Emails sending to opt out leads

[Kim_Gandy1]

Any thoughts why marketing emails would be sending/delivering to opted out leads? Shouldn't Marketo automatically exclude these leads from qualified lead list? If not, do I need to add opt out, unsubscribe, marketing suspend = false to EVERY campaign?

[Josh_Hill13]

Without knowing more about an incident, this is hard to say.

Non Operational Emails will NOT be sent, regardless of the smart list to:

• Durable unsubscribed
• Unsubscribed=T
• Suspended=T
• Invalid=T
• Blacklisted=T

Operational Emails can go to

• Unsubscribed=T
• Suspended=T

I've seen incidents where lead data is funny:

• lead uses two variations of the same email box: josh.hill vs. joshua.hill@ which are treated DIFFERENTLY in Marketo.
• lead thinks they unsubscribed, but did not (always hard to trace)
• lead replied to unsubscribe, but no one checked this.
• sales is using a separate system like Salesloft that isn't synced.
• random behaviors that may or may not jive with expected behavior in Marketo.
• Merged records.

[Kim_Gandy1]

This was not an operational email. After running a smart list, I see 600+ leads' data value changed to opted out=T before 10/25/16, but were sent the email on or after 10/26/16.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Do you have a custom "opted-out" field; or are you referring to the system "unsubscribe" field?

[Josh_Hill13]

Good point Dan. Only the fields I mentioned above are recognized by the system. Custom fields have to be blocked at the smart list level. Never use a custom Opt Out field for this reason...custom fields should be specific to the type of communication.

@Kim, what kind of email is this anyway? Even if it's not "operational" could be it be construed that way? Did someone ask for help?

[Kim_Gandy1]

Dan Stevens This is a separate field from the system "unsubscribe." Our instance was built before my time. How can I determine if the field is native or custom?

[Dan_Stevens_ · Accepted solution]

That's the culprit.  Refer to Josh's list of fields that Marketo will use to suppress, regardless if a lead qualifies in the smart list of a smart campaign.  Since this is more than likely a custom field - and certainly one that Marketo isn't looking at to prevent an email from being sent - you'll need to run a smart campaign to ensure any lead that has "opted-out" = TRUE, to change UNSUBSCRIBE to TRUE.  And since it sounds like you're not using the out-of-the-box unsubscribe process with your emails, you'll need to make sure you opt-out process now includes the unsubscribe field as part of the process.