Email not delivered?

[Nate_Oosterhous]

Background:

Today sent out an email around 2pm to around 700 email addresses we have an existing business relationship with.  Marketo tracks them as delivered, however, there are no opens which is highly unusual.

Question:

Could there be any reason marketo would track something delivered when it really did not for what ever reason?  If yes, for what reason?

[donley2045]

We had a similar issue recently while doing a targeted account-based campaign to a particular company (about 300 names).  Is it possible to do something different in the sending of the email so that we don't hit a spam filter? I haven't been doing anything other than putting them into a send list.  I really need to be able to send emails to one account in a targeted fashion - do I have to actually do something with the send lists to make them smaller? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

[SanfordWhiteman]

If you send all at once, then you're leaving yourself at the mercy of the recipient's mailserver — and, even worse, you're compounding the problem by lowering the ongoing reputation of your domain and/or IP on their side.

You'll need to send to small lists, spaced out much more than you might expect. Start with 50 (yes, 50) per day. Work up or down from there. If you can, find someone in IT who can tell you the limit (this can be very difficult due to internal politics).

[Josh_Hill13]

Sure.

• Delivered isn't always posted back to Marketo.
• Delivered is assumed if not otherwise bounced.
• Opens isn't reliable.
• Are there clicks?
• Did you send a text only email?
• did you wait long enough?

[Nate_Oosterhous]

Hi Josh,

It has been almost 2 hours.  I show a 100% delivery rate with no opens or clicks or survey fill outs from the call to action in the email.  This makes me conclude it was not delivered in the first place but I have no way to identify why not since there were no bounces.  Any ideas on why that could be?  Also the email was sent to one company.

[Dan_Stevens_]

"Delivered" and "arrived in the recipient's inbox" are two different things.  We, for example, have always had high deliverable rates in Marketo (95%+).  But a much smaller percentage of these are probably making it into the user's inbox (I don't want to discuss the reasons here as it's been discussed in several other community posts).

"Delivered" simply means the email was accepted by the email server (and even that doesn’t mean an email address isn’t invalid - some servers may not even return appropriate bounce codes back to Marketo) - what happens to it after that can vary.  For example, the emails can be moved to some quarantine area of the server where the recipient will never even know that an email was sent to them.  Unfortunately for us - since we have a very account-centric way of going to market (using relevant content based on functional role), many of our emails are flagged as spam based on the number we send to within a given named account (even with proper opt-in consent).  I wrote more about this issue here: Now that ABM is such a large focus for many marketers, how are you operationally emailing everyone e...

[Nate_Oosterhous]

Thanks Dan,

Sounds like with it being a large customer of ours it may be best to ask their IT department to whitelist our DKIM as Mr. Whiteman suggests here:

Instructions for customers on how to whitelist Marketo

Whitelisting instructions to provide to customers?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Nate,

You also have to consider the possibility that you massively hit the spam boxes

-Greg

[Nate_Oosterhous]

Thanks Greg.  I don't think I would have since I ran through a spam test in Litmus before the email was sent.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Nate - keep in mind, services like Litmus provide general guidance on how to minimize the chances that your email will be flagged as spam (use of specific words, text-to-images ratio, etc.).  It's unable to determine if a company - for example - blocks ALL emails from Marketo (or any other mass email service).

[Nate_Oosterhous]

Agreed.  That was what I was trying to get at.  Since I minimized the likelihood of the email getting flagged as spam I am ruling that out as a suspect even though I can't be 100% confident.  That conclusion then leads me to guess that their IT department might now be blocking all emails from Marketo and getting our DKIM whitelisted most likely is our best option.

[Josh_Hill13]

Nate,

If you send a single email to alot of people at the same Domain, you will certainly get hit by their spam server, which will block inbox access.

Unless you are whitelisted by their IT team, it is always recommended to avoid a mass single domain send. I did this the other day and had a similar experience of 91% soft bounce rate.

[Nate_Oosterhous]

Hi Josh,

I follow now after reading Dan's post that I missed above.  This doesn't seem like a small issue but rather a big one and certainly is for us.  Also if we did get flagged as spam, does that mean our future sends to them (including multi-domain sends) will not make it to their inbox unless we get in touch with their IT team to get removed?