Email Links, Smart Trigger, and Webinar Registration

[Zach_Batastini1]

So we have ran in to an interesting situation... We sent an email out with a button to register for an upcoming webinar. Because we already have the contacts information in Marketo, we are not asking them to re-submit a form, simply click the "1-Click Registration" button, that then takes to a webinar-confirmation page. I created a trigger to "register" the person for the webinar using the following logic:

"Use all filters"
Opens Email [email name here]

Clicks link [link contains www.linkurl.com]

Visits webpage [contains webinar-confirmation]

Flow
Change program status to registered

As soon as the email went out we noticed an overwhelming number of registrants near instantly...Not consistent to our previous patterns. The webinar has now come and gone, and the attendees about 1/10th of the "registrations." We have reached out to a few of the people who registered to follow up that we have a good relationship with and they are saying they did not register, but in fact even had an out-of-office reply during the times the email was sent..

Does anyone have any idea whats going on? I was fairly confident that having all three filters would avoid the "fake clicks" or "fake opens" by typical email firewalls and such..       

[Ronen-Was-SRpro]

Hi,

Triggers will always be in the option "or", so basically what happened is that if a lead made any action of the three he got registered.

[Zach_Batastini1]

Hmm, so would it be best to have the change program status to be "post" email send using the same criteria?

[Ronen-Was-SRpro]

Our suggestion would be to send an email with a link that will transfer the user to a registration page which will contain a form to fill out and a "register" button (if it is a known lead he will only see the button), after the lead clicks the button on the page he will be transferred to the webinar page and only then marked as registered.

[Anne_Angele1]

When you have multiple triggers, it triggers if ANY of the trigger criteria are met. The any and all options apply to additional filters added after the triggers. If you were to want to continue down this path, you could create one that triggers off of "visits webpage" and then add filters for opened and clicked link, so it will only trigger if someone has visited the webpage after meeting the other criteria.

However, this would make me nervous for a number of reasons - a spam filter CAN click through and show "visits webpage", you could run into issues with cookies, etc. What happens if the email is forwarded and that person wants to register or they want someone else in their org to register? Have you thought about having a simple form with just email address pre-filled so all they have to do is hit submit on the LP so you can trigger off of a form fill still? 

[SanfordWhiteman]

...you could create one that triggers off of "visits webpage" and then add filters for opened and clicked link, so it will only trigger if someone has visited the webpage after meeting the other criteria.

The problem starts with requiring an Opens Email activity, because you'll be falsely exempting people that simply have images disabled.

And, as you say, a mail scanner can issue a headless Visits Web Page.

So we return to the same conclusion for the umpteenth time... it isn't possible to reliably distinguish automated mail scanners from humans using Marketo Smart Lists alone.

As Ronen suggests, the form can contain only a button (although I wouldn't rely Known Visitor HTML here, I would use a form with no fields, because of some tracking quirks of KV HTML).

[SanfordWhiteman]

Zachary, to summarize points Ronen, Anne, and I have made: you cannot offer 1-click anything in 2018. Abandon the (seeming) convenience for the end user as you'll break tracking.