Question
How was a deceased individual included in my email campaign?
Answer
The most likely cause is the audience sync may not be set up or may have been paused. If so, audience information is no longer being updated in your marketing automation platform and a recently deceased person could still be included. First, please check the audience sync in Campaign Workflow.
If the audience is syncing properly, there may be a temporary issue in the data source. We use a 3rd party process that references the official Death Master File and uses other verification techniques to identify deceased individuals. This information is accounted for when filtering a campaign target audience. Even with this input, there is a very low probability of a discrepancy, such as:
- An individual's death was not reported to the Social Security Administration (SSA).
- The deceased person did not participate in the Social Security program.
- The death is recent and not indexed yet.
- There was human error upon data entry at the source.
Scenarios like these are vanishingly rare, and it is extremely unlikely that campaign metrics would be affected in any meaningful way should they occur. Audiences can be synced regularly, so these issues will resolve themselves as soon as the data is updated at the source. You can also request a one-off Do Not Solicit (DNS) update via a secure support channel.
