Is there a built in delay for the "Forward to a Friend" capability?

[Anonymous]

I've been testing the Forward to a Friend capability.  I'm using a couple of my own email addresses, and the Activity logs for both the sender and receiver show that the messages are reported as being sent/received.  However, I'm not actually receiving the forwarded email.

I've also checked the junkmail folder, and the messages are not showing up there.

1. Is there some sort of batching or built-in delay and I'm just not wating long enough.
2. Is the FTAF capability subject to a campaign's "Send Only Once" limits?
3. Is there a way to check the overall email stats on hard or soft bounces, delivery/open status, etc. as I can with regular email campaigns.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hello Steve,

There is no built in delay with this. That said, what it does is create a lead in the system that is marked unsubscribed after the first send. This is to prevent forward to a friend from causing you to mistakenly send out unsolicited emails to these leads. We're looking out for your overall deliverability by preventing these leads from joining your regular mailing list without opting in. This means that you will only be able to test to a given address once, unless you go in and remove the unsubscribed status between tests.

As for your stats, I don't believe there's a specific data point on forwarded messages. You could cobble this together with several smart list filters together, though.

[Anonymous]

Autumn,

Thanks for the reply.  

I sent the test to four different email accounts, three of which were existing opt-in leads in Marketo, and one a new email account created for this test). All were all sent between 11:00 and 11:30 AM yesterday.

I understand the point on creating the new lead as unsbuscribed.  

I think there's a bigger issue:  I received the forwarded message in all four accounts this morning--about 18 hours after clicking "send".   All  had an idential timestamp of 5:00 AM.

There appears to be a programming bug which is causing  FTAF leads to be delayed.    

[Anonymous]

Hello Steve,

I would encourage you to contact support on this. We'd need to do some testing and possibly work with engineering to resolve this. From my understanding, there shouldn't be a delay on this, so something else was going on.

[Anonymous]

Thanks - I initiated a support request.

[Anonymous]

Just in case anyone is following this issue, or stumbles onto it through a community search, here's the status from Marketo support:

Thanks for your patience with this.

Engineering looked into this, and found an issue with the implementation in regards to this feature. They are working on a fix, but are speculating that it can take some time - the June release would be the earliest.

If anything changes, I will let you know!

Regards,
Jim
Marketo Support