An email that was supposed to go out to an audience of 8800 only got delivered to 8.

[TylerM123]

Hello,

When going over some performance numbers I saw that an email that was scheduled to go out to 8800 people only got delivered to 8. Below are the screenshots. Any insight on to what might have happened so that it doesn't happen again would be greatly appreciated.

[Christiane_Rode · Accepted solution]

Can you confirm -- have you pulled an email performance report? I have found that the dashboards do not always provide accurate information. 

If you're seeing the same info in an email performance report, that might make it easier to start to diagnose issues -- you can then start to look at program membership (who was sent the email, etc.) and figure out potential issues from there. 

[PeeyushSachdeva · Accepted solution]

Hi @TylerM123,

Based on the screenshots you shared, it looks like the program was never approved. Because of that, the email wasn’t actually executed to the full audience.

The 8 delivered records showing up in your dashboard are likely from either a seed list or pre-testing rather than the intended 8,800 recipients.

Here’s how the ‘Approval’ tile appears once the program has been completed.

[TylerM123]

Hey, that was a test clone I made of the program to show how many people the email was supposed to go to, not the actual program

[uditmathur]

Hi @TylerM123 ,

This usually should not happen, if you maintain a healthy data base.

For Email program members are qualified at the time the program starts processing & only those are sent mail who qualify.

In your case since the program has already ran, i will advice you to check the Members tab for your email program, this will give you the exact number of leads who qualified for the send & than recheck your SL criteria.

Hope this helps. 😊  

[EllenSchwier]

I would also ask if you clicked on the refresh button on the target audience size before you hit send. If delivering 8 emails was 5% of the total audience it was sent to, then the total audience was not 8,800. Sometimes Marketo does not automatically update the audience size after you update your Smart List.

Also, were you sending to new people in your database? Is it possible you had that many hard bounces?

[TylerM123]

I might have done that I can't really remember. Are smart lists for smaller sends like this are also pretty set in stone we sent an email out to the same audience segment a week or two before that. Also to clarify it sent to 159 people and only delivered to 8.

[Christiane_Rode · Accepted solution]

Can you confirm -- have you pulled an email performance report? I have found that the dashboards do not always provide accurate information. 

If you're seeing the same info in an email performance report, that might make it easier to start to diagnose issues -- you can then start to look at program membership (who was sent the email, etc.) and figure out potential issues from there. 

[TylerM123]

I pulled a performance report and it said the same thing

[Christiane_Rode]

If that's the case, are there any characteristics of the people who were not delivered the email but were sent it (You can pull a list of "was sent email/not was delivered email")? Are there any bounce codes associated with those folks? Were they hard bounces or soft bounces?

Marketo has an Operational Program that you can import from the program library.  If you are sending to Gmail addresses, these won't be reported here, so you may want to explore Google's Postmaster Tools. 

The other thing to explore -- how is your sender reputation? Are you on a shared IP or a dedicated IP? That could also affect the ability to reach the inbox. 

The last thing to consider -- are you adhering to Google's Email Deliverability Guidelines? 

Lots to troubleshoot here to get to the root issue of why something might not be delivered -- especially if this turns into a chronic issue.