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Included in this article Overview Data you’ll get from Email Bounces Bounce Categories Hard Bounces Soft Bounces Bounce Details Building the Directory 1. Create 6 custom fields 2. Create a Program to house everything 3. Create a Static List 4. Create two Smart Campaigns Smart Campaign One - Logging Email Bounces with Bounce Details Smart Campaign Two - Remove Leads From the List After Successful Deliveries 5. Create Custom List View Showing Bounce Details Overview Bounce activities carry details for why the email was bounced, but it’s housed within the activity log entry, not in a field on the lead record, so it’s difficult to export that data. This article will show you how to extract that information to create a directory of leads bouncing emails and how to make the list automatically update. This will also create counters for bounces and successful re-deliveries after bounces happen. Data you’ll get from Email Bounces Bounce Categories Email bounces come in different types depending on why the email was bounced; Hard Bounces or Soft Bounces. Hard Bounces Hard Bounces come in two types, Category 1 and Category 2. Category 1 bounces are emails that have been marked as spam by the recipient mail server. Many email servers monitor blacklists or spam traps, so after de-listing with them, leads that have had a Category 1 bounce previously may be able to receive emails again. Category 2 bounces occur due to an email address that is invalid or doesn’t exist. Soft Bounces Soft Bounces come in three different types, Categories 3, 4 or 9. Category 3 bounces are usually temporary, caused by full mailboxes, timeouts, or throttling. Any email with this designation has been retried for up to 24 hours (36 for AOL). Category 4 bounces are caused by technical problems, Transient Failures, Admin Failures, DNS Failures. Any email with this designation has been retried for up to 24 hours (36 for AOL). Category 9 bounces are unknown, undetermined or gibberish details. Any email with this designation has been retried for up to 24 hours (36 for AOL). Bounce Details When an email is bounced, the recipient mail server includes details of why it was bounced. These are created by the admin of the recipient mail server and vary greatly, but most will give some explanation that can give valuable information. Email Bounce Codes Building the Directory 1. Create 6 custom fields You’ll need 6 custom fields, two DateTime fields, two Score fields, and two String fields Name the DateTime fields “Bounce Date” and “Email Delivered After Bounce”. Name the Score fields “Email Bounces” and “Deliveries After Bounces” Name the String fields “Email Bounce Details” and “Email Bounce Category” Directions for creating Custom Fields can be found here: Create a Custom Field in Marketo 2. Create a Program to house everything Use a default program type and name it "Directory of Leads Bouncing Emails". Info on creating programs can be found here: Create a Program 3. Create a Static List This static list will be your actual directory that contains all of the leads that are currently bouncing emails. Name it "Active Bounce List". Info on creating a static list can be found here: Create a Static List 4. Create two Smart Campaigns These two Smart Campaigns are what will be used to add and remove leads from your active bounce list. Info on creating Smart Campaigns can be found here: Create a New Smart Campaign Smart Campaign One - Logging Email Bounces with Bounce Details Your first Smart Campaign will be used to listen for any email bounces that occur. The campaign will populate the “Bounce Date”, “Email Bounce Category” and “Email Bounce Details” fields. It will then add one point to the “Email Bounces” score field which can be used to count how many bounces have occurred per lead. Lastly, the campaign will add the lead to the static list which will be an active directory of leads who are bouncing emails. Campaign Smart List Use the two triggers of “Email Bounces” and “Email Bounces Soft” in the Smart List. Set both triggers to “is any” so that they will fire whenever any email bounces for any reason. Campaign Flow The Flow of the campaign will have 5 flow steps. The flow will use a System Token and some Trigger Tokens, which can be used to pull details out of the action that activated the trigger. In this case, the Trigger Tokens will be pulling out the details on why the emails were bounced. That info is in the bounce message and is logged in the lead's activity log. Normally you'd have to comb through the activity log one at a time to find these details for each individual lead. This method, however, will pull the details out automatically for all leads. Flow Step 1: Change Data Value Attribute: “Bounce Date” New Value: {{system.dateTime}} Flow Step 2: Change Data Value. Attribute: “Email Bounce Category” New Value: {{trigger.category}} Flow Step 3: Change Data Value Attribute: “Email Bounce Details” New Value: {{trigger.details}} Flow Step 4: Change Score Score Name: “Email Bounces” Change: +1 Flow Step 5: Add to List List Name: “Active Bounce List” Smart Campaign Two - Remove Leads From the List After Successful Deliveries Campaign Smart List The Smart List of the campaign will need a trigger for “Email is Delivered” set to “is any” and also a filter of “Member of List” looking just for leads that belong to your Static List. This way, the campaign will only apply to leads who have had an email bounce but have then had an email successfully delivered afterwards. Campaign Flow The Flow of the campaign will have 3 flow steps to do the following; log when the email was delivered, add a point to the "Deliveries After Bounce" Score Field, and remove the lead from the "Active Bounce List". Flow Step 1: Change Data Value Attribute: “Email Delivered After Bounce” New Value: {{system.dateTime}} Flow Step 2: Change Score Score Name: “Deliveries After Bounces” Change: +1 Flow Step 3: Remove from List List Name: Operational.Active Bounce List 5. Create Custom List View Showing Bounce Details The custom fields you’ve created for email bounce information won’t show automatically in the view of your list. You can create a new view of the list to show just this information so that when it is exported it will give you only the email bounce information you need. Once the list has the necessary details, it can be exported with those columns included so that you can work with it. You can identify emerging trends and issues with your deliverability by looking for common themes among the bounce details. Directions for creating Custom Views can be found here

