Alternatives to Forward to Friend?

[ameliamarie]

Hi everyone, 

We recently discovered that Marketo has removed the Forward to Friend functionality, which was a highly requested and successful feature for our teams. 

Our primary use case was:

• A business partner forwards an event invitation to a colleague or client. 
• A new email is sent to that recipient. 
• When the recipient registers, Marketo attributes the registration to the forwarded email (helpful for tracking and reporting). 

Without this feature, we have had issues when people manually forward emails - elements break, tracking becomes unreliable, and attribution is lost. Has anyone found a good workaround or alternative to replicate this functionality? 

Thank you!

[SanfordWhiteman]

The Forward to Friend (FtoF) feature was little more than an automatic autoresponder campaign attached to every email.

If you're familiar with the Marketo API you can build the same thing yourself. However, it will have the same concerns as the original FtoF. If someone gets their hands on a valid mkt_tok for that same email – quite simple once you're in the Marketo db! – they can send it to someone else. Your custom solution might restrict forwards to people at the same corporate domain, which is much, much safer. And it should also credit the original sender in the content (maybe in the From header) instead of letting them hide entirely. But it's still gonna have some gaps. If you're okay with that, go for it!

[ameliamarie]

@SanfordWhiteman You're so insanely proficient in this tool it blows my mind. Thank you for always sharing your insight, it's so helpful.

My initial thought is that I'm not sure if the juice is worth the squeeze if we need to bring in additional dev. 

One of our thoughts would be for our business partners to register for events on behalf of their clients, filling out the registration form with their clients name/email. But in doing so, those clients would also receive reminder and confirmation emails as it's part of the automation in the program. There's concern with that because those clients may not have explicitly opted in to receive emails. 

Any other best practices you can share that could be helpful to discuss with the team?