Knowledgebase

Featured article

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 Description You want to find the day that a piece of predictive content was discovered. Issue Resolution There isn't a direct way to see the exact date a piece of content was discovered. What you can do is filter the results to content discovered during a specific time frame. Go to the "All Content" tab. Select the Calendar on the upper right side Choose the time frame and click Apply. Result: You will see only the content that was discovered during that time frame. Who This Solution Applies To Customers with Real-Time Personalization (RTP) or Predictive Content. Is this article helpful ? YesNo

In order to improve our targeting abilities, once a known lead has visited your website, we will override their company name by using their email domain. This way, even if the visitor is not currently at the office, but visiting your website from their house, instead of appearing as an ISP (Comcast Cables / AT&T..) they will appear as coming from the company associated with the email domain they used. For example, someone is known in Marketo Lead Database as 'john.doe@example.com' – once they have visited your website, they will show up as coming from Example Corp even if they are not currently at the office. IP based geo-location targeting has a 95% accuracy rates for country level and around 85% for states which is why you may sometime see discrepancies. Location identification is not 100%, especially with ISP’s. Given this information, the visitors might be at their home using an IP that is registered as in the wrong city and sometime even state. Once we override the company name, they will still appear as coming from their company but a wrong location.

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 may be wondering if it is possible to edit or rename your custom fields in Marketo. Solution Yes, editing or renaming your custom fields in Marketo is possible. You can do so by navigating to "Admin" > "Field Management" > Click on the field on the right-hand side field list > click on the name of the field in the centre canvas (UI) then edit. Your fields would need to be unused by any asset in order for you to edit/rename them.

Issue Email asset does not show which template it was built on and shows the word "none" instead of the name of the template that was used to create that asset. Solution Any edit directly to the HTML code of an email will break the connection between the email and the template. Changes made to the template will no longer flow down to the email. After making those change you will see a template name of None instead of the name of a template. When editing the HTML in the email, you will see this warning message: This is a article attached image

Issue Issue Description The user role has all the permissions to Design Studio, but whenever trying to preview an email, a limited access message is displayed: "You do not have sufficient privileges to perform this action" Solution Issue Resolution The user role must have permission to 'Access Database'. The full access to Database is not needed, just the main access by selecting 'Access Database' and unchecking everything else underneath. The reason for this permission is that, when previewing emails, you are able to select to preview an email as a specific lead. In order for this to happen, users will need access to leads.

Issue Issue Description You would like to change the order in which the emails are being sent to leads but some of the leads have received several emails from the stream already. If the order of email is changed would those leads receive the same emails again? Solution Issue Resolution If a lead has received the email previously from any campaign or program then they will NOT receive this email as long as the email ID remains the same. Marketo will go down the list of emails within the stream until it finds one that has not been sent to the lead and this will be sent to the lead at the time of the engagement program cast.

No - It’s done automatically and behind the scenes. The algorithms used by our proprietary technology automatically present relevant content to your audience segment using digital behavior, keyword search terms, and firmographics such as: geolocation, employee size, revenue size, and industry. The recommendation engine uses predictive analytics and machine learning to predict which content asset will most likely to be individually relevant for each one of your website visitors to read.

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 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 Smart campaign email tab's count for soft bounced and delivered activities does not match the number of soft bounced and delivered activities in smart campaign results tab Example: Email tab shows 5 soft bounces, whereas, results show 6 soft bounce activities Email tab shows 10 delivered, whereas, results show 13 delivered activities Solution The email tab on a smart campaign is an Email Performance Report so it is calculated based on documented rules at Email Performance Report | Adobe Marketo Root Cause There was one lead that opened the email, so the lead was not counted as soft bounced on the email performance report and was counted as email opened based on email performance report rule #4 "If the email is Opened, bounces are ignored." There were three leads that had soft bounce activity also had a delivered email activity. Based on email performance report rule #1 "Each email activity record is set to one, and only one, of the following: Delivered, Hard Bounced, Soft Bounced, or Pending." - in this case, soft bounce takes precedence over delivered email activity so the three leads were not counted as delivered on the report but were counted as soft bounce. Environment Smart campaign Email tab Smart campaign results Email performance report

Issue Statuses are not showing for a channel when viewed in the Admin > Tags section of Marketo. Solution To view the statuses for a channel, follow these steps: Go to Admin > Tags. Expand the Channel tag type. Double-click on a channel to open the Edit Channel window. Scroll down to view the statuses. If you are unable to see statuses in the Edit Channel window, it may be due to the slight delay that can occur when Marketo is loading the values for a channel. If you leave the channel window open, the values should populate. The more statuses there are for a particular channel, the longer the delay can be before they populate.