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(Article Updated - August 2024) Overview A blocklist is a database of IP addresses or domains that have been associated with the sending of unsolicited commercial email or spam. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and business email networks use information from blocklists to filter out unwanted email. As a result there can be a drop to inbox delivery rates if the IPs or domains involved with sending email are listed on a blocklist. Marketo’s Email Delivery and Compliance team monitors blocklist activity on our IPs and domains daily. When an impactful listing occurs, we reach out to the blocklist, attempt to identify the sender that triggered it, and work with the blocklist organization to get the listing resolved. There are thousands of blocklists, most will not have a significant impact on your delivery rates. Below, we have compiled a list of the blocklists that commonly appear across our sender ecosystem. Each blocklist has been grouped into a top tier (Tier I) by most impactful, to the bottom least impactful tier (Tier III). These may have little to no impact across our sender network. Tier I Blocklist Spamhaus (SBL) Impact: Spamhaus is the only blocklist that we categorize as a Tier I for a reason: it has by far the greatest impact on delivery. It is the most well-respected and widely used blocklist in the world. A listing at Spamhaus will have a negative effect on your ability to deliver emails to your customer’s inbox and can cause bounce rates of over 50%. Evidence suggests that most of the top North American ISPs use Spamhaus to inform blocking decisions. How it works: Unlike many blocklists, Spamhaus lists senders manually. This means they are proactively watching sender activity, collecting data, and base listings on a number of variables. Most commonly senders are listed for mailing to spam trap addresses that Spamhaus owns. Sometimes Spamhaus will list senders based on recipient feedback as well. Next Steps: Please note that every Spamhaus email can be quite different depending on the information provided and the nature of the listing . Because Spamhaus has multiple types of listings, the remediation steps are based on which type of blocklisting has occurred. We have listed the most common types to affect Marketo customers, from most to least impactful. Impact can range from a full block of top severity, to a partial block that is less severe (CSS Data, DBL). If remediation isn’t performed and the problem not addressed, these listings can increase in severity and turn into a full blocklisting. Spamhaus Blocklistings Types SBL (full blocklisting) Considered the most impactful. Remediation steps: Our team monitors closely for Spamhaus listings. Once alerted to the listing, we send an email notifying the customer, and reach out to the Spamhaus contact to start the remediation process. Only a Marketo delivery team member should be in direct correspondence with the Spamhaus contact, to speak on behalf of the customer, and to relay their questions and instructions, ensuring quick resolution and reduced impact. Senders that trigger this listing on a shared IP range will be moved to a more isolated, penalty range (IPB), so as not to impact the other shared senders. Those affected on a Dedicated IP, only impact their own sending and will not be moved. However, depending on the severity of the issue, our team may need to revoke a customer’s ability to send any emails until full resolution. The listing will last until Spamhaus is satisfied that the offending sender has taken the appropriate steps to mitigate the problem. SBL CSS Customers are alerted of the listing with an email containing all the information needed to immediately begin the remediation process. This is part of an automated trigger listing, that allows for a customer to delist directly on the Spamhaus website, after they’ve completed remediation. Remediation steps: Customers will go to the Spamhaus IP lookup website, at https://check.spamhaus.org, where they can check on the status of their IP and continue to monitor it in real time, until it is no longer listed there. Follow the remediation and delisting instructions provided, and check for specific details in the blocklist notification email. DBL (Domain blocklisting) Customers will receive an email notification