Marketo sent same email to same person 4 times in same day. Why???

[JaredA]

I have a recipient in my Marketo database that shows in the activity log they received the same email 4 times on the same day. Can someone explain to me how this is possible? My flow is set up to send to a 20% random sample every hour for 5 hours (1 hour wait step in between each send). Between each send it is set up to remove you from the flow if you received the email the previous hour and then it sends to another 20% random sample until all recipients have been processed and sent to. I set it up this way because I am sending to over 200K recipients and I wanted to stagger my send because of the size. 

Activity LogSmart Campaign Flow

[SanfordWhiteman]

You shouldn’t try to use Random Sample like this.

Instead, use a single flow step with multiple Add Choice entries to sort the people into different static lists.

Then send to the people on those lists on your staggered schedule.

[JaredA]

This doesn't explain why Marketo sent the same email multiple times though to the same person. I thought Marketo has a feature built into it that prevents a recipient from receiving the same email within a program.

[Darshil_Shah1 · Accepted solution]

Well, you didn't select the campaign to remove people to whom the email had been sent by in the first place! Ideally, you should have selected "this camapaign" in the choice step 1 of the "Remove from Flow" flow step, something like below:

It's noteworthy to mention that the qualification rule in the schedule tab refers to the # of times a same person could run through the flow step, i.e., if you have the qualification rule set to allow qualifying people to run through the campaign 1x, that would not preven the person from receiving the same email multiple times if there are multiple send email flow steps that a person passes through in the single campaign flow.