Issue Description Unable to send Operational Email via Marketo Sales Insight when the lead is flagged as unsubscribed. 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 A lot of people suddenly synced from Salesforce to Marketo. They have been in SFDC for a long time, so you're wondering why they suddenly synced. Solution People sync from Salesforce for a number of reasons. If they aren't new leads, then they probably met some criteria that caused them to be visible to the Marketo Sync User and sync down. One thing to keep in mind is that if the visibility rules change, Marketo won't actually see those people until a field that Marketo can see changes. Marketo looks at the "sysmodtime" stamp on a record. This indicates the last time a record was modified. If the record was changed since the last time the sync ran, then Marketo updates the record on the Marketo and SFDC side with the newest information. There have been cases where the visibility rules changed, but the new records that Marketo could see weren't updated for a considerable period of time. (This could be as long as years.) However, if something eventually changed and updated the sysmodtime, these leads would all sync to Marketo. The change can be anything, but if it's a large number of people, it's frequently a change on the Account object, which then filters down to the Contacts and Leads. If you're still unsure why a large number of people have synced to Marketo, the first thing to look at is what information changed, since Marketo only syncs people when they are updated with new information.

Issue The email was sent from an engagement program or email program where Recipient Time Zone was enabled, however, emails sent to several leads were not sent based on their time zone. Solution If the time zone calculation for the affected leads falls under the conditions mentioned in https://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Understanding+Recipient+Time+Zone, then check in [Admin > Field Management] if the Person Time Zone field is hidden. If this field is hidden, then this would be the reason as this field is where the Person's Time Zone is stored for when it is calculated and is used to determine the Recipient Time Zone for sending emails.

Issue You have a custom landing page template and are able to see that landing page is not rendering perfectly on the editor but works as expected when published. Solution As you are facing the issue on a custom template, we suggest you to follow the below steps. Download a template form the URL- experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/marketo/using/product-docs/demand-generation/landing-pages/landing-page-templates/guided-landing-page-template-list.html In Marketo, navigate to the Design Studio Click Landing Pages in the left-hand tree, then select Templates. In the menu bar, click Import Template. Choose the downloaded file, enter a template name, then click Import (make sure to pick a descriptive name and indicate that editing mode is Guided). Create a new Landing page with the recently downloaded template without making any changes. If the default background image works on this landing page as expected, it confirms that the issue lies with the custom coding that was added to the template. Marketo Support is not set up to assist with troubleshooting custom code. The best point of contact will be your web developer who should be able to resolve the issue for you. Please be aware that the landing page editor may not load all external resources in the editor or previewer, which can cause them to look different than the published version. If the background image doesn’t render on this newly downloaded template as well, contact support and we will assist in troubleshooting your issue.

Knowledgebase

Maintaining a Directory of Leads Bouncing Emails

Top Blocklists - What You Need to Know

Content Discovery Date

How does Organization Name Override work in RTP?

MS Dynamics Sync Stuck at X% when syncing custom entities

Add/Remove Tout Users

Modify 'Friendly name' (label) on custom fields

How are records synced from Microsoft Dynamics CRM to Marketo?

Email Asset Shows Template “None” Instead of an Actual Name

Limited Access Message Displayed When Previewing Email

Changing the Order of the Content within a Stream of an Engagement Program

Do you need to create segments to use the CRE?

Marketo Emails Are Showing Up in the Salesforce Email Template Selector

Image link from Design Studio won't work

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

Smart Campaign Email Tab discrepancy with smart campaign results

Channel Statuses Are Not Showing

MSI Unable to send Operational Emails to Unsubscribed Recipients

Large Influx of Records Syncing From SFDC to Marketo

Email was not sent based on Recipient Time Zone

MSI Actions Drop-down Not Visible in SFDC for Specific Contacts

Troubleshooting Background Image Not Being Rendered on Landing Page Editor