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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 The URL for the landing page shows as "https" even though you do not have SSL set up on your Marketo instance, causing the browser to display a "Not Secure" warning. Solution This can happen if the primary domain and DNS are SSL secure, but Marketo is not. For instance, if your primary domain is "mycompany.com" (SSL secure) then the DNS, which is also SSL secure, will push down the "https" transfer protocol down to all the CNAMEs on that DNS. This will force the Marketo landing page using the CNAME to use "https" in the URL, even though it is not secure. There are two ways to resolve this: Work with your IT department to see if there is a non-SSL option for your DNS Purchase SSL for your Marketo instance so that both your primary domain and your Marketo pages are SSL secure. If you would like to add SSL to your Marketo instance, please contact your Account Manager to see about adding that to your subscription.

Issue You sent an email using a Smart Campaign and the email performance report for the email shows more Sent than there are members in the Smart Campaign Solution The email may have been sent by more than one campaign. You can determine this by looking at the "Used By" info on the email's summary page, to see which campaigns sent the email. In this case, you can use the Campaign Email Performance Report to view the email's performance within the specific campaign.

Issue Person/Lead Source is empty. Why isn't it populating? Solution Marketo does not automatically assign Person Source. We do populate Original Source Type. Assigning credit for a Lead can only be determined by someone with intimate knowledge of a company's marketing strategies. If someone fills out a form, Marketo doesn't know if they were brought to that form by an email blast, TV commercial, talked to a salesperson, or any number of other reasons. If they came in through a List Import, they could have attended a Tradeshow and signed up there, they could have been exported by a CRM and are being imported, or any number of other ways. There are many discussions on best practices for handling Lead Source attribution in the Community. If you need assistance setting up Smart Campaign to update the Lead Source based on your specific business criteria, please contact Marketo Support.

Issue Embedded Marketo form not visible in Firefox Private Browsing mode. Solution Firefox's private mode will be enabled by default. When you embed a Marketo form in your own webpages and view it in Firefox's private mode, it will disable the Javascript as part of the tracking protection of this browser. JavaScript is needed for the forms to appear on the landing pages or webpages. The "Tracking Protection" in the Firefox browser will need to be deactivated for the form to appear. Here is an article from FireFox regarding the Tracking Protection: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection

Issue Webinar integration is giving an error "Invalid Username or Password" during setup, even though the username and password are correct. The webinar provider uses your Single Sign-On (SSO) provider for login. Solution Marketo is not able to access the SSO provider and will not be able to log into the service if SSO is used. Use the following workaround for your integration. Disable SSO for the webinar service so that a user with login and password can be used in the Marketo Launchpoint service. Create the integration user in the webinar provider and complete the integration Re-enable SSO for your webinar service after the webinar is over. Who This Solution Applies To Clients leveraging SSO for Launchpoint services

Issue When making API calls, Marketo reports the daily API limit has been reached but does not show when the limit resets. Solution When Marketo shows the daily API limit has been reached, it will reset itself that night at midnight central time, and then will allow for the API calls to resume. These are the reset times according to US time zones. 10:00 PM Pacific 11:00 PM Mountain 12:00 AM Central 01:00 AM Eastern

Issue Marketo Email templates that have been used are showing or appearing within the Salesforce Email Template Picker/Chooser. Solution The templates are created when Marketo syncs lead email activities to Salesforce. You can disable these activities from syncing in Marketo Admin > Salesforce > Edit Sync Options. Unselect the Email activities or Sales Email activities you have synced. The templates will no longer be created, but you also won't get these activities pushed from Marketo anymore. This applies to both Sales Insight and normal Marketo sent emails. If you would like to note an email was sent to a lead without enabling these activities, you can utilize Interesting Moment Flow Steps or Create a Task to sync via the activity log! Who This Solution Applies To Customer using Sales Insight for Salesforce

Issue When you add variables to your email template assets, the value assigned to that variable is not showing in the text-only version of the email even though it shows in the HTML version. Solution Email 2.0 variables do not pass the defined values for variables through to the text-only email. Since Marketo token values are passed through to the text-only email, customers may expect variable values to also be passed through to text-only emails. However, this is not currently the case.

Issue When creating a Smart List with a "Member of SFDC Campaign" filter, the SFDC Campaign is visible on the drop-down list, yet it throws an error when selected and the Smart List is loaded: "Error running Smart List: Check your Smart List configuration" Solution Things to check: The campaign has been re-named in SFDC or has been deleted. It could also be that somehow a "space" has been entered before the campaign name. For example, Marketo is looking for "SFDC Campaign Name" and SFDC has it as " SFDC Campaign Name" or "SFDC Campaign Name ". The campaign is present and active in SFDC, but is not visible to the sync user. The Marketo Sync User details can be located in [Admin > Integration > Salesforce > Username] This can be checked by logging in to SFDC as the Marketo sync user and verify that the campaigns are present with the correct name and activated for that sync user.

