program, email program, or smart campaign. But it’s a good idea to make sure your Admin settings and program templates are set up correctly in order to make sure your communication limits apply by default across your instance.

Whew! Thanks for joining me on this journey. Huge thanks to JD Nelson, Keith Nyberg, and Kimberly Galitz for their help testing this.

[sawako_neko]

This report was really helpful, thank you so much.

Before reaching this, I had read some reports that operational emails counts towards communication limits...

Let me add that operational emails do not count regardless of whether the checkbox(in the default admin setting / mail program setting / smart campaign setting) is checked or not, because it was a bit confusing.

Thank you,

[Robb_Barrett]

I would like to bump this article and thank you for it. There are articles from the mid-2010s that are stating out-dated information about Operational counting towards communications limits in Marketo Engage and those articles are out-dated. Recently we performed testing on this question and spoke to product experts within Marketo Engage's Product Marketing team who confirmed that Operational Emails are not counted towards Communication Limits. If anyone is seeing Operational Emails count towards communication limits in Marketo, they should make note of the evidence and submit a support ticket.

[ToriC]

How can we identify who was skipped because of the communication limits. Trying to figure out the logic for my smart list and can't seem to get it right.

I want to send these people the same email a week later.

[IAmCarrie]

What field is used to limit communications? Marketo key? email address? A combination? We have a number of contacts with multiple accounts under the same email and some of these folks received multiple emails even though our limits are 1/day - 7/week.

Thanks in advance for any insights!
Carrie

[Rohit]

I appreciate your report very lot; it was quite helpful.

Marketo uses a combination of email address and lead ID (Marketo key) to limit communications, not just the email address alone. Multiple accounts with same email but different lead IDs can receive multiple emails.

[uditmathur]

Hi @IAmCarrie ,

Multiple accounts under the same email can receive multiple emails despite the communication limits set if the send email is occurring in response of a Trigger, that means lead qualifies for an email through a Trigger Campaign. Trigger Emails as treated similar to operational email & hence not counted under communication limits.

To restrict multiple email send to same account its better to use Batch Campaign where all the leads are processed at same time & have inbuilt logic to send only 1 email per email address.

[Darshil_Shah1]

@IAmCarrie, communication limits are applied to individual records, not per email address (the email address is not taken into consideration, just the lead's record ID)! So two records with the same email address will have their own communication limits managed separately! Since you have duplicates in your system, I'd also advise you to go through this article: Implications of Duplicate Records in Marketo.

Also, emails sent via a trigger campaign and operational email are very different things; if the email used in the trigger campaign's Send Flow step is a non-operational email and the person has reached the communication limits, they'd not be sent the email! Usually, a lot of times, autoresponder emails are operational emails (e.g., registration confirmation, double opt-in email, etc.), but that's not always the case.

[uditmathur]

Hi, @Darshil_Shah1 Thanks for correcting about Trigger campaign & communication limits. If i have understood correctly, this means that if the email of a trigger campaign does not have the "Operational Email" Checked box checked, it will be counted as non operational & will not be sent if limits have reached.

[Darshil_Shah1]

Yes, a non-operational email would not be sent if the person has already reached the communication limits no matter the type of campaign that sends it.