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Included in this article Overview Data you’ll get from Email Bounces Bounce Categories Hard Bounces Soft Bounces Bounce Details Building the Directory 1. Create 6 custom fields 2. Create a Program to house everything 3. Create a Static List 4. Create two Smart Campaigns Smart Campaign One - Logging Email Bounces with Bounce Details Smart Campaign Two - Remove Leads From the List After Successful Deliveries 5. Create Custom List View Showing Bounce Details Overview Bounce activities carry details for why the email was bounced, but it’s housed within the activity log entry, not in a field on the lead record, so it’s difficult to export that data. This article will show you how to extract that information to create a directory of leads bouncing emails and how to make the list automatically update. This will also create counters for bounces and successful re-deliveries after bounces happen. Data you’ll get from Email Bounces Bounce Categories Email bounces come in different types depending on why the email was bounced; Hard Bounces or Soft Bounces. Hard Bounces Hard Bounces come in two types, Category 1 and Category 2. Category 1 bounces are emails that have been marked as spam by the recipient mail server. Many email servers monitor blacklists or spam traps, so after de-listing with them, leads that have had a Category 1 bounce previously may be able to receive emails again. Category 2 bounces occur due to an email address that is invalid or doesn’t exist. Soft Bounces Soft Bounces come in three different types, Categories 3, 4 or 9. Category 3 bounces are usually temporary, caused by full mailboxes, timeouts, or throttling. Any email with this designation has been retried for up to 24 hours (36 for AOL). Category 4 bounces are caused by technical problems, Transient Failures, Admin Failures, DNS Failures. Any email with this designation has been retried for up to 24 hours (36 for AOL). Category 9 bounces are unknown, undetermined or gibberish details. Any email with this designation has been retried for up to 24 hours (36 for AOL). Bounce Details When an email is bounced, the recipient mail server includes details of why it was bounced. These are created by the admin of the recipient mail server and vary greatly, but most will give some explanation that can give valuable information. Email Bounce Codes Building the Directory 1. Create 6 custom fields You’ll need 6 custom fields, two DateTime fields, two Score fields, and two String fields Name the DateTime fields “Bounce Date” and “Email Delivered After Bounce”. Name the Score fields “Email Bounces” and “Deliveries After Bounces” Name the String fields “Email Bounce Details” and “Email Bounce Category” Directions for creating Custom Fields can be found here: Create a Custom Field in Marketo 2. Create a Program to house everything Use a default program type and name it "Directory of Leads Bouncing Emails". Info on creating programs can be found here: Create a Program 3. Create a Static List This static list will be your actual directory that contains all of the leads that are currently bouncing emails. Name it "Active Bounce List". Info on creating a static list can be found here: Create a Static List 4. Create two Smart Campaigns These two Smart Campaigns are what will be used to add and remove leads from your active bounce list. Info on creating Smart Campaigns can be found here: Create a New Smart Campaign Smart Campaign One - Logging Email Bounces with Bounce Details Your first Smart Campaign will be used to listen for any email bounces that occur. The campaign will populate the “Bounce Date”, “Email Bounce Category” and “Email Bounce Details” fields. It will then add one point to the “Email Bounces” score field which can be used to count how many bounces have occurred per lead. Lastly, the campaign will add the lead to the static list which will be an active directory of leads who are bouncing emails. Campaign Smart List Use the two triggers of “Email Bounces” and “Email Bounces Soft” in the Smart List. Set both triggers to “is any” so that they will fire whenever any email bounces for any reason. Campaign Flow The Flow of the campaign will have 5 flow steps. The flow will use a System Token and some Trigger Tokens, which can be used to pull details out of the action that activated the trigger. In this case, the Trigger Tokens will be pulling out the details on why the emails were bounced. That info is in the bounce message and is logged in the lead's activity log. Normally you'd have to comb through the activity log one at a time to find these details for each individual lead. This method, however, will pull the details out automatically for all leads. Flow Step 1: Change Data Value Attribute: “Bounce Date” New Value: {{system.dateTime}} Flow Step 2: Change Data Value. Attribute: “Email Bounce Category” New Value: {{trigger.category}} Flow Step 3: Change Data Value Attribute: “Email Bounce Details” New Value: {{trigger.details}} Flow Step 4: Change Score Score Name: “Email Bounces” Change: +1 Flow Step 5: Add to List List Name: “Active Bounce List” Smart Campaign Two - Remove Leads From the List After Successful Deliveries Campaign Smart List The Smart List of the campaign will need a trigger for “Email is Delivered” set to “is any” and also a filter of “Member of List” looking just for leads that belong to your Static List. This way, the campaign will only apply to leads who have had an email bounce but have then had an email successfully delivered afterwards. Campaign Flow The Flow of the campaign will have 3 flow steps to do the following; log when the email was delivered, add a point to the "Deliveries After Bounce" Score Field, and remove the lead from the "Active Bounce List". Flow Step 1: Change Data Value Attribute: “Email Delivered After Bounce” New Value: {{system.dateTime}} Flow Step 2: Change Score Score Name: “Deliveries After Bounces” Change: +1 Flow Step 3: Remove from List List Name: Operational.Active Bounce List 5. Create Custom List View Showing Bounce Details The custom fields you’ve created for email bounce information won’t show automatically in the view of your list. You can create a new view of the list to show just this information so that when it is exported it will give you only the email bounce information you need. Once the list has the necessary details, it can be exported with those columns included so that you can work with it. You can identify emerging trends and issues with your deliverability by looking for common themes among the bounce details. Directions for creating Custom Views can be found here