alerting of the company domain being listed. The email will contain specific information to help narrow down and identify which email source likely triggered it within Marketo. It’s important to note that any email sent from outside of Marketo, that contained the company domain, is suspect. This means, if the sender uses multiple IPs and/multiple email platforms, then any of those could be the source. Remediation steps: Follow the detailed instructions in the email, which will also provide a link to the Spamhaus Domain reputation checker webpage, to check the real time listing status of the affected domain. Once the email source is identified and cause addressed, this customer will follow the online instructions to request to be delisted. Tier II Blocklist SpamCop Impact: SpamCop is not used by any of the major North American ISPs to inform blocking decisions, but it makes it to the Tier II list because it can have a significant impact on B2B email campaigns. SpamCop is considered a Tier I one blocklist for B2B marketers but a Tier II for B2C marketers. SpamCop is a dynamic IP blocklist, that can affect a single IP or a subset of IPs Typically, the block will automatically lift within one business day, but can take longer for relisted IPs. To have triggered a SpamCop listing likely means the sender has a list management problem that should be addressed. How it works: SpamCop lists IPs for one of two reasons: Either the email hit SpamCop spam trap addresses OR A SpamCop user has reported the email unwanted. Most of SpamCop’s spam traps are previously valid addresses that have not been active for 12 months or longer. Remediation steps: If you are seeing a significant number of bouncing emails caused by a SpamCop blocked IP but aren’t sure if your email activity triggered the listing, first identify whether you are sending on a shared sender network or not. If sending from a shared IP range when this occurs, you or any other customer sending from the same network may have contributed to the IP block. This IP block will automatically get dropped within a business day. For those on a Dedicated IP that trigger a listing, refer to the above remediation steps and resources, to address the list management issue. Tier III Blocklist (Low/ No impact ) These are considered the lowest tier and therefore cause the least impact across the Marketo sender ecosystem. Some of these blocklists were more impactful at one time, while others are only impactful based on the sender region (Manitu). Others still can suddenly flare up (Lashback). There are also many blocklists that are ignored (0spam), and are not taken seriously because they do not provide any means to delist once on the list (NoSolicitado) or that they charge money to have the listing removed ( UCEPROTECT ). The pay-to-delist model is not well respected in the email industry. When using blocklist tool checkers, such as MXToolBox, many blocklists will appear, but very few are relevant. Here is our selection of Blocklists you may come across that are least impactful: Project Honey Pot SpamAssassin URIBL/SURBL DrMX PSBL 0spam HostKarma Ascams ZapBL Barracuda Trendmicro Inc. Cloudmark Proofpoint Invaluement ISP Blocklists Some ISPs use internal blocklists to make blocking decisions. Examples include AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook and Hotmail. If your IP is being blocked by one of these networks, and those networks have a large presence in your lists, a block of this kind could have a noticeable negative impact on delivery. Marketo monitors for significant ISP blocks. Those experiencing deliverability issues with emails not making it to the Inbox and bulking in the spam folder may benefit from additional services with our Email Delivery Consultants. Remediation Steps: Email Delivery Compliance Team works to resolve any ISP blocks. ISP blocks are are usually resolved or lifted within less than 24 hours of a delisting request. Customers experiencing significant blocks for Microsoft domains (outlook.com, live.com, microsoft.com), can submit a request to the delivery team to seek mitigation on their behalf. Additional Resources: Blocklist Deep Dive Abuse Report Deep Dive What is a spamtrap, or spam trap, and why does it matter? Blocklist remediation Blocklist resolution flowchart Successful lead reconfirmation What is a blocklist?

