Email performance reports show email resends to small groups (1-3 users) and always have 100% unsubscribe

[Hayley]

Hi 

I am pulling a quarterly email performance report in marketo. I noticed that there are emails from the previous quarter included. What's strange is that marketo appears to have taken a small subset of the audience (1-3 users) and resent the email. 

There is always an open rate of 100% and an unsubscribe rate of 100%. I cannot find this activity in the marketing activities tab to establish who got the email and appears to be an automated process.  Some of these emails are from months before and the information is no longer relevant to the user. 

Marketo support have told me its normal and not to worry and suggested reporting each email one at a time which is not how a quarterly report works ! They mentioned this may be triggered by soft bounces retrying. 

Has anyone else got experience of this and any suggestions on how to prevent these resends? 

Many thanks 

[Darshil_Shah1]

@Hayley, Before you go into the rabbit hole of determining whether this is due to a soft bounce retry, you should thoroughly check the "Used By" of the email asset(s). That's the first place I'd find any program or flow that sends emails out of my knowledge or radar. Also, when a soft bounce occurs, Marketo retries sending the email for 24 hours, using an exponential backoff algorithm. This means it starts with shorter intervals between attempts (like 5 minutes) and gradually increases the wait time if the delivery still fails. So, Marketo does try to send the email more than once during these 24 hours. The exact number of attempts depends on how quickly the initial failures occur.

Possible Reasons for Receiving an Email Twice:

• Multiple soft bounces within 24 hours: If the email encounters temporary issues multiple times within the 24-hour window, Marketo might attempt to send it again after each failure, potentially leading to the recipient receiving it twice.
• Other email providers' retries: Even if Marketo stops trying after 24 hours, the recipient's email provider might also have retry mechanisms in place, which could also lead to duplicate emails in rare cases.
• Multiple campaigns sending emails to the same person: If you have different campaigns targeting the same person with the same content, they might receive the email multiple times, regardless of soft bounces. You should check email asset's used by tab to see where and all it is being referenced.