Email Not Sending to Entire Smart List

[JohnnyVillarini]

We scheduled an operational email today that was suppose to be sent to around 2300 people. Even after approving the email program, it said it would send to 2300 people, including the 900 who were blocked. It only ended up sending to around 1800.

I'm assuming the majority of the emails that didn't send were the ones that were blocked, even though this was sent as operational. Is there a way I can create a report to see exactly who didn't receive our email and why?

[Michael_Florin]

Sure, you can run a Smart List like this:

A likely explanation would be that the persons who didn't receive that email were blocked due to other reasons. Operational only sends to Unsubscribed and Marketing Suspended, but not to Blacklisted or Email Invalid e.g.

[JohnnyVillarini]

Thanks Michael, with their permission of course, would it be possible to automate a change to their mailable segment status to default so that they are no longer blocked? Perhaps I can create a smart list for the specific people and have the flow be "mailable segment is default?

[Michael_Florin]

Hey Johnny,

I guess you would need to explain what "mailable segment status" means in your instance. Do you really have a Segment (as in part of a Segmentation) that indicates their marketability? If so, you cannot change their segment in a Smart Campaign Flow, but you'd need instead change the underlying criterion that adds them to this segment. 

If for instance you had a Segmentation that says: Members of Smart List where Unsubscribed = true fall into the segment "not mailable", you'd need to change Unsubscribed to false in order to make them go in your mailable (or default?) segmentation status.

[Katja_Keesom]

I would be very careful of that and really investigate why they were removed from the emailable segment.  As Michael said, reasons for blocked people not to be sent an operational email would include the Blocklisted and Email Invalid flags. If Marketo has identified an email address is technically not correct, there is no point in trying to send an email to it, as it will never reach its destination. If a person was marked as blocklisted, you must have had a very good reason to permanently exclude them.

Keeping your database clean is an important part of maintaining a good deliverability. So I'm not saying don't do it, but definitely make sure you understand what you are doing.