Issue Issue Description Unable to send Operational Email via Marketo Sales Insight in Salesforce when the lead is flagged as unsubscribed. Solution Issue Resolution Check the settings for your Sales Emails in Admin > Sales Insights. You may have them set to "Respect Unsubscribe Settings." If you wish for MSI to respect the operational email flag this will need to be changed to "Ignore Unsubscribe Settings" for Operational Emails. Who This Solution Applies To Customers using Marketo Sales Insight

Issue Issue Description Windows Outlook users who use the Marketo Sales Connect plugin might have noticed that emails don't send as fast as they usually do. Unfortunately it takes a little longer than usual on this particular platform due to a recent MSC plugin update. We are working on a long-term fix for this subset of customers, but in the meantime you can use the following workarounds: Solution Issue Resolution If you switch Outlook to, "Online Mode" (as opposed to Cached Exchange Mode) this will decrease the total sending time. You can follow this document in order to turn off Cached Exchange Mode. If you would like to learn more about the differences between Online Mode and Cached Exchange Mode, you can read more here. Alternatively, you can also use the Web version or Mac version of Outlook to address this issue. Who This Solution Applies To Windows Outlook users who utilize the Marketo Sales Connect plugin.

Issue Issue Description When validating the HTML of a template, you receive an error of 'Error: Nested Editable Element: ...' with the id of the element following causing you to not be able to approve the template. Solution Issue Resolution This is due to having an element with a 'mkto...' class nested inside another element with a 'mkto...' class. Below is an example: <div class="mktEditable"> <div class="mktEditable"></div> </div> You will need to remove the 'mkto...' class reference from one of the elements to be able to pass validation and approve the draft as in the corrected example below: <div class="mktEditable"> <div class="newClassName"></div> </div>

Issue Tracked links in emails resolve to "Your connection is not private", or other security warnings in the browser, when clicked. Solution The browser is expecting the branded link domain to be secured with a SSL certificate. Subscriptions without Secured Domains for Tracking Links: Please contact your Customer Success Manager to discuss purchasing a subscription to Secured Domains for Tracking Links. Subscriptions with Secured Domains for Tracking Links: Please contact Marketo Support to provision a SSL certificate onto your tracking link domain. More information can be found here Overview & FAQ: Secured Domains for Tracking Links

Issue Issue Description When attempting to add an additional Facebook or LinkedIn Launchpoint service, it does not appear as an option in the drop down. Solution Issue Resolution While we only support one Launchpoint service for each integration type, we support multiple accounts through the Launchpoint service that the customer adds. The user account that is used to authenticate the service will need to have the appropriate permissions to each business page that is going to be used by the instance.

Issue Issue Description When using a Velocity scripted my.token, the default value is not being used if the field the Velocity script is pointing to is not populated. Solution Issue Resolution The reason for this is because Velocity script isn't designed to consider a default value the way that a lead token would. It's designed to execute the code to provide the rendered value. Although the UI specifies to look for a default, that's ignored by design since the code itself is only looking for the value for those leads. If the goal is for it to evaluate and provide a known value, otherwise then render a specified default, that needs to be built into the Velocity script code itself.

Issue You have a field (e.g. Most Recent Website Visit) that you want to see previous values for without needing to look through the activity log. Solution This can be done using a few custom fields, and one trigger campaign. Make duplicates of the field you want to see most recent values of (e.g. Most Recent Website Visit 1, Most Recent Website Visit 2, etc.) while still keeping the original field. Use the original field as you previously have, but set a trigger campaign to look for data value changes to that field. In the flow of that campaign, set the logic like so: (1) Change Data Value: Most Recent Website Visit 3 new value: {{lead.Most Recent Website Visit 2}} (2) Change Data Value: Most Recent Website Visit 2 new value: {{lead.Most Recent Website Visit 1}} (3) Change Data Value: Most Recent Website Visit 1 new value: {{lead.Most Recent Website Visit}} Using the above flow, the most recent values for the field can be checked without looking into an activity log. This can be useful in a number of ways, for example this information could be included in an email or alert. Another example, if the primary field (in the above example it is Most Recent Website Visit) is updated to a value that it should not have, then you can setup another campaign to update Most Recent Website Visit using the value in Most Recent Website visit 2 to restore the previous value. Warning Please Note: The above process can be somewhat resource intensive (particularly if a large number of records trigger the campaign at close to the same time), this should be done with as few fields as possible to assure good instance health overall.

