Send Email Flow Sporadically Doesn't Send - Nothing in Activity Log

[Anonymous]

From time to time we are finding that Send Email flow activities are not executing and there is no sign of it in the Activity Log for that user even though the campaign it is a part of does show in the activity and all other flow activities in that campaign fired.

We know the campaign was activated since it appears in the activity log of that user so the filtering is not an issue.

The flow is simple:
1) Send Email (template explicitly specified)
2) Change Data Value (Attribute 1)
3) Change Data Value (Attribute 2)

2 & 3 triggered but no sign of 1. Looking through the campaign results all other members who flowed through in the last 30 days activated all 3 activities so why did this one not and why is there no sign of any error in the activity log?

[Delinda_Tinkey1 · Accepted solution]

Have you confirmed that the user you are trying to email is eligible to receive emails? Check to make sure:

• The email address is valid
• They have not unsubscribed
• They are not marketing suspended
• The email is not currently suspended
• They are not on your blacklist

[Anonymous]

Does this affect all members or just a group of them?

If it is only a group of members, they may have unsubscribed, invalid emails, marketing suspended or been blacklisted. Check out the lead record for the affected members and look at this section:


If any of the above is checked off, Marketo would have ignored that flow step and continued with the rest of the steps. When you schedule a campagin, you can see how many members are blocked from recieving email here:


Does that cover your issue?

[Josh_Hill13]

Wow, Joe is on fire today.

That would be my guess too. A triggered campaign isn't going to let you know ahead of time.

You may need to modify your Email to be Operational=TRUE to function as an Auto Responder. Otherwise, all emails will be blocked if any of the above are true.

[Anonymous]

Turns out the Email Address was being modified in Salesforce at the same exact time the email activity was supposed to fire in marketo. The user accidentally nulled the email value altogether and mistakenly added it to the Fax field. After they recognized their error they went back and corrected it but the email activity event had already come and gone and when it tried the email value was null so no email send event.

My biggest issue with this is that there was no indication that there was a problem when you review the Activity Log for this user. I had to reconcile all the account updates to figure this out. It should have at least errored saying no Email Address or logged a Skipped "Do Nothing" event.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the props Josh!

Rebecca, this sounds like a very unique circumstance. You could create a final flow step that sends an alert if that email was not sent. I am not sure there is a satisfactory answer to help prevent this in the future. Having a skipped flow step activity would be nice in a situation like this. You should create the idea so that we can all like it.

[Anonymous]

This is what it should've done but instead there was nothing...It was like Marketo didn't even try to run it all.

[Dory_Viscoglio]

To follow up on this, Rebecca, if the email address field is nulled, then I would expect that Market didn't try to run it at all. If there's no email address, then Marketo shouldn't be attempting to send an email... similarly to how you won't see a record in the activity log if someone is blocked due to email invalid, marketing suspended, or unsubscribed.

[Anonymous]

I take no issue with the fact that the step was skipped or failed to run because of the reason I outlined.

I do take issue however with the logic from an activity log perspective.

If a step that was supposed to execute is skipped or fails to execute for any reason it should be logged otherwise how could anyone truly audit their workflows? As it stands now I'm questioning the integrity of the activity log in general since there's no telling how many skipped or failed events have occurred that are not visible here.

It's bad enough that we can't really search on or set up a report to explicitly find failed activities from a broad perspective now I have to worry that the event failure is even captured in the first place.

[Anonymous]

Rebecca, you should create an idea that we can like and comment on for this functionality.