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Colleen_Jones
Level 2
September 15, 2020
Solved

Send Marketo HTML email for Others to Send Using Their Email System

  • September 15, 2020
  • 3 replies
  • 5302 views

I've created a marketo email and need to send it to someone who will send it out to their association through their email program- Outlook or other. Can I simply forward and email sent to myself or is there a better way to do this for tracking?

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Best answer by SanfordWhiteman

You most certainly do not want to provide someone an email sent to you, with the tracked links attributing all Email and Web activities to your lead! That would be catastrophic for reporting. 

 

If you set all links in the email to untracked, that would at least be a reasonable starting point. It's infinitely better to have anonymous traffic than misattributed traffic.

 

It's also possible to have a 3rd-party sender generate link that are associated with individual Marketo leads. Provide them with the Marketo Unique Code of each of your recipients and ensure that the LP(s) you link to have pURLs enabled. You'll also want my pURL fixup JS on those pages. In this case you still don't want the email to contain Marketo's typical rewritten tracked links, so tracking must still be off. But you have them append the Marketo Unique Code to the URLs, i.e. pages.example.com/landingpage/{Marketo Unique Code} → pages.example.com/landingpage/ABC123.

3 replies

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhitemanAccepted solution
Level 10
September 16, 2020

You most certainly do not want to provide someone an email sent to you, with the tracked links attributing all Email and Web activities to your lead! That would be catastrophic for reporting. 

 

If you set all links in the email to untracked, that would at least be a reasonable starting point. It's infinitely better to have anonymous traffic than misattributed traffic.

 

It's also possible to have a 3rd-party sender generate link that are associated with individual Marketo leads. Provide them with the Marketo Unique Code of each of your recipients and ensure that the LP(s) you link to have pURLs enabled. You'll also want my pURL fixup JS on those pages. In this case you still don't want the email to contain Marketo's typical rewritten tracked links, so tracking must still be off. But you have them append the Marketo Unique Code to the URLs, i.e. pages.example.com/landingpage/{Marketo Unique Code} → pages.example.com/landingpage/ABC123.

Katja_Keesom
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
Katja_KeesomCommunity Advisor and Adobe Champion
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
September 16, 2020

In addition to Sanford's comments there is a plethora of reasons why you would not want to do this. Yes, it it technically possible to save a Marketo email from your own Outlook inbox as an oft file and have another person use that. However, Outlook templating structures and Marketo's are definitely not the same and there are likely to be all sorts of display issues that will arise from the difference. In addition it is indeed virtually impossible to track the email interactions against the correct person in your database as Sanford explained.

 

If the need to enable non-Marketo users to send emails is a structural one I would recommend deploying a tool like Marketo Sales Insight or the OneMedia tool OneInsight to provide users the option to send Marketo emails directly from the platform itself in a personalized way. This allows the user control of who to send the email to at the right time ánd it will provide the full tracking visibility and email design integrity you need.

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
September 16, 2020

Of course it's not always the case (and doesn't seem to be here — it's another "association") that the non-Marketo users who want to send email are other people at your company. When you use an outside partner to send email, they can't simply use MSI!

 

Also not sure I agree that providing the original source code of a received email is dangerous at all. In fact, that's exactly what you want to provide: a cross-client-tested email that has already gone out on the wire. Not, for a counterexample, Marketo-flavored markup that still has {{my.tokens}} that will have no meaning to an outside service. It's just necessary that the links in the source code not be tied back to your own lead; they have to be undecorated links.

 

In addition it is indeed virtually impossible to track the email interactions against the correct person in your database as Sanford explained.

I feel like you're mispresenting my view here. It's extremely possible to send an email via a partner service and have the resulting pageviews (and all subsequent and even prior pageviews) be tracked to the Marketo lead. You can't get a Clicked Email activity, yes, but you can certainly get Visit Web Page and everything else you expect.

Katja_Keesom
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
Katja_KeesomCommunity Advisor and Adobe Champion
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
September 16, 2020

Hi Sanford,

I stand corrected. Thanks for the elaboration!

Kind regards,

Katja

Dave_Roberts
Dave_Roberts
Level 10
September 16, 2020

It's not the best or cleanest (or my favorite) process, but we've done this in the past by pulling the HTML from the preview panel of the Email Editor and then editing that HTML in a code editor to relink a few things like image paths and links that render differently in the Preview panel than they do in the actual email. A common example of this is images get their URL path substituted to a proxy image path that needs to be re-pointed to the actual image in Marketo. 

 

The advantage of using the Preview panel is that Marketo renders out all the variable values into the HTML so you get a "clean" set of code instead of what you'd get from the EDIT CODE pop-up (which has the raw variables still) or the email template (which also has the variables).

 

*Note this requires someone familiar w/ email HTML to kinda clean the code that you'd grab from the inspector when you Preview an email in the Email 2.0 editor.

 

In this way, you're not grabbing the code from your inbox with all your personalized stuff, but it take a little more leg work to clean up. 

 

It's might also be important to note that once an email hits your inbox, not only does it contain data and information relative to your specific 'account' but the code itself changes and becomes degraded to the standards of whatever inbox you're using. In this case, Outlook isn't the most friendly inbox and needs some specific code to do pretty standard stuff still so it'll toss out everything that it doesn't like or recognize and what you end up with in your inbox (or as a forward) is actually a DIFFERENT set of code than what you sent from Marketo -- like not only are the variables and all that rendered out, but when you look at the footprint of the code it's different than the code you sent from Marketo. Oh.... the joys of ESPs.

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