Issue Duplicate records were sent an email from an Email Program. Solution While Marketo prevents sending emails to duplicate records (i.e. same email address) via the same Smart Campaign, it is possible to send an email to duplicate record when there is A/B test configured for the Email Program. Specifically, one record can be sent an email from the test send while the duplicate record can be sent the email from the winner send. For example, if there are two records for "mary@mail.com" in the audience, Mary can be sent two emails as follows: One record can be sent the email by qualifying for receiving the test from the sample size of the A/B test The other record can be sent the email by qualifying for receiving the winner from the sample size of the A/B test Note: sending the test and sending the winner utilizes individual campaigns which is why the systematic deduplication of emails within a smart campaign does not take effect for this scenario. To prevent this from occurring, exclude the duplicate records from the smart list of the email program.

Issue Naming conventions of email in email performance report Solution Email reports will use an email's full label including the program it exists in. Although asset names cannot duplicate within Programs, they can be duplicated within the whole Instance and Email Performance Reports have access to emails from an entire instance. For example if you had two newsletter programs, both with an email named "October Newsletter" the full program name can help differentiate between the two. NL-2018-10-Technology Program.October Newsletter NL-2018-10-Industry Program.October Newsletter The email report will always display with the full email name including the program it was created in to avoid this confusion. Even within a specific Program Report, you can access all emails within the Instance.

Issue You would like to know which partition a record that was captured by using "Forward to a friend link" in an email will be created in. Solution The record will be created under the partition which is associated with the work space under which the email asset is present. The record will not be created under the default partition. For example, if you have a workspace named "Asia" which is connected with the partition named "APAC", then leads created via Forward-to-Friend links in emails stored in the "Asia" will be created in the "APAC" partition.

Issue When attempting to import an audience through the Facebook Custom Audience integration an error is received with a variation of the following error text: "error_code": 1870068, "error_summary": "Contains a Disabled Audience", "error_message": "Contains a Disabled Audience: This ad set was paused because it contains at least one audience that was disabled. Disabled audiences were shared by accounts that are no longer active. To fix this issue, remove the affected audiences: <affected_audience_names>" Solution Facebook allows for audiences to be shared across multiple business managers. In the past, if one business manager was disabled after sharing an audience, the remaining mangers would still have access to that shared audience. Facebook made a policy change December 11th, 2018 which has removed the ability to access those shared audiences owned by disabled accounts. To resolve this error, the disabled account must be reinstated by Facebook or an alternate audience with an active Facebook account must be chosen Who This Solution Applies To Clients Utilizing Facebook Custom Audiences

Issue You're receiving an error that states 'Not Allowed - Error approving <asset-name> - {{token-name}} : Token key not found' when trying to approve an email asset. Solution Check that token syntax is correctly inserted with no missing left or right 'curly' brackets '{{' '}}' Check that the field name of the token does not have any incorrect spelling (e.g. Email Address) If the token syntax is correct and the field name of the token is spelled correctly, it is possible that the field name of the token contains a Unicode non-breaking space (e.g. between 'Email' and 'Address'). This would have been inserted if it was copied across from a platform that was encoded with Unicode (e.g. Microsoft Word) - To rectify this, delete the space in the token and re-insert it with a normal space using the spacebar on the keyboard. Once this is corrected, the email approval should work.

