Is there a way to automatically add myself to every email campaign?

[Karyn_Hill]

This method works quite well for the default limits of no more than 2 in a day and no more than 5 in 7 days as a solution for someone who wants to be sent every email that goes out. For some of us, that's a requirement of our jobs.

I understand your desire to keep the pressure on the product team to develop a more flexible native Communications Limit solution. I'm not so sure I agree with denying any home-grown solution for those that need that functionality now, not when the product team gets around to it. I agree that it's something Marketo should fix but that doesn't mean I won't find the best way around the problem that I can and share that solution with anyone else who has need of it.

[SanfordWhiteman]

This method works quite well for the default limits of no more than 2 in a day and no more than 5 in 7 days

Yes, but as I noted, not using a sliding window redefines "communication limit" because it suppresses more emails than the native feature would. Thus you're stopping people from being marketed to when the native feature would have resumed contact. Absolutely, if it's more important to get CC'd then to send an email, that takes priority!

You might also look into enabling the Marketo BCC feature, because you'll get everything you need that way, although you'll likely need your IT to participate in deduping emails so you only archive/forward one copy for every campaign + send. You can also use a Velocity script to accomplish a similar BCC-all feature.

Finally, if you add webhook logic to your above Smart Campaign, you can implement a true sliding window that will be functionally identical to Communication Limits™ and can be customized for every lead, so your internal people have no limit and every lead in your database can have a different limit. It's kind of a win-win.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Karyn,

On top of what Sanford already explained, one of the reason why sliding windows are important is also because of time differences. Midnight does not happen for every of your targets at the same time.

Another limitation of ad-hoc systems is that it's quite difficult to  distinguish, when an email is sent, whether it was a marketing email or an operational one. And you need this distinction in order to correctly increment your Email daily counter and email weekly counter for Marketing emails only. Today, this distinction rely again on user discipline (adding the score to smart campaigns or detecting email type base on naming convention), and is therefore error-prone.

-Greg

[Karyn_Hill]

No worries. I won't be sharing any solutions in here anymore. I'll never be sure it's 100% perfect so there's no point.

For the record, Marketo's Communication Limits doesn't distinguish between operational and non-operational either. Operational gets through in both cases whether the limit has been reached or not. Smart campaigns function as they always have and our users don't set them up anyway; I do.

I'll learn about the "webhook logic" mentioned if I can.

Also for the record, if you gentlemen had said "this is good but this other stuff would make it better," I wouldn't be sitting here feeling like my genuinely useful solution (arrived at with the help of Marketo, not some random person) was crap. It's not, but that doesn't take the feeling away.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Karyn Hill ,

Do not take us wrong, the solution IS good, but the Consultant should have warned you it also has some limitations and is not 100% equivalent to the system CL's. I am sorry you are interpreting our comments that way, and that was not my intend, and I know that it was not Sanford's, either.

Note that the comments are not even always intended to the person who wrote the post in the first place. The comments are just to make sure that any reader that would consider implementing the same solution is aware of these (small) drawbacks or risks. Remember that thousands of people interact here and some of them will take your solution as is, and would be driven to mistakes if they are not aware of the limitations. Setting the CL to unlimited is something that can only be done in environments where everyone is seriously trained, and I know for sure it's not the case for every Marketo customer (Not being judgemental about your situation here ).

On another standpoint, as often in Marketo (and other systems), no solution can be made perfect (Even the system CL's are not perfect). Solutions are a tradeoff between the operational objectives and constraints, the organization capabilities, the time and money that can be allocated, etc..

With regards to communications limits, you are right, operational emails and marketing ones are counted, but Operational emails can go through anyway.

-Greg

[Suzanne_Wink1]

Hi Mahurrinah,

There is an option to auto BCC an email address on every batch email going out from Marketo but I believe this needs to be enabled by Marketo support ( I m not sure if there is an additional cost involved..). See:

BCC Options

[Veronica_Holme4]

Issue with the auto-BCC is that it will copy that inbox on EVERY email sent from Marketo - so if you send 5000 emails to a list, that inbox will be BCCed 1000 times. Great for financial services archiving compliance (which was what it was built for), not so great for just copying an authorised person once on what was sent out.

The way I usually do this is what others have recommended which is to have a static list of internal folks that must be included in every smart list for sends, however Gregoire is 100% correct, this solution falls foul of communication limits all the time, so is sub optimal. Bottom line is that Marketo really has no good solution for this issue.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

In this most commented and read post : Just do it! Marketo so-called minor missing features , there are few ideas about seed lists and communication limits. Have fun reading.

-Greg

[Michael_Tucker1]

Mahurrinah Sims​, I've done the same thing as Veronica... One of my clients had a standing rule to set up a template Email Program or a Default Program with a Smart Campaign that has a Send Email and a 24 hour Wait Step at the beginning of the Flow...

So every time we'd have a new Email to send, we'd clone the program and it'd include these Smart Campaigns with this list, which was a global asset in the Database area so that it could be updated one central spot as different personnel came and left the organization. One of the business units in this organization preferred to set up a separate Smart Campaign because they relied on the Campaign Activity reporting as a local reporting asset in each of their programs.

It requires a little bit of discipline from your team, but this is why they hired me as a central Campaign Desk person on their MOPS team...

Hope that makes sense... ultimately what you choose to do (and the advice you chose to follow) depends on your organization culture and the standard operating procedures (SOPs) that work best for your group.

Hope that helps,

Michael

[Natalie_Kremer]

We have an internal send list that is sent every email that goes out of our workspace. To get around the communication limit issue, we've built in an Email Send - Internal Smart Campaign into each of our Program Templates. This Smart List contains the internal list of email addresses to receive the email, the Flow step to send the email and the Schedule is set to ignore communication limits. This works best for us as it rarely requires updates to the Program Template and is just one more Smart Campaign to schedule when starting the campaign.