Why didn't Marketo send emails to a large portion of my list?

[Anonymous]

Has anyone ever run into the situation where a large portion of their list never got their emails?  According to the reports, many emails were never sent?

[Andy_Varshneya1]

Hi,

That depends on the volume and the standings of those leads. If you have a very large volume of emails going out, sometimes it takes a while to get them all out. It's also dependent on how many email addresses in the smart list are unsubscribed, marketing suspended, invalid, etc.

An easy way to check is to go to the Schedule tab of the smart campaign and there you'll see the number of people that will be attempted an email delivery versus how many will not. You can then click into the list of those that will not be sent the email and look for patterns.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Leigh March,

Many issues may explain this.

1st thing : what does the email performance report tell you ?

• Emails were not sent ? (Marketo filtered them out before sending, because they are unsubscribed, or have an invalid or empty email address, or are duplicates)
• Emails were not delivered ? (They were hard bounced or soft bounced, and you will have to look at their bounce reasons to understand why)
• Emails were delivered but people tell you they did not get them ? (They might be blocked by anti spam or other email security features)

The diagnosis protocol really depends on the symptoms

-Greg

[Dory_Viscoglio]

One other main reason they might not be sent is due to communication limits being reached. You would be able to see this in an individual record after the send was attempted. These people would have been included in the original calculation as people who could receive the campaign.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Dory,

Right, and probably the most likely.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

We had the very same thing happen to us today and we have dug into everything described above, there is no clear explanation as to why this happened.  We sent the email out this morning and only 74% of the list was sent (and that number keeps going down).  For some reason the Opens tracking/reporting is not working either, it's only showing a few people that opened the email one to two hours after it is sent and usually this is in the thousands. 

We're talking about a list size of over 250K people, so this is a big issue for us!

[Anonymous]

I am also having this problem today, and my list size is only 16,000.  Very bizarre that it's taking so long to deliver.  About 90% have been delivered, which is okay, but it's still strange that 10% haven't been delivered yet (including myself and other members of my team, which is how I realized the issue).  I always check delivery stats after a send, and I haven't noticed it as bad as today yet.  Generally speaking, I've noticed a slower delivery over the past few months, and it's not like our email list sizes have changed drastically.  16,000 also does not seem to warrant such a slow delivery, IMO.

[Andy_Varshneya1]

Leigh March​, Nikki Boock​, Runjini Murthy​, based on the discussion from a different thread, it looks like at least one server hosting client instances has has a bug and Marketo's engineering team is working on that. That may be causing the issue for you if they've partially shut it down to work on it.

I suggest you reach out to support to find out if you are being impacted by the server issue. You can reference the thread Re: Marketo Tracking Links Not Rendering Properly