Issue After the switch to a secured domain (from http -> https), landing pages display both a broken format and mixed content warnings. Solution Make sure all links referenced in your Landing Page Templates and Landing Pages are secured, in other words served with the appended in the front and not Step 1: Open up Landing page with non secure warning sign Step 2: On Google Chrome right click on the page that is displaying the warning and select "Inspect." On Mozilla Firefox it's called "Inspect Element." Look for any "Mixed Content" warnings. Step 3: Find and address the links that are referenced in the error messages **If the link that is unsecure is a custom CSS file, these files will need to be moved and hosted in a secure location so that the links are loaded over https. Who This Solution Applies To Customers with Secure Domains for Landing Pages Service

Issue A record in Marketo failed to sync to Salesforce due to a Field Validation error. Errors may include the following: Failed: FIELD_INTEGRITY_EXCEPTION: INVALID_OR_NULL_FOR_RESTRICTED_PICKLIST: bad value for restricted pick list field. Solution The lead was unable to sync to Salesforce because the value for a specific required field was missing or did not match the rules Salesforce had for the data in the field. For example, the field in Salesforce could be a picklist and the value Marketo is trying to pass in the field is not in the picklist. Salesforce always requires a Last Name and a Company Name value for all records, so if your lead is missing data in these fields, the sync will fail. To resolve this, check Salesforce to see what the acceptable values are for the field specified in the error, and make sure the Marketo record has the necessary information. If you need further assistance with this, we recommend working with your SFDC Admin to determine why Salesforce is rejecting the record. This commonly happens when Country/State picklist is enabled on your SFDC instance. As a consequence, SFDC will reject any record with country/state value does not belong to the list and so you will have to make sure that countries are set correctly everywhere in Marketo, and especially: in forms in data management campaigns in imports For example, if you try to pass the value "New York" to Salesforce, it will not be accepted. Salesforce will only accept "NY". The error messages you're seeing are coming from Salesforce because the State fields have been standardized to only accept certain pick-list values. In order to get these records to sync with Salesforce you'll need to update them to have valid values. Contact your SFDC Admin to get the list of accepted values for that field and update the record in Marketo with the appropriate value that is accepted by SFDC. If you feel like pick list is not necessary on SFDC, you could just disable the state or country pick lists in SFDC by following the below document https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=admin_state_country_picklist_enable.htm&type=5 Who This Solution Applies To Customers integrated with Salesforce

Issue You want to know the difference between a field with the type of string and text area. Solution Both a string and text field will hold information that you can freely write in. The major difference between the two fields is how many characters you can put in these fields. A string field has a limit of 255 characters, whereas a text field has a character limit of 30,000 characters. (This is a general rule. It may vary by application and platform.) A string field is a good choice if you wanting to store data like address, names, or simple custom data. A text area field is a good choice when you want to store information from something like a comment box on a form or if you are importing a large block of text.

Issue You go to a Marketo form that has prefill enabled and see that it contains some other person's information. Solution Form prefill can display another person's information if a Marketo email sent to one person is then forwarded to someone else. Clicking on another person's tracked link cookies you with their information and causes it to prefill in the form. To correct this, clear the cache and cookies on your browser. If you would like to make sure this does not occur with your customers, please disable form prefill for the fields on your form. There is nothing wrong with the forms or landing pages themselves, it is simply a matter of another person's cookie being placed on the browser by the forwarded email tracking link.

Knowledgebase

Maintaining a Directory of Leads Bouncing Emails

Top Blocklists - What You Need to Know

Marketo Program/Salesforce Campaign Status Mismatch

Marketo Sales Insight for SFDC Unable to send Operational Emails to Unsubscribed Recipients

Outlook Marketo Sales Connect Users Experiencing Slow Email Sends on Windows

Receiving 'Error: Nested Editable Element: ...' when editing a template

Smart Campaign Returns N/A Existing People When Viewing the Leads Affected

Tracked Email Links Return "Your Connection Is Not Private"

Unable to Add Multiple Facebook/LinkedIn Services

Velocity Scripted Tokens Not Using Default Values

How to Retain Previous Values in a Field While Adding New Values

Duplicate Records Were Both Sent an Email from an Email Program

How Are Emails Named in an Email Performance Report?

New Lead Created by 'Forward to a Friend Link' Is Not in Default Partition

Disabled Audience Error Uploading Facebook Custom Audience

Error Approving Email - Token Key Not Found

Switch to Secured Domain but Landing Pages Are Still Showing Mixed Content Warnings

Record Failed to Sync to Salesforce with a Field Validation Error

How to Change the Display Name of Your Marketo Instance

Passing Marketo Activities into Microsoft Dynamics

The Difference between a Field Type of String and Text

Form Prefill Displays Another Person’s Information