Source Tagging Leads That Come In Through Forwared Emails (Not through forward to a friend link)

[Anonymous]

Does anyone have any suggestions for auto source-tagging leads that come into the system through forwarded emails? When email recipients use the forward to a friend token to forward the email, the tag is easy (if entered data base through forward to a friend, the source is email). I am trying to auto-tag leads that enter the system through forwarded emails that don't use the forward to a friend token.

Is there generally a unique identifier that wil indicate a lead can be sourced to email? Some sort of first activity? I'm wondering if anyone else has any ideas.

Thanks,

Steve

[SanfordWhiteman]

If you're talking about forwarded emails with tracked links (the default) a click on the forwarded email is going to be attributed to the known lead who received the email.  That seems to be the principal problem to overcome, no?  If you can segregrate the new lead from the old one it isn't particularly difficult to tell that the click came from an email, for example with utm_medium.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Sanford,

For me the specific challenge is when a new lead clicks on a link in an

email (that was forwarded to him/her) and fills out a form.

We have the new person's name, and I want to make sure that I can

attribute the source of that new name to email as the source. I am using

universal forms.

As I think out loud, I can probably accomplish the source fill using the

URL builder tool. Any other suggestions?

Thanks again,

Steve

[SanfordWhiteman]

If you can get them to fill out a form, that's great.  Until that point, though, their activities.will be logged to the original lead, although they will be retroactively associated with the new lead upon form fillout.

This is a good example of where asking the lead to re-identify themselves, instead of just hiding all forms and trusting their current association, is worth it.  You probably should leave a cookie in the browser if they've re-identified so you don't continually have to do this (mkto_associate_mechanism=form or something like that).

You don't actually need to tag your links in this case since the referrer will be your tracking domain (as long as your LP domain isn't running HTTPS, which will not show you the referrer).

Still, as John said, forwarding is something to live with but not something to recommend.

[John_Clark1]

Hi Stephen,

We actually don't recommend forwarding Marketo emails through anything but the F2F token.  This is because each email is wrapped with tracking information specific to the lead it's sent to, so any lead that may click a forwarded email would get cookied as the original lead.

With that said, there isn't really a way to be absolutely certain of new leads coming from a forwarded email.

John