“Marketability” – the one field to rule them all

“Marketability” is a made-up word in this context. Here it should mean: A person’s eligibility to receive emails. (This definition is not complete, but it should suffice here.)

Technically, a field – let’s call it “Is Marketable” – is supposed to sum up all properties of a person record that decide whether or not they will receive an email.

Let’s take a look at all the fields that are relevant here:

Unsubscribed

Usually set by a Marketo person that clicks the unsubscribe link in an email and submits the subsequent form. Automatically prevents to send a non-operational email to that person.

Marketing Suspended

Set by you based on whatever criteria you define to prevent a person from receiving emails. Automatically prevents to send a non-operational email to that person.

Email Invalid

Set automatically by Marketo when a person bounces. (This is a longer story as there are cases when Email Invalid is not set to true when a person hard bounces). Automatically prevents to send any email to that person.

Email Suspended

A weird field. Marketo sets a person to Email Suspended = true, if they bounce soft. This suspension is valid for 24 hours and then Marketo will try again. But the field remains on “true”, so it actually says: “This person has been suspended once in their lifetime” instead of “This person is suspended right now”.

Block Listed

Similar to “Marketing Suspended” it’s your task to define criteria that prevent a person from receiving any emails. Think your competitors for example. Block Listed persons won’t receive any emails, not even operational ones.

Now, where are we going with this? We want that one field that gives us information not only whether the person will receive that email, but also we don’t want to have these non-marketable people in our Smart List counts or programs. So first we have to populate this field.

Create two Smart Campaigns:

Set “Is Marketable” to TRUE

This campaign sets “Is Marketable” to true if all relevant fields are false.

Smart List:

Flow:

Run this campaign as a recurring campaign daily.

Set “Is Marketable” to FALSE

(Always remember to create the opposite scenario for whatever you do!)

This campaign sets “Is Marketable” to false if any of the relevant fields are true.

Smart List:

Set “Is Marketable” to false in the flow. Run this campaign as a recurring batch as well.

Now we have it. Now you can tell your marketers to just use this one field in their Smart Lists to find all records that should be in your email sending program. If you hit “Schedule” on your Smart Campaigns or preview results in your Email Program, the number of blocked persons should be 0.

Please keep in mind that you cannot use this field when you want to send an operational email aka include unsubscribed and marketing suspended persons.