Avoid link instrumentation in emails

[Anonymous]

We put a lot of energy into building invite emails in Marketo and we use them there for various list blasts. The invites link back to a Marketo landing page with a form. When the links are instrumented that user's info shows up pre-populated (and the munchkin cookie is wired to that lead record).

The problem is that our employees get these emails and copy/paste them to prospects with instrumented links. When the prospect clicks the links in those email the mkt_tok is wired to our employee and their info shows up pre-populated. This is bad! I want to encourage proper behavior but I can't figure out what proper behavior is in this scenario.

Here are some thoughts I've had so far:

• Copy/paste emails from Marketo is always evil
• Sending an email from Sales Insight is the preferred approach
• The new "forward to a friend" feature is useless in this scenario because it does not strip the instrumented links
• The Send Test feature is useless because it instruments the links for whoever you send to

I'm left with two less-than-ideal options to preach to my team for this scenario:

• Build a second email template from scratch outside of Marketo
• Drop down to the html level and strip out all marketo link instrumentation

Has anyone come up with a better solution?

[Anonymous]

Hi David,

Something that I have done in the past is to create two versions of the email we are sending out, one is the normal email and one has all the links with mktNoTrack set as the class for all links. By setting the links to mktNoTrack, Marketo does not add the tracking code to the links.

Then in my flow steps I use:
Send Email
Add choice: If email contains @mydomain
Send the email with mktNoTrack on links
Default: send normal email

This way your staff can forward the email they receive freely.

I understand that this is not an ideal soluton, but it took us a while to get the sales team up and running with sales insight. This workaround only added about an extra 3-5 minutes.

[Anonymous]

I think Thomas' approach is your best bet here.

If you wanted to get super complicated you might be able to create a test lead with an email address that forwards to you. You could then do a send test to that email address and have something special in your forms (Javascript) to clear that leads info if it sees it.

-Erik