External Unsubscribe Page in Email HTML Message

[Anonymous]

Is it possible to set up the HTML Message in the Email Admin section to point to an external unsubscribe page? We built an unsubscribe preference center in our CMS and we would like to point to that and have that be the URL that shows up in the footer for all email templates. Is this possible or does it have to be a Marketo landing page?

I've been trying to follow this documentation: Edit the Unsubscribe Message - Marketo Docs - Product Documentation  and it doesn't say anything about it having to be a Marketo URL, but a lot of articles in the community seem to make it sound that way.

Thanks!

Courtney

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Courtney,

You can put any URL you want, but you will kill your Marketo email unsub stats.

And also, you have to pay a lot of attention on how you reimport that data in Marketo for future emailing.

All in all, I really do not recommend to do this. Marketo is an excellent book of records for unsubscription, thanks to the durable unsubscribe and to the way the activity are logged and cannot be tempered with.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Hi Greg,

Thanks for getting back to me. Why exactly would unsubscribes not be tracked if it's just an external URL that is on our CMS, but the page has the munchkin tracking code and it is using an embedded Marketo form on the page to submit the unsubscribes? I feel like since those two things are in place, I'm not exactly understanding why unsubscribes wouldn't be tracked just because the page is hosted on our CMS and not within Marketo. What am I missing on this exactly?

Thanks for helping me to understand.

Courtney

[Amy_Goldfine]

Hi Courtney,

I think what Greg means is that you lose the activity "unsubscribed from email" (unless someone unsubs directly from their email provider inbox). We have our own email preference center on a non-Marketo OP. Our developer coded it so that it updates all records with matching email addresses when someone changes subscription preferences or unsubscribes. But it is just dawning on me that maybe our email unsubscribe metrics are not accurate if Marketo can't track unsubscribes from a non-Marketo LP. Going to have to look into this myself!

~ Amy

[SanfordWhiteman]

Don't worry, you can get unsubscribes tied back to the specific originating email -- as long as your external Marketo form is constructed correctly.

You can't proxy the change to the ​Unsubscribed ​field via another field, and you can't set ​Unsubscribed ​in a flow.  It needs to be set to true directly from the form. And you need to ensure the mkt_tok ​is not stripped off the URL for any reason.

I think the far bigger problem with 3rd-party pref centers is that they don't, um, actually load preferences.  That's a curious user experience to say the least. Of course, if you Pre-Fill....

[Amy_Goldfine]

We actually use our own forms and the API for forms (which I realize is not the norm for most instances). Our preference center