Featured article

(Article Updated - August 2024) Overview A blocklist is a database of IP addresses or domains that have been associated with the sending of unsolicited commercial email or spam. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and business email networks use information from blocklists to filter out unwanted email. As a result there can be a drop to inbox delivery rates if the IPs or domains involved with sending email are listed on a blocklist. Marketo’s Email Delivery and Compliance team monitors blocklist activity on our IPs and domains daily. When an impactful listing occurs, we reach out to the blocklist, attempt to identify the sender that triggered it, and work with the blocklist organization to get the listing resolved. There are thousands of blocklists, most will not have a significant impact on your delivery rates. Below, we have compiled a list of the blocklists that commonly appear across our sender ecosystem. Each blocklist has been grouped into a top tier (Tier I) by most impactful, to the bottom least impactful tier (Tier III). These may have little to no impact across our sender network. Tier I Blocklist Spamhaus (SBL) Impact: Spamhaus is the only blocklist that we categorize as a Tier I for a reason: it has by far the greatest impact on delivery. It is the most well-respected and widely used blocklist in the world. A listing at Spamhaus will have a negative effect on your ability to deliver emails to your customer’s inbox and can cause bounce rates of over 50%. Evidence suggests that most of the top North American ISPs use Spamhaus to inform blocking decisions. How it works: Unlike many blocklists, Spamhaus lists senders manually. This means they are proactively watching sender activity, collecting data, and base listings on a number of variables. Most commonly senders are listed for mailing to spam trap addresses that Spamhaus owns. Sometimes Spamhaus will list senders based on recipient feedback as well. Next Steps: Please note that every Spamhaus email can be quite different depending on the information provided and the nature of the listing . Because Spamhaus has multiple types of listings, the remediation steps are based on which type of blocklisting has occurred. We have listed the most common types to affect Marketo customers, from most to least impactful. Impact can range from a full block of top severity, to a partial block that is less severe (CSS Data, DBL). If remediation isn’t performed and the problem not addressed, these listings can increase in severity and turn into a full blocklisting. Spamhaus Blocklistings Types SBL (full blocklisting) Considered the most impactful. Remediation steps: Our team monitors closely for Spamhaus listings. Once alerted to the listing, we send an email notifying the customer, and reach out to the Spamhaus contact to start the remediation process. Only a Marketo delivery team member should be in direct correspondence with the Spamhaus contact, to speak on behalf of the customer, and to relay their questions and instructions, ensuring quick resolution and reduced impact. Senders that trigger this listing on a shared IP range will be moved to a more isolated, penalty range (IPB), so as not to impact the other shared senders. Those affected on a Dedicated IP, only impact their own sending and will not be moved. However, depending on the severity of the issue, our team may need to revoke a customer’s ability to send any emails until full resolution. The listing will last until Spamhaus is satisfied that the offending sender has taken the appropriate steps to mitigate the problem. SBL CSS Customers are alerted of the listing with an email containing all the information needed to immediately begin the remediation process. This is part of an automated trigger listing, that allows for a customer to delist directly on the Spamhaus website, after they’ve completed remediation. Remediation steps: Customers will go to the Spamhaus IP lookup website, at https://check.spamhaus.org, where they can check on the status of their IP and continue to monitor it in real time, until it is no longer listed there. Follow the remediation and delisting instructions provided, and check for specific details in the blocklist notification email. DBL (Domain blocklisting) Customers will receive an email notification alerting of