Do you need to gate content offered in outreach emails with forms?

[Anonymous]

Hey all!

Happy Friday!

This may be a silly question, and I think I know the answer but want to 100% confirm - when adding a link to a gated piece of content as a call-to-action in an outreach email, do you need to direct the lead to a landing page with a form first, or can you take them directly to the piece of content? Or, shoud you direct them to a landing page specfic to that piece of content with a direct link and no form?

What are the best practices here? Since we will already have the lead's name and email, we don't need to grab that, but not sure exactly what is necessary to make sure they are cookied for tracking and that tracking is associated with the correct lead.

Hope that all makes sense, thank you in advance for any guidance!
Allison

[Anonymous]

We generally don't gate content when we are promoting it through an email to known leads. We do update the score and buyer journey stage if they click the link though. 

[Anonymous]

Hi Elliott,

Thanks for your response!

What if the leads are only in the database from a list import, and haven't been cookied yet? Do they still need to fill out a form for Marketo to associate any subsequent web activity with their known lead? Or will that automatically happen if they just click on a link in the email to a piece of pdf content?

[Anonymous]

Nope - all they need to do is to click the link to create the cookie.

[Anonymous]

If they're linked directly to the PDF, how is that cookie being served to them if they're not visiting a web page where the cookie gets placed?  Does it matter if the PDF is on Marketo's server (within Design Studio with the other documents/images) or on a non-Marketo server.

[Anonymous]

That's what I'm wondering Dan. Our pdfs are all in Marketo in the Design Studio, so I suppose those links that Marketo creates contain the cookie as well?

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

As I understand it, the cookie will only be served if they click through to a landing page.  The best practice here would be to link directly to a thank you page with a link to the PDF.  This will tie the expected email address (from your list) to the device clicking through, before they then click on the link.  

[Anonymous]

Good point Steven.  The link does need to go to a web page with munchkin in order for the recipient to be cookied. 

[Anonymous]

Great, thank you Steven. That is exactly how I had hoped to be able to handle this. Many thanks everyone for your assistance!