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?

SanfordWhiteman

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

😁

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

It’s a tough situation because when used non-maliciously and legally, referral programs can work. And they work even if the referrer transparently benefits (with a % of revenue), as long as the referral gets value from the product/service. They’re just easy to use maliciously as well.

I think the best setup puts everything upfront: <Person> referred you at <timestamp> based on your shared interest in <product>. We’d like to contact you further but want to ensure <Person> wasn’t mistaken. Click here to confirm you want to receive emails about <product>.

And if they don’t confirm within say 3 days, don’t let them be referrals for anyone in the future, just to be safe.

But that’s still far from foolproof.* Can you have your partners, assuming they’re vetted, provide you with a list of their clients’ domains so you only allow those through?

* To be fair, if you have any forms that use implicit opt-in, including
event registration forms, those can be “gamed” in the same way.

ameliamarie

Thank you @SanfordWhiteman

I think your idea with the referral form and opt-in is an interesting approach - I'll definitely bring it up to the team for discussion.

As for collecting domains ahead of time, I think that would work well in theory but tricky in practice. Many of our referrals happen on short notice, and while I could see this working for internal scenarios (someone realizing a colleague wasn't on the original invite list and quickly sharing it), it would be difficult for external contacts. There would be too many steps for them, which could lead to frustration.

I can foresee feedback coming in like "We sent a referral to X but they didn't receive it" only to find out it was blocked because the domain wasn't pre-approved. The domains would change from event to event depending on location/audience.

Another idea we've bounced around (I think we've discussed this in the past) was a section on our form where a business partner can enter the emails for those they want to sign up on their behalf, then they would get added to the list inside of Marketo. We could create a Smart Campaign that would label them as a referral.