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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

Featured article

(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 Some leads received emails 1, 2 and 3 from an Engagement Program stream but did not receive email 4. Solution Issue Resolution Check if leads were still a member of the Engagement Program at the time Email 4 was sent. Check if leads were removed from the Engagement Program before Email 4 was sent Check if leads were moved onto a different stream within the Engagement Program before Email 4 was sent Check if the Engagement Program has been turned off Check if leads were paused from receiving content

Issue When you use the "Add to SFDC Campaign" flow step, and the lead isn't already in SFDC, this step will sync the lead to SFDC, and you want to know which assignment rules will be applied. Solution The SFDC auto-assignment rule will be used. To explain this further, if for some reason you don't have lead assignment rules firing properly in Salesforce, it will be assigned to what is called the "Default Lead Owner" in Salesforce. It's not just "Add to Salesforce Campaign" that uses what is called "implied Salesforce actions". All of the following flow steps will sync the lead to Salesforce first before running the flow step if the person is not already synced to Salesforce: Add to Salesforce Campaign Change Status in Salesforce Campaign (this will sync them AND add them to the campaign first) Change Owner Convert Person Create Task

Issue Description Emails with valid email address get soft bounced with this error: Local address contains control or whitespace Issue Resolution This error means that the email has a space somewhere in the the From email address or there was a comma or extra character in the From line. The email send did not occur due to the error with the address. The emails will need to be resent once after the associated address is corrected with white spaces or extra characters. Is this article helpful ? YesNo

Issue Description Is there a way to prevent opening a new browser window when a mailto/email address link in an email is clicked? Issue Resolution The reason why the link clicked in an email redirects to a new browser window occurs is because the link is a tracked link. As per design of Marketo tracked links, they are required to be loaded in a browser first which is why the mailtolink/email address clicked is loading in the browser first. If you wish to load the link clicked in the same window and not redirect to a new browser window, you will need to disable tracking on the link. docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Disable+Tracking+for+an+Email+Link Is this article helpful ? YesNo

Issue Description The lead's activity log shows that the 'Sync Person to SFDC' flow step failed because of the following message: "Failed: INVALID_CROSS_REFERENCE_KEY: Record Type ID: this ID value isn't valid for the user:" Issue Resolution The issue is the SFDC ID value populated in the "Record Type ID" field is not considered a valid value in Salesforce for the Lead/Contact. You'll want to work with your SFDC Admin to identify a valid value or try deleting the value in Marketo and then updating this value from the Salesforce side. Is this article helpful ? YesNo

Issue Description Change Lead Owner reason shows "Synched from salesforce.com - fixup Lead Owner." Issue Resolution The "synched from salesforce.com fixup lead owner" activity means the lead owner was switched within SFDC, often times through auto-assignment rules. The phrase "fixup Lead Owner" is what Marketo records when it is taking the Owner ID being passed from Salesforce and translating it into the Lead Owner values (First Name, Last Name, Email Address, etc) to populate into Marketo.

Issue Description MS Dynamics Sync shows that it is stuck at a certain percentage after a long period of time. Issue Resolution This is usually caused by enabling several Custom Entities at a time. To resolve this issue, you will need to sync the custom entities one by one so that the sync is not bottlenecked. If that does not resolve the issue, check how many fields are enabled for the custom entity. A large amount of fields can cause a bottleneck, try to reduce the amount to have only necessary fields. Who This Solution Applies To Customer with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Is this article helpful ? YesNo

Issue You want to prevent Marketo from updating certain fields within Salesforce. Solution If you are interested in stopping Marketo from overwriting fields in Salesforce, you could change the Sync User permissions in SFDC. Specifically, the User Profile for the Sync User, inside the Field Level Permissions, you can remove 'edit' permissions for individual fields. If you want updates to this field in Salesforce to still sync down to Marketo, leave the 'read' permissions for the field. Please keep in mind that removing this edit permissions can cause discrepancies in data between Marketo and Salesforce.

Issue Description After running an A/B test, some Lead records appear to have received both Test and Winner. Issue Resolution In an A/B test, the sample size of the audience is sent the variants, and then for the winner: the entire audience minus the test audience is sent the Winning email. So let's say that you received both Test and Winner. This means you have duplicate records in the database. Marketo is designed to not send duplicate leads the same email at the same time. So one of the duplicates is qualified for the Test, and then when the Winner is sent, it's the total audience minus the test audience, the Winner is sent to the duplicate record. This above situation can apply to Lead Records as well, because of duplicates with the same email address, but also duplicate records that may have a FWD set up between them (record B emails FWD to Record A email address). Because this is expected from the design decision, the resolution is to deduplicate your database. Is this article helpful ? YesNo

Issue When approving emails, the system shows the following error: "Note: detected the following lines in text version that are longer than 1000 characters: Line 6 and they are not fixed. The email is now approved". Solution This error is an indicator that there is a large line of text in the text-only version of the email that is over 1000 characters. This occurs when there are long links in the email which will not publish correctly in the text version of it. But still the email will be approved and can be sent. Check for excessively long links in the text version of the email and simplify them if possible. You can test it by sending a text version of the email to yourself, or by checking the Text Only version in the Email Editor.

