Double-Opt-In process: What's the best trigger - click link or visit web page?

[Michael_Florin]

Hello all,

I usually don't like it when trigger actions are based on "Clicks Links in Email" or "Visits Web Page". But for a double opt-in process where a person has to click a link that says "Please confirm your email address here", I see no other way.

These links usually lead to a Marketo Landing Page, so "Clicks Link" and "Visit Web Page" should be functionally identical. Yet I see pretty regularly that e.g. "Visit Web Page" occurs in the Activity History, but "Clicks Link" does not. Or "Clicks Link" is delayed - in my current case even by ~20 minutes.

What would you recommend to use as the trigger for this case? Clicks Link, Visit Web Page or even both? Or something else entirely?

Thanks!
Michael

[Darshil_Shah1]

This is definitely a gray area! If I would have to make a choice today, I would consider choosing "Clicks Link in Email" trigger with "Is Bot Activity" constraint set to False (assuming bot filtering is on, and bot activities are logged). Adding in a filter for the "Visited Web Page" activity would help, but there's a chance that this may prevent genuine people (who clicked and visited the webpage) from flowing through the campaign due to delay at Marketo's part to log the visit web page activities. There's a hacky way to keep people in a wait step for some time and then check if they visited the web-page before updating the Double E-mail opt in to True, while this can be helpful to a certain extent but, as you would guess this certainly isn't 100% accurate too - there are scanners that can follow the web-page from the email link and log the Munchkin hit. 

I think, a better and more resilient solution is to have the user submit a form on the webpage. The form can just have a single email address field visible to user and a hidden Double Email Opt in field set to TRUE. With prefill enabled, Marketo's native prefilling can take care of auto-filling the email address for the person coming in from the tracked email link. Given that prefilling works as expected, it'd certainly take an extra click for the user to confirm their email preferences in this process, but I believe this process is more reliable and trustworthy. 🙂

[Jo_Pitts1]

@Darshil_Shah ,

your approach with a pre-filled form is exactly the approach I take as well.  That solution get's my vote.

An potentially interesting extension of that would be a hidden form on the landing page, with code to force the submit under the hood.  That way there is no additional friction for the user, but you still get a (fairly immediate) event coming in about the form fill.  Thoughts?

Cheers

Jo

[Darshil_Shah1]

Good thought, Jo! Submitting form via JS did come to  my mind too, but I'm and have been a little skeptical in implementing that - if the email scanners could possibly execute the JS on the linked webpage (I know not all scanners do that at present, but the most advanced ones could possibly do), the entire setup would essentially fall apart and fail to serve its purpose in the first place. These email scanners are gonna get more sophisticated and advanced over time!

[Michael_Florin]

Thank you for your thoughts!

So I'll stick with the clicks email trigger for now. Although I certainly agree that fills out form is the more stable trigger, I don't want to send my customers to another form submit. Also, it would be very much out of the realm of the expected behavior for DOI, as everybody bases this on the click.

Probably I got a little anxious as there were a couple of service degradation recently in the EMEA realm.

May 12, 2022 12:36 PM (UTC+2)

Marketo customers (Netherlands and Australia Datacenters) may notice that "email clicks" and "open email" are not being recorded in the Activity log in Marketo UI.

[Darshil_Shah1]

Cool, glad we could shed some light! 🙂

Over the time, I've tried coming up with solutions that rely less on visits/clicks (can't eliminate them 100%, but can definitely try avoiding them wherever possible). 

[Tmosco23]

Curious on an update on how this is working for you if you're willing to share. I just went through a similar process at my new company to push a double opt-in across our instance. 

I started off with just using clicks on the email, but I then defaulted to the single field (email) form submission for a more solid confirmation.

[SanfordWhiteman]

You're doing the right thing, although you don't actually need the Email Address if someone is clicking a tracked Marketo link to get there.  You can have just the confirmation button - or even have the button echo the person's Email Address, like

Yes, opt in sandy@figureone.com

[Darshil_Shah1]

Any day, the form post approach is guranteed to be more accurate about the actual human double-opting-in than the email clicks (even with the bot filter turned on)!

Sandy, I loved the idea of adding the email address token in the form's submit button, makes it very intuitive! Thank you for sharing. 🙂