Workarounds for Identifying Skipped Emails Due to Communication Limits
Marketo provides a built-in communication limit setting that allows marketers to manage the number of marketing emails sent to people in their database. These limits are defined at both the daily and weekly levels, ensuring recipients do not receive excessive marketing emails, which can help prevent fatigue and unsubscribes.
How Communication Limits Work in Marketo
Marketo automatically prevents emails from being sent to people who have reached their communication limits. However, there are two exceptions:
Campaign Qualification Rules: If a campaign has the checkbox “Block non-operational emails” unchecked, Marketo will send emails to people even if they have reached their communication limit.
Operational Emails: Emails classified as operational bypass communication limits and are delivered regardless.
While this feature helps control email volume, Marketo lacks a dedicated report or filter to identify recipients who have hit their communication limit. This creates a challenge in estimating the actual number of people who will receive a marketing email from a campaign or email program.
Workarounds to Identify Skipped Emails Due to Communication Limits
Since there is no direct filter to identify users who have been skipped due to communication limits, here are two workarounds that can help approximate this data:
1. Query Email Activity/Inactivity
You can create a smart list using the "Email Sent" filter to approximate how many recipients have received a marketing email within a set timeframe.
Use the "Min. Number of Times" constraint to match your instance’s communication limits.
Add specific marketing emails in the filter constraints to differentiate operational vs. non-operational emails.
2. Update Program Status to Track Skipped Emails
A more structured approach is to create a mechanism where: If an email is not sent within limits, the person’s Program Status is updated (e.g., to “Skipped Email”). You’d want to use the “Change Program Status” flow step for this.
Catch you next week. Until then, Happy Marketo’ing! 💜