Background campaign caused list to receive two emails from different programs

[lorifrucht]

I recently created an email campaign nested in a default program. The leads in this program all received the email.

I have a completely separate nurture campaign and somehow these leads received the first email from this program through a background campaign. I have never had this issue and am trying to find out more about background campaigns and how I can prevent them from causing leads to receive emails or join programs I don't want them to. Any help or information is greatly appreciated--thanks!

[Darshil_Shah1]

When you say nurture campaign, do you mean Engagement Program or do you have a separate campaign to send out the email? By default as you'd know, the engagement program in Marketo does not send the email to people in-case it was sent earlier.

[lorifrucht]

An engagement program, and the email from this program was a different email than the one those leads received from the correct email program. They received both emails, but the one from the engagement program, I was told, was from a background campaign. It looks like these leads were put in several lists when I uploaded them. I have never had this happen and not sure what went wrong. 

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

To be clear, “background campaign” sounds more mysterious than it is.

It’s just a way of saying how a message in a Email Program was sent. All emails have an associated campaign, so Marketo creates one on-the-fly so you don’t have to manually add a Smart Campaign, which would be a maintenance nightmare. The same applies when you right-click and Send Email to one or more people in the database: there’s a campaign created in the background for that as well.

So what we’re really talking about is no different from a manually created Smart Campaign sending an email outside an EP. This is always possible unless you deliberately suppress members of EPs from non-EP sends.

[Darshil_Shah1]

Agreed - I was also trying to wrap my head around why OP didn't come across this case before. Since the emails are different, and when the campaigns are deployed, the person would receive emails from both the "background campaigns" unless they deliberately suppress people (as you said above).