Email Performance "Sent" vs Progression Status Membership "Sent"

[Anonymous]

We sent out our program to a static list of 5331 people last week. We followed the best practice of "establishing total program membership" by adding the "change status in progression" flow step New Status: Email Blast > Sent. 4772 leads made it, and I assumed this meant that 556 leads had bounced, but our 01 - Outreach campaign (first of the blast) counts 1371 as "blocked from mailings."

Members: 5331
Sent: 4772
Blocked: 1371

When I looked at the Email Performance section of Analytics for the program, it says:

Sent: 5331
Delivered: 3687
Bounced (hard and soft): 1644

I've read all the articles that define sent, delivered, bounced, etc., but I'm still confused as to what means what here. How many emails were actually delivered?

[Anonymous]

Sent is different from Delivered.  3,687 were Delivered. 

I'm a little confused as to where you got the "Blocked" number from - was this from the Schedule tab of the smart campaign that you used to send the email?  Block can mean several things:

• a lead selected  by the Smart List of the smart campaign has already gone through the flow and its Qualification Rule is limiting it not to go through again (at least right now)
• a lead is on your black list
• a lead has unsubscribed
• a lead has an invalid email

[Anonymous]

Okay, 3,687 delivered. I'm still a little confused as to whether 4,772 or 5,331 were sent, though.

Yes, the "blocked" number is from the schedule tab of the first smart campaign. This was our first program ever so there are no leads on our black list, and this was the first group of leads ever in our database (imported list), so I'm a little confused as to where this number came from too...

[Anonymous]

Puzzling. *Subscribing*

[Anonymous]

Did you add members to your campaign solely as a result of their being sent the email?  If so, that is why the Email Performance report's Sent number is the same as the number of program members.  Do you have other progression statuses in you channel such as Opened and Clicked?  If so, that is why the number of leads with a progression status of "Sent" is less than the number of members.  If you add the number of leads wtih a status of Opened and Clicked to the number of leads with a status of Sent, it should total to 5,331 (assuming you don't have another status that should also be included). 

Was the "blocked" number before or after you ran the smart campaign to send the email?

[Anonymous]

Hi Andrew,

I had a discussion with Marketo on this topic earlier this week and as a by-the-way they advised that beest practice is to count ALL sends regardless of whether they received them or not.
 
We were setting program members to the progression status of 'Email > Sent' only if the email was delivered.   So we now build the change progression status to Email > Sent immediately after 'Send email'. 

I realize it does not answer your question but thought you may also want to consider this. 

Regards,

Victoria

[Anonymous]

Victoria: Thanks for the input! The reason this all came about is because we're trying to figure out whether to evaluate our click-through rate based on all sent or all delivered, so that advice helps. We build our progression in the same way you now do.

Elliott: Yes, thank you. You're completely right. All of the leads in all status progressions should add up to the sent total, which they do. The blocked number is after we ran the campaign to send the emails, so this number will potential grow as people unsubscribe in round two of emails, correct?

[Anonymous]

Correct.

[Anonymous]

Thanks again Elliott.

By the way, your name came up earlier this week at our Chicago Users Group meeting and we applauded the help you lend everyone here in the community. Keep it up!