Drive smart campaigns on first click in a roundup email?

[Evan_Kubitschek]

Hi,

I'm relatively new to Marketo's smart campaign functionality, and we're working through a training program roundup email backed by automated drip campaigns.

Here's the 1st email.​

What I'd like to do is segment the recipients of this email by "Clicks Link in Email," based on just their first click.

Once they've clicked on one of our program links, they'd be entered into a smart campaign that's looking for that specific link click, driving a second email 5 days later:

The complicating factor is, I'd like to lock them out of all the other smart campaigns for the programs linked in the first email, once they've clicked that first link.

Right now my best guess solution is using a "Member of Smart Campaign" choice in the "Send Email" step that locks out every other program, so that the prospect would only receive one smart campaign at a time, based on the one they were entered into on the first click action in the email:

Is there a more elegant solution for achieving this that I'm missing? I'm familiar with simpler batch campaigns and easy triggers, but having to contend with ​only​ the first click on an email link driving a smart campaign, while locking them out of all other paths, is vexing me!

[SanfordWhiteman]

I would back away from ​anything ​that relies on click tracking in the current landscape, since you're going to have mail scanners clicking links on behalf of unwitting humans.

[Evan_Kubitschek]

Thanks Sanford! This issue wasn't even on my radar until you brought it up.

I did some digging and saw this thread​ around using "Visited Webpage" rather than "Clicked Link in Email" as a trigger could reduce some of the link scanner false positives - thought with your response there too. Have there been any changes that you've seen since you weighed in on that thread?

We're looking to reduce email volume around individual training programs for a particular business unit and these automated follow up campaigns were our compromise. I'm bummed to hear that we can't utilize this functionality without catching a bunch of false positives!

[Dan_Stevens_]

Evan, have a look here as well: [Shared Blog]: I Want to Believe, But: Your Email Link Clicks Aren’t Real

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Evan,

The change is that the situation with email click reliability is getting worse every month.

Vote here:

-Greg