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Anonymous
August 3, 2015
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Email Client Report?

Is it possible to see in Marketo what email clients my emails are read in?  i.e., Outlook, Gmail, Postbox, etc...

Thanks

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Casey_Grimes2
Casey_Grimes2Accepted solution
Level 10
August 3, 2015

Hi Todd,

If you're looking specifically for email clients as opposed to user agent, you may want to look into using Litmus' Email Analytics tracking script. It integrates pretty decently with Marketo, though you'll likely need to alter your email templates somewhat.

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7 replies

Elliott_Lowe1
Elliott_Lowe1
Level 7
August 3, 2015

Marketo's open and click activity records that are logged to the lead record do not show the specific email client, but they do show the User Agent (e.g. type of browser), whether it is a mobile device or not, Platform (e.g. iOS, Win7) and Device (e.g. iPhone, PC).

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Casey_Grimes2
Casey_Grimes2Accepted solution
Level 10
August 3, 2015

Hi Todd,

If you're looking specifically for email clients as opposed to user agent, you may want to look into using Litmus' Email Analytics tracking script. It integrates pretty decently with Marketo, though you'll likely need to alter your email templates somewhat.

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SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
August 3, 2015

Todd, to be clear about what Marketo can do natively, the User-Agent field does allow you to reproduce which desktop email client was used (and, via elimination, whether a desktop or web-based client was used).  The User-Agent cannot reliably differentiate between webmail clients, though: SquirrelMail and SmarterMail are going to be indistinguishable when visited from the same browser (though if you had the Referrer as well , you'd have additional identifying data as most email apps have their own unique URL structure).

Although the User-Agent tells you pretty much everything you need to know about desktop clients, the main complication is that Marketo doesn't supply any mapping between U-A string(s) and the friendly name of the email client.  For example, my favorite, totally awesome Windows email app (I'm not kidding) The Bat has User-Agent = thebat32.exedwnloadmnger or thebat64.exedwnloadmnger.  You can distinguish the email client by these text strings.   However, there's no friendly place to perform that lookup.  You'd have to build the mapping yourself using choices. 

I've commented more here: Re: Finding which email client is being used

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    Elliott_Lowe1
    Elliott_Lowe1
    Level 7
    August 3, 2015

    My experience with the User Agent containing anything particularly useful has been inconsistent. 

    For example, I always read my emails with Outlook on my PC and have gotten the following results.

    Aug '15 -

    • Open Email: even though images were displayed in the email, an Open Email activity was not logged in my lead record.
    • Click Email: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:39.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/39.0

    June '15 -

    • Open Email: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; Microsoft Outlook 14.0.7149; ms-office; MSOffice 14)

    Dec '14 -

    • Open Email: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/7.0; MSOffice 12)

    The user agent value in Open Email activities appears as though it is just a laundry list of possible browsers / clients.  Also the Click Email activity appears to be the browser used to display the destination page, not the email client.  It would be great to have the mapping of the User Agent values to a specific client if one exists.

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    SanfordWhiteman
    SanfordWhiteman
    Level 10
    August 3, 2015

    Yep, Click Link in Email activities will correspond to the web browser used to follow the link, even if the Open Email is from a desktop app.

    The User-Agent from Open Email isn't just a laundry list of the possible clients, though.  It actually indicates the client because the U-A is augmented by, in this case, Outlook.  When you see MSIE 7.0 ... Microsoft Outlook 14.0.7149; ms-office; MSOffice 14 these spell Outlook 2010.  Obviously Internet Explorer 7.0 is not on your machine, but Outlook uses a comparable rendering engine (AFAIK, this is simply a "WebBrowser control in IE7 mode," which third-party Windows developers can add to their own apps as well).

    Just to give you an idea of the complexity of the mapping table, ms-office is also seen if you use Word to open a URL... if one does such crazy things. I wish I had a complete list to give you, but I think the info is scattered around the web.

    If you don't see an Open Email activity, that wouldn't have anything to do with the email client.  If the tracking pixel was really loaded from Marketo but Marketo logged nothing, that's a bug.  Maybe for some reason the visible images in the email loaded, but not the special tracking pixel.

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      Anonymous
      August 5, 2015

      Thanks guys!  I added this as an idea,

      Todd

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        Elliott_Lowe1
        Elliott_Lowe1
        Level 7
        August 5, 2015

        I voted it up!

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