Issue Lead owners are required when syncing a lead to Salesforce, but is there a way we can sync them without assigning a lead owner? Yes there is, and it's called lead queues! Solution How to do it: Lead queues must be set up in Salesforce first. Like lead owners, the queues must be visible to the Marketo Sync user before they can be selected. Select the lead queue you want leads to be assigned to in the 'Sync Lead to SFDC' or 'Change Lead Owner' flow steps. Qualified leads that pass through this flow step with then be synced to Salesforce and assigned to the lead queue rather than a lead owner. A few important notes: Only leads can be assigned to a lead queue, contacts cannot and must be assigned an owner. Assignment rules in Salesforce can conflict with the request sent from Marketo. Double check these assignment rules to make sure there are no conflicts.

Issue None of your tokens are rendering inside of your .ics Calendar File token and instead are showing as the {{lead._____}} form. Solution This is caused when a single token has an undefined value, such as a 'My Token' which doesn't exist in your Program. Send yourself a version of the Calendar file and look for a blank space where a token should be- This will be the token causing the others to not work. Make sure to define a value for this token and then your Calendar File will render without issue.

Issue Clicking on a link in a Marketo e-mail that re-directs to a non-Marketo webpage destination does not open the page. Solution Complete the troubleshooting step below. If they do not resolve the issue, include the results in a Marketo Support Ticket. Check the CNAME is correctly setup for the email tracking link Check that the Default Branding Name matches the CNAME in Step 1 (check for typos). If you are unsure you can visit CNAME lookup on mxtoolbox and enter the default branding name to check. Under the Domain field enter your default branding name. Do you have SSL for tracking links enabled? If Yes, tracking links in emails should start with If No, tracking links in emails should start with If you do not have SSL enabled, but when you click the link it resolves to ,try a different network and see if it still occurs. Your network may be configured to automatically use HTTPS automatically even if the link is specified as HTTP. (Check with your network admin) If you are re-directed to the non-Marketo landing page but the page does not load: Check with the website admin if there are any redirect rules setup on the website. Try cutting out parts of the additional URL Parameter to see if that fixes the issue to identify which part of the URL parameter is causing it. Sometimes lead tokens or the mkt_tok may affect a redirect rule, since mkt_tok generates random characters and sometimes the token contains percentage '%' characters. It very common for websites to interpret a % followed by a character as an encoding. Seen in this website here If you are unable to resolve the issue in the steps above, provide the test results and information in a Marketo Support Case.

Issue What type of HTTP Redirect Rules does Marketo use when you setup a redirect rule in Admin > Landing Pages? Solution Internal Pages such as landing pages hosted on Marketo will use a HTTP 301 Redirect External pages & non landing page URL's (when using "non-Marketo landing page") used in the redirect rule will utilize a HTTP 302 Redirect: Branding links do not use an HTTP Redirect and use a script-based redirect on the Branded links page. Example: Email branding link - go.mybranddomain.com/ABCDEFIlB0ETg0X063WLL1 is a Marketo hosted page that utilizes a script to redirect & point to thetargeturlinanemail.com

Issue Email filtering can prevent the delivery of the invitation email to the Sales Insight Outlook Plug-in, preventing end users from being able to activate the plug-in. Solution This can be remediated by white-listing the trusted IP range from the following document: https://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Setup+Steps#SetupSteps-AskITtoConfigureProtocols The email invitation return path is determined by the Marketo user who is inviting in the instance. So if there is a restriction on the domain that the email can be sent from you can adjust this by creating a dummy user with a username with the a domain that would qualify for IT restrictions. Then log in as the dummy user and send the invitation. It will have the dummy address in the From line.

Issue When a piece of predictive content is approved the following error appears: "Action failed. Please contact support. Error code:24 Error message: Invalid email title Error message: internal error, reported to support." Solution Change the title of the content to less than 48 characters. This error indicates that the title for the content is too long. The maximum number of characters for a title in content AI is 48 characters.

Knowledgebase

Maintaining a Directory of Leads Bouncing Emails

Top Blocklists - What You Need to Know

Browser Displays Not Secure Warning When Viewing Marketo Landing Pages

Email Performance Report Shows More Emails Sent than There Are Members in the Smart Campaign

Person/Lead Source is Empty

Embedded Marketo Form Not Visible in Firefox Private Browsing Mode

View In Browser Link Gives Error When Clicked In Email Preview

Webinar Integration Gives Invalid Username or Password Error When Using SSO

Daily API Limit Has Been Reached and Need to Know When It Will Reset

Marketo Emails Are Showing Up in the Salesforce Email Template Selector

Email 2.0 Variables Not Shown in Text-Only Emails

Smart List Error for Member of SFDC Campaign Filter

How to Sync Leads to Salesforce without Assigning a Lead Owner

Tokens Not Rendering in Calendar File

Can Email Insights Quickcharts Be Shared across Users?

Tokens Not Populating in ICS (Calendar) File When Sending Sample Email

Marketo Email Link Is Not Redirecting to a Non-Marketo Landing Page

How Do Marketo Redirect Rules Work?

Email mailto: Link Not Working

Email Filtering Blocking Sales Insight Outlook Plug-In Invitations

Engagement Program Failed to Send Email in Stream

ContentAI - Error 24