the company domain being listed. The email will contain specific information to help narrow down and identify which email source likely triggered it within Marketo. It’s important to note that any email sent from outside of Marketo, that contained the company domain, is suspect. This means, if the sender uses multiple IPs and/multiple email platforms, then any of those could be the source. Remediation steps: Follow the detailed instructions in the email, which will also provide a link to the Spamhaus Domain reputation checker webpage, to check the real time listing status of the affected domain. Once the email source is identified and cause addressed, this customer will follow the online instructions to request to be delisted. Tier II Blocklist SpamCop Impact: SpamCop is not used by any of the major North American ISPs to inform blocking decisions, but it makes it to the Tier II list because it can have a significant impact on B2B email campaigns. SpamCop is considered a Tier I one blocklist for B2B marketers but a Tier II for B2C marketers. SpamCop is a dynamic IP blocklist, that can affect a single IP or a subset of IPs Typically, the block will automatically lift within one business day, but can take longer for relisted IPs. To have triggered a SpamCop listing likely means the sender has a list management problem that should be addressed. How it works: SpamCop lists IPs for one of two reasons: Either the email hit SpamCop spam trap addresses OR A SpamCop user has reported the email unwanted. Most of SpamCop’s spam traps are previously valid addresses that have not been active for 12 months or longer. Remediation steps: If you are seeing a significant number of bouncing emails caused by a SpamCop blocked IP but aren’t sure if your email activity triggered the listing, first identify whether you are sending on a shared sender network or not. If sending from a shared IP range when this occurs, you or any other customer sending from the same network may have contributed to the IP block. This IP block will automatically get dropped within a business day. For those on a Dedicated IP that trigger a listing, refer to the above remediation steps and resources, to address the list management issue. Tier III Blocklist (Low/ No impact ) These are considered the lowest tier and therefore cause the least impact across the Marketo sender ecosystem. Some of these blocklists were more impactful at one time, while others are only impactful based on the sender region (Manitu). Others still can suddenly flare up (Lashback). There are also many blocklists that are ignored (0spam), and are not taken seriously because they do not provide any means to delist once on the list (NoSolicitado) or that they charge money to have the listing removed ( UCEPROTECT ). The pay-to-delist model is not well respected in the email industry. When using blocklist tool checkers, such as MXToolBox, many blocklists will appear, but very few are relevant. Here is our selection of Blocklists you may come across that are least impactful: Project Honey Pot SpamAssassin URIBL/SURBL DrMX PSBL 0spam HostKarma Ascams ZapBL Barracuda Trendmicro Inc. Cloudmark Proofpoint Invaluement ISP Blocklists Some ISPs use internal blocklists to make blocking decisions. Examples include AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook and Hotmail. If your IP is being blocked by one of these networks, and those networks have a large presence in your lists, a block of this kind could have a noticeable negative impact on delivery. Marketo monitors for significant ISP blocks. Those experiencing deliverability issues with emails not making it to the Inbox and bulking in the spam folder may benefit from additional services with our Email Delivery Consultants. Remediation Steps: Email Delivery Compliance Team works to resolve any ISP blocks. ISP blocks are are usually resolved or lifted within less than 24 hours of a delisting request. Customers experiencing significant blocks for Microsoft domains (outlook.com, live.com, microsoft.com), can submit a request to the delivery team to seek mitigation on their behalf. Additional Resources: Blocklist Deep Dive Abuse Report Deep Dive What is a spamtrap, or spam trap, and why does it matter? Blocklist remediation Blocklist resolution flowchart Successful lead reconfirmation What is a blocklist?

