Emails being sent out 4-8 hours after scheduled sent time.

[Anonymous]

Hi there I scheduled an email to go out at a specific time 11:30am, some of my subscribers received it at roughly this time. Some of my subscribers received it at 10:30pm and 9:00am. 

Has anyone else encountered this problem?

[Grace_Brebner3]

Hey Nick,

Just to confirm - when you say subscribers received the email at these times, do you mean that you checked the activity history in the lead records/sending smart campaign and can see that this is when the activity happened?

In large batches it's not uncommon for the send process to take a little while, but this is much longer than what I think would fall in the standard deviation there.

One point to double check in the smart campaign results tab/lead activity log might be whether this these times are a reflection of when the email was delivered but that the send happened on the schedule. That may indicate that it's a server/client delay on the subscriber side rather than a delay on Marketo side.

[Stephanie_Sweet]

You may have a campaign backlog causing this delay - do you have a high number of trigger campaigns? Try to update these to batch campaigns (we're working on this now to improve performance). A large number of activities in a short period can lead to backlog.

[Jason_Raisleger]

To add on to the above responses, was it an email program or default program with a batch send? If email program did you intend to use recipients timezone? Were there any A/B tests?

[Anonymous]

Hi Jason,

It was an email batch program. It was sent to a relatively large group of subscribers 83,000 roughly. I did use the recipient timezone send and there was no A/B test. Is there a way to see if recipient time zone send was accidentally used?

Cheers,

Nick

[Jason_Raisleger]

I looked at one of our recent batch sends and am seeing something similar, although on a smaller scale because we had few recipients. I went to the activity log and made sure that only email send was selected, sorted by descending and found that all of them sent at 10:56 am. However, then I changed it so that it so that only email delivered would show and sorted that in descending order and found many emails that were delivered 10 minutes later to hours later. I would assume this would have something to do with system load but potentially also with the client you sent to.