Issue Values in a form field are not showing in the preview or live form even though the value is in the picklist for the field. Visibibility rules for the field are enabled. Solution The value is not in the picklist in the field visibility rules. To fix this do the following: 1.Select the field in question in the form editor 2.Click "enabled" In the right pane, where it says Visibility Rules, 3. Add the missing value to the picklist 4.Hit Save

Issue A lead has an Unsubscribe activity logged in their activity history, but they continue to receive emails after the Unsubscribe. Solution An Unsubscribe activity is logged when the lead clicks the system Unsubscribe link embedded in a Marketo email. However, if that link takes them to a Preference Center that allows them to select from multiple options, they may not choose the full unsubscribe option and may continue to receive selected emails. To confirm if this is the case, find the Unsubscribe activity in their activity log and double-click on the activity to open it. This will show you the choices they selected in the email preferences form. In the example below, the lead did not fully unsubscribe, they only chose to unsubscribe from specific content. Since they did not choose the global unsubscribe, they will continue to receive some emails.

Issue A field value in Marketo is changed to "null" by the SFDC sync, but when you check the field on the Salesforce side, no change has been made. Solution It seems that there were differing values between integrated fields in SFDC and Marketo. The specific fields in Marketo had a value that was not present in the SFDC picklist fields. Reason why this happens: Fields are being nulled out on the Marketo side was because updates were made to these records on the SFDC side, making the most current version of the record which lead to these fields being nulled out on Marketo's end. Troubleshooting: Review First - If there is an alert setup for tracking these changes, this can be caught by finding a "Failed: no more information" error in the Activity Log of the leads. After this first "Failed: no more information" error, the Contact record in SFDC and the Person record in Marketo were no longer able to sync until the picklist value present in Marketo was added back to the picklist field in SFDC. Check SFDC side - Check to see if the field value was removed on the SFDC side. It might be filtered by the record types on the Contact object. In other words, the value was present for the picklist field on the Contact object, but it was not available if a Contact record was created with a certain record type. Once this value was added back to the Contact record types new Contact records and their fields are able to be updated by the Smart Campaigns. Once the SFDC Contact record picklist values had been added back to the Contact record types Marketo will sync again.

Issue Description A lead qualified for a Smart Campaign even though they do not meet the Smart Campaign filter requirements Issue Resolution At the time the campaign ran, the smart list was configured differently, which made the lead qualify at that time. The smart list of the campaign was then changed after it ran. Users with admin permission can check this using the Audit trail docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Change+Details+in+Audit+Trail#ChangeDetailsinAuditTrail-AssetAuditTrail

Issue Description Sometimes there can be a circumstance where a text token should hold null value. Since the token must contain a value, you need to insert a value that will display as empty when the token is rendered. Issue Resolution Adding a HTML comment to the on the Text {{my.token}} side would work.  If you're just plopping the token into your HTML, this will be fine. If you're embedding in JS then you can still check for that specific value, it just won't be "magic": if ( "{{my.token}}" != "" ) { // it's not empty }

Issue When using Email Insights or other email tracking in Marketo, the device metrics do not always show the proper device that was used to open the email. Marketo tracks opens of emails through a single pixel on the email that when images are loaded it tracks it as an opened email. However your stats don't always show the proper information or client. Solution Due to the way the pixel is tracked it pulls Email Client version data much in the same way as a web browser obtains what browser visited. The "User Agent" as it is called is a widely adopted standard that email clients use to ID themselves. These strings/ID's are determined by the developer of the Email client. Some email clients have the same string for different operating systems (Gmail for Example). Due to the user agent string, some situations may not always give accurate stats on the device or provider. Inaccurate data is less common with most major email apps and programs. The accuracy of data on some mobile platforms can be harder to differentiate due to the limited user agent data provided by the Email Application program.

Summary When submitting a file for bulk import via the REST API, the uploads appears to stall with no response. Issue Occasionally Bulk Import API calls will "hang" or "stall" never returning a response. This may appear to be a blank or missing response when the API is actually still waiting for the end of the file to be transferred. Solution You can add the following header: 'Transfer-Encoding: chunked' to your API calls and it will fix this issue. Please note that adding this header on the client side will cause cURL to send data in chunks. For more information on chunked file transfer, see Wikipedia: Chunked Transfer Encoding Environment REST API Bulk Import

Issue Description We have a field (Field Label: Account Record Type, Field Name: RecordType, Data Type: Record Type) in SFDC that is visible to Marketo Sync User but it is not syncing the field to Marketo. We are unable to find the specific field in Admin -> Field management. Issue Resolution We do not have the Record Type field synced to Marketo. Instead, we sync the Record Type ID, which gives the alphanumeric string for the record type. Marketo Sync user does not have access to Salesforce record type. There is a work around to get the record type names that is discussed here: https://nation.marketo.com/blogs/marketowhisperer/2016/04/09/setting-the-sfdc-record-type Who This Solution Applies To Customers integrated with Salesforce Is this article helpful ? YesNo

Knowledgebase

Maintaining a Directory of Leads Bouncing Emails

Top Blocklists - What You Need to Know

Leads Did Not Receive an Email from an Engagement Program

Assignment Rules used for Add to SFDC Campaign Flow Steps

Soft Bounce: Local address contains control or whitespace

Mailto Link clicked in email opening new browser window

Sync Person to SFDC failed

Add/Remove Tout Users

Change Lead Owner shows "Synched from salesforce.com - fixup Lead Owner"

MS Dynamics Sync Stuck at X% when syncing custom entities

How To Stop Marketo From Updating Fields In Salesforce

Received 2 Emails in the A/B Test: Test and Winner

Email Error : Lines in the text version that are longer than 1000 characters

Form Field Value not Showing

Email Performance Report send count is lower than the campaign results for Send Email

Lead Continues to Receive Emails After Unsubscribe Activity is Logged

Field Value in Marketo Erased by Sync from SFDC, but SFDC Shows No Change

Lead qualified for the Smart Campaign unexpectedly

Creating a token with a null value

Inaccuracy of Device Open Types on Emails

Bulk Import API Calls Returning Blank Responses

"Record Type" Field Sync Issue