Issue Users for your Marketo instance are unable to log into the instance. Solution Check your landing page URLs and email links. If these are also unavailable, your Marketo instance may have been shut off. Marketo Support can confirm whether your instance has been deactivated, but are not able to reactivate it. In this situation, please contact your Marketo Account Representative to discuss the status of the instance and regaining access.

Issue Is to possible to set up a distribution list (for internal employees) in Marketo? Solution There is no such feature called "Distribution list" in Marketo. An email can be sent to people only of they are part of your lead database. Alternate Workaround: You can create a excel sheet for your internal employees with their email addresses and import them into a Marketo static list. You can refer this list in your smart campaign whenever you would need to send a communication email. Note: Mark the email you send as "Operational" to ensure that it reaches all the people in the imported list.

Issue Description You try to approve a segmentation and get the error message of "No possible draft" even when there is a draft in place. Issue Resolution This error message can be a little misleading, as there usually is a draft in place. Check to make sure that segments in the draft have smart list filters in place and that there are no empty values in the smart lists. An example of an empty value would be "First Name is ____" instead of "First Name is Joe."

Issue You have a lead that is marked as Email Suspended and you are not sure whether they can receive Marketo emails or not. Solution When emails bounce as spam, the lead that bounced is set to "Email Suspended." "Email Suspended" is a historical field. A more accurate name for this field would probably be "This email was suspended at some point in its history." The actual suspension only lasts 24 hours. To see if the lead is currently suspended, check the timestamp on the 'Email Suspended' field. If it is more than 24 hours ago, the lead is not currently suspended and can receive email from your Marketo instance. However, the "Email Suspended" flag will remain on the lead record for the purposes of future troubleshooting. It is not possible to set "Email Suspended" to "false" once it has been set to "true." The "Email Suspended Cause" field will provide the bounce message associated with the most recent spam bounce.

Issue You created a picklist field in SFDC and want to know if that field will sync down to Marketo with the field type of picklist. Solution Marketo has a picklist option in form fields, but not in Lead Database fields. When you sync a field from SFDC that has the type of picklist, this field will show in Marketo with a type of String. However, when you create a form, the field type for your field will show as "select," which is a picklist.

Issue Description Are smart list filters that accept text values case-sensitive (e.g. First Name, Last Name)? Issue Resolution Smart list filters are NOT case-sensitive. For example: If you use the smart list filter 'First Name is John', it will return leads with First Name 'John' or 'john' with a lower case 'j' Vice versa: If you use the smart list filter 'First Name is john', it will return leads with First Name 'john' or 'John' with an upper case 'j' Is this article helpful ? YesNo

Issue You notice that new records in Marketo have the 'Website' and 'Company Name' fields populated with the domain of their email address. Solution This will happened when a new lead is created by a form fill-out. If the new record is imported or created manually then this would not apply. This design decision has been a part of the code for many years where the domain of the email is used for the company name and website fields on the lead record. This feature cannot be disabled.

Issue Description You have a Smart List that should exclude a group of leads from a campaign, but they still show up in the Qualified Leads list Issue Resolution Check the filter logic for your Smart Lampaign. "Or" logic allows leads that only qualify for some but not all of the filters to be included in the membership. For example, you could have a Smart List with the following filters. SFDC Type = Contacts Unsubscribed = False (You are trying to exclude unsubscribed leads) Visited Webpage - http://www.company.com/products If you use the following Advanced logic - "(1 or 2) and 3" - you will still have unsubscribed leads showing up in the list because they are Contacts, and the logic says they can be either Contacts or Unsubscribed = False. They only need to satisfy one of the two filters to qualify, and an unsubscribed Contact would go through. There is a blog post that goes into more detail on this. Smart List Logic - How many people do you want in your club? Is this article helpful ? YesNo

Issue The activity log is not recording the Open Email activity for an email send. Solution Issue Resolution Email opens are linked to an individual asset. If a record is sent the same email more than once, only the first open activity will be recorded. If you are not seeing opens record for a record, search the activity history to confirm whether or not the asset has been opened previously. Also, Text-Only emails lack the tracking pixel used to determine whether an email is opened, so Text-Only emails will never show opens in the activity log. In Email Performance Reports, Opens will be backfilled by the report's internal logic if the customer clicks a link in the Text-Only email. Otherwise, opens will not be recorded.

