Why does the status of a lead change to "email sent" while no email has been sent, because he's unsubscribed?

[Cindy_Dijkstra]

I noticed in the activity log of a few leads who were either bounced or unsubscribed that whenever they were part of a campaign, the email was not send to them (good!), but their status was changed to ‘email sent’ (not so good). Why is this and can I change this? We do not want leads to have the status email sent, while the email was not sent to them.

[Josh_Hill13 · Accepted solution]

This happens when you inadvertently make someone a member of a program in a campaign. Often, you'll see this step in a smart campaign:

Change Program Status=Sent

but this occurs before the Send, or even after. But Marketo will mark the Status regardless of emailability even though it doesn't actually send the email. To fix this, block bad emails at the Smart List level. You could also do a choice Step like

if Was Sent Email=X, then Change Program Status=Sent

Another way that I see often is you'll upload people to a Program, which automatically places them in the First Program Status (usually=Sent) instead of a Status like "Uploaded" and then Sent is a later Status. To fix that, you'll need to adjust your Channel Statuses in Admin.

[Cindy_Dijkstra]

This was very helpful, thank you! I think the best option for me is to add this condition to the "Change program status" step in the flow.

Sophie Boodiah​, this question of mine has been answered