Output an email as a PDF document

[Randall_Tam]

Hi,

Do you know if Marketo has a way to produce an email as a PDF?  Currently we send out tons of certificates and what this process to be automated within Marketo.  For example when someone qualifies for a certificate Marketo would automatically generate the PDF and send it to them in an email.

Thoughts?

Randall

[SanfordWhiteman]

P.S. Consider having the cert be a. Marketo LP. Then pass the LP URL to a PDF generating service. Should be really simple.

[Anonymous]

You will have to try Sanfords suggestion out.  The problem I have had with the url method is that if I don;t have the users cookie when I open the url I won't have a personalized certificate.  If you just need a generic Certificate then you are fine, but if you want the users name in it then it may not work.  I also tried this with PURLs.

What I had to do was actually send all my "certificate"  emails to a single inbox and process them from there to get the content personalized.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Jamie, let me explain why existing cookies are not required to render personalized LPs.  It is impossible for cookies to be required because no cookies are sent to Marketo on the first hit to a given LP domain. 

The branding domain does not set a cookie, and even if it did, it would not necessarily be readable on the destination LP domain since you only get one branding domain to share across all of your links. The branding domain (tracking server) tracks the click (Clicked Link in Email), rewrites the original link by adding a mkt_tok that is specific to both the lead and the email, and redirects the browser to the mkt_tok-enized link.

The association of the next page view -- the view of the Marketo-hosted LP -- with the lead's personalized content is done using the mkt_tok value and not with cookies, as cookies do not yet exist.  The mkt_tok is also used to associate subsequent page views -- views that no longer include the mkt_tok in the URL -- with the lead via the Munchkin cookie.  That cookie is only created after the initial page content is sent to the browser. Further web activity tracking depends on having that associated cookie.

[fzsofi]

Hi @SanfordWhiteman ,
I'm trying to make this work the way you described in your article (Use Marketo LPs as PDF templates with PDFmyURL — TEKNKL :: Blog), however it's not working as expected. Technically the download of a pdf happens after clicking on the link provided in the email, however what gets downloaded is not the Certificate LP, but our fallback page. 
Our certif LP is: https://web.companyname.com/Certificate.html
Link in email:  https://web.companyname.com/Certificate.html#pdf
Our fallback domain: https://companyname.com
The downloaded pdf shows https://companyname.com page.
Could you suggest why is this happening and how to fix it?

Thanks,

Sophie

[SanfordWhiteman]

Modern browsers (that post is from 9 years ago) no longer forward the entire referrer cross-origin by default. You have to add a meta tag for that to still work:

<meta name="referrer" content="no-referrer-when-downgrade">

[fzsofi]

Thank you very much @SanfordWhiteman, after several days of struggle it's finally working. 🙏

Just an additional information as it might be useful for others trying to set this up:
When we added the meta tag and the script on the certificate LP  in the custom HEAD section the lead tokens were not populating.
When we created a dedicated Certificate LP template with the above mentioned meta tag and the script in the head and then built a Certificate LP based on it, then the lead tokens were also populating correctly.

[SanfordWhiteman]

A link in an email will always be personalized via mkt_tok, not requiring an existing cookie. There is literally no way for the LP to not be personalized if you pass through the mkt_tok. This is how ShareMaker works, for a related example.

[Randall_Tam]

Thanks for that suggestion, I will look into that one.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Randall, I just wrote up this method on my blog: http://blog.teknkl.com/use-marketo-lps-as-pdf-templates-with/​

It literally took < 30s for me to hook this up. 

[Randall_Tam]

Hi Sanford,

Does this work only with lead tokens or can I use local tokens?

Thanks,

Randall

[SanfordWhiteman]

Any tokens that work in the LP will work in The PDF version.

[Randall_Tam]

Great thanks,

[Randall_Tam]

Thank you for your help.

[SanfordWhiteman]

This is identical to another question from a couple of weeks ago. Was that also you?

The answer, anyway, is no. But certainly there are a plethora of PDF generation sites/software that you can use.

I also like Ray's take on this.

[Randall_Tam]

Nope not me

[Anonymous]

I had this predicament a few years ago. Then came to the realization that nobody actually needed a PDF certificate.

Depending on how legit-looking you need your certificates to look, I used to just have a certificate email template. I used to work for an edtech company and the teachers needed some proof of professional development hours. These seemed to be sufficient for US high schools and universities. (Note, we were not issuing these as actual CEUs).

I used border lines to outline the certificate, some decorative images in the corners to make it look certificate-like, and some official sounding verbiage, and tokens with Name, Topic, Duration, Date.

So think if you actually need a PDF certificate, or just need something that proves attendance. Email might be sufficient.