Issue Description You've been using Marketo for a while and have started noticing that smart lists take longer to process than before. There are multiple filters in your smart list ranging from really specific attributes about a person to really broad geographical information. Issue Resolution The best performance will come when you order the smart list filters from most restrictive to least restrictive. Since your entire database is checked against the first filter, if we can narrow down the number of leads which move on to the next, there are fewer and fewer leads who qualify for each of the subsequent filters. Many times, the processing difference will be minimal. However, as your database grows, the penalty on efficiency can grow over time. If you haven't checked it out already, take a peek over at our product documentation for smart list best practices: https://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Best+Practices+for+Smart+Lists

Summary Unable to update Person Source as expected for records created with the LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms and Facebook Lead Ads integrations. Issue New records created through LinkedIn Lead Gen forms as well as Facebook Lead Ads results in the records not updating the Person Source field as expected. Solution Person Source may be set to block updates to the field as noted in the example for Block Updates to a Field - Marketo Docs - Product Documentation. To resolve the issue ensure the field is not set to block updates for the desired update method. Alternatively the Person Source values populated by the integrations can be kept and expected values can be updated to include these sources. Root Cause The LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms and Facebook Lead Ads integrations automatically update the Person Source to preset values when a new record is created in Marketo through the integrations. Blocking field updates to the field may prevent the value from changing to pre-configured values as a value already exist for the integration created records. Environment LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms Facebook Lead Ads

Issue Description: The Activity Log shows "Fill out a form" without a page visit. How users could fill out a form without visiting the page? Issue Resolution: Google Chrome introduced Incognito. Firefox, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer implemented Private Browsing. Pages that users visit in Private Browsing/Incognito will not leave traces, like cookies, on users' computers after they close all open windows. A normal visit to any page is not tracked during visits, regardless the navigation path. That includes other pages after the form is filled out. The new Do Not Track feature is a contributing factor for apparently incomplete Activity Logs. When users turn on the Do-not-track feature, the browser tells every website they visit (as well as their advertisers and other content providers) that they do not want their browsing behavior tracked. Honoring this setting is voluntary — individual websites are not required to respect it. Websites that do honor this setting should automatically stop tracking your behavior without any further action from users.

Question: Is it possible to assign a lead owner during a list import? Answer: No. The reason for this is because lead ownership is a Salesforce functionality and should be first done from within Salesforce. If you are not able to do the assignment in Salesforce, here is one option that is available to you within Marketo: 1) Upload your leads into Marketo's Lead Database without lead owner information. i.e. your import CSV will not have any lead owner column in it. More information on importing leads can be found here: Import a List of Leads from a Spreadsheet into Marketo (Import List). 2) Once the list import is successfully completed and your leads are in Marketo, you can use the "Sync Person to SFDC" flow action to assign lead ownership. More information on the "Sync Person to SFDC" flow action at Sync Person to SFDC.

Issue How do you delete the data in Marketo Custom Object records, or in specific fields on the custom object if the the custom objects have already been created and approved? Solution Marketo Custom Objects are not accessible via the User-Interface. API calls must be utilized in order to delete this record data. You can delete the records via the 'Delete Custom Objects' call Delete Custom Objects If you are interested in extracting any of the existing data, you can use the following GET call. You will need to make a 'Get Custom Objects' call Edit Custom Objects Here is an additional resource that may be useful and relevant List Custom Objects

Issue You have Workspaces and Partitions in your instance, and a static list that used to contain certain leads is now missing those leads. The leads still exist in the database and there is no "Remove from List" activity in the Activity History for the affected leads. Solution This can happen when the workspace that contains the static list no longer has visibility to the partition that the lead record is located in. The lead may have been moved to a different partition, or the partitions that are accessible to the workspace may have been changed. To confirm whether this is the case, do the following Go to Admin > Workspaces & Partitions and locate the workspace that contains the static list Confirm which partitions are accessible to that workspace Go to the lead record of one of the leads that was in the static list before but is not now. See which partition the lead is in currently. If the lead's partition is not accessible to the static lists's workspace, the lead will not show up in the static list.

