Contact owner approves adding person to program via alert email?

[Marc_Asmus]

I'm trying to build a nurture program that will send a series of survey solicitation emails. I'll run a batch campaign to identify people who should be added to the nurture program. The emails will be sent from the person's contact owner. However, our contact owner's are in and out of the office on vacation, sabbaticals, maternity leaves, etc. We don't want to send the survey emails from that owner if they are away. And, I don't want to take responsibility for tracking who is in or out of the office and when.

So, I'm interested in creating a process by which the person's contact owner gets an email alert when the person is eligible for the survey nurture program. Then the contact owner must "approve" adding the person to the nurture program before the person starts receiving the survey solicitations.

The contact owners don't work in Marketo and it's important that the approval process is very easy for the contact owner. I'm hoping there's a way to do this where I include 2 links in the alert email and all the contact owner has to do is click one or the other ("yes, add <John Doe> to the survey program" or "no, don't add <John Doe> to the survey program).

Is it possible to execute such an "approval" process with Marketo?

Context: our Marketo instance is synced with Salesforce.

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

It's absolutely possible! This is merely a form of the Referral Form pattern -- where Referrer A can fill out a form on behalf of Referral B, and Referral B runs through the resultant Filled Out Form trigger and related workflows.

In your case, you would pass the email address of the referral in the query string, then use that to populate the Email field on the form.

If you search here for "referral form" you'll see a number of threads on this. It requires a small amount of JavaScript but is not particularly complex.

[Marc_Asmus]

Sanford Whiteman​ - thanks for the reply and for giving me the vocabulary to tackle this challenge. I'll dig in to the referral form pattern and post back here if I can share anything of benefit for the community.

[Meghana_Rao1]

Is it possible to have a Marketo smart campaign (that could add a lead to a program) trigger off of the contact owner clicking into the alert email (not an actual lead clicking into a regular email)? I've just tested it and it doesn't seem to work but I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has had managed to pull that off.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Sure (if the link goes to a Referral Form that is auto-submitted). But you don't want to do this because mail scanners (including your own) are perfectly capable of emulating this behavior. You want to require a human interaction, that's why "Confirm" buttons aren't creating needless friction but are needed for such cases.  When I see "one-click" anything in the wild I know people aren't accounting for scanners.