Can we track if someone forwarded a marketo email?

[Olya_Zenchenko]

Hi Marketo community,

I'm just wondering if there's a way to track if someone forwarded an email that we sent? My email has a link to pdf, but we dont have 'forward to a friend' option, can we still track it?

Thanks.

Olya

[SanfordWhiteman]

No, you can't track that someone hit the built-in Forward button in their mail client.

Note, however, that clicked links in an email forwarded in this way, and subsequent web activity, will be tracked to the original recipient. So if you have a form behind the CTA and you give people a prominent Not You? link, you can detect which people saw someone else's info at first.

[Olya_Zenchenko]

Thank you Sanford. So apart from the option suggested, what is the best practice to capture those 'email forwards'?

[Ruth_Baucom]

One option is by using Litmus Analytics. However, when I used this at a previous company, we had overall data on each brand we marketed; we didn't set it up to track every campaign/program. Therefore, it might not be a good solution if you're trying to see how many forwards an individual email gets.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Litmus can track how many different email clients open the same email. But it can't truly isolate forwards from that figure, AFAIK.

[Denise_Greenb12 · Accepted solution]

Hi Olya -

Are you using Marketo Forward to a Friend link in your emails? That doesn't stop someone from using the built-in Forward button in their mail client but if you make it prominent I suspect a lot of people who wanted to forward the email would use it - and that can be tracked.

Denise