Issue Description You want to measure who clicks a specific link that uses a query string from a landing page, but when you try to use this logic in a smart campaign or smart list, it tells you the URL can’t be found, even though you can see the URL embedded on the landing page. Issue Resolution If you are using the link "marketo.com/company/contact/?firstname=test", then you need to seperate the url into the link and the query string. The root domain (Link in the filter/trigger) will be marketo.com/company/contact/ and the query string (from Add Constraint dropdown) will be firstname=test. This will allow you to correctly track the links you are wanting. Make sure that you have the correct Web Page associated as a constraint as well. For a better understanding of what query strings are, they are the parameters that are preceded by the "?" in the url. Is this article helpful ? YesNo

We have enhanced the behavior of the unsubscribe functionality to make it “durable”. We have added a master email status, which is separate from the unsubscribe flag visible on the lead detail record. If the unsubscribe flag is set from false to true, the master email status is updated, and the change is propagated to other leads with the same email address. Update the Unsubscribe flag from True to False (e.g. Re-subscribe a lead) When a lead is imported, the unsubscribe flag WILL NOT be overwritten by the import. Here are the ways a lead can be re-subscribed: 1. In SFDC, uncheck the Email Opt Out field. This WILL sync to Marketo. 2. Manually update the lead detail record by un-checking the unsubscribe flag 3. Run a Change Data Value Flow Action on one or many leads a. Select the attribute “unsubscribe” and set the value to False 4. Update an existing lead via SOAP API 5. Form Field – set a field on a form to set the unsubscribe flag to “false” and this will unsubscribe the lead a. Best practice would be to have text on the form that says that by filling out this form, they are agreeing to receive email communication Creating a New Lead When a new lead is created, we check it against the master email status table. If the lead was previously unsubscribed, we will update the record to be unsubscribed. Changing an email address If you change the email address of a lead to an unsubscribed email address, the lead will be unsubscribed. This change can occur in either Marketo or SFDC. If you change an unsubscribed email address to one that is subscribed, the lead will be subscribed.

Issue You have been sending live emails (non-samples) to yourself or colleagues to test functionality of an upcoming email blast, and even though you may be opening the email, you are not seeing the open email activity on the Lead Activity Log. Solution Note that there may be a slight delay between opening the email, and the activity displaying on the Log. Marketo considers an "open" to be when the images in the email are downloaded, specifically a single-pixel tracking image. The recipient may be receiving the emails and viewing them, but not downloading the images. This would not count as an "open." Please note that since text-only emails have no images, so they will never log an Open activity. If the images are being downloaded, and you are still not seeing the activity after about 5 minutes, check to make sure there are no duplicate leads that are logging the activity instead. If you need further assistance, please contact Marketo Support.

Knowledgebase

Maintaining a Directory of Leads Bouncing Emails

Top Blocklists - What You Need to Know

How to Export Salesforce Mapped Fields

Unable to Access Marketo Instance

Creating an Internal Distribution List

Segmentation cannot be approved with error message "No Possible Draft"

How the Email Suspended Field Works

Picklist Field Type in SFDC and Marketo

Smart List filters case-sensitivity

'Website' Field Same as Email Address Domain

Smart List is including leads that should be excluded

Email Opens Not Showing in Activity Log

Does the order of smart list filters matter?

Updating Person Source for LinkedIn and Facebook created records

Activity Log Shows Form Submission without a Page Visit

Does Marketo reuse or recycle old deleted lead IDs

Is It Possible to Assign a Lead Owner during a List Import?

Deleting Marketo Custom Object Record Data

Leads Removed From Static List Without 'Remove from List' Activity on Record

URL not appearing on filter for Smart Campaign or Smart List

Durable Unsubscribe - How Leads are Unsubscribed and Re-subscribed

Marketo Does Not See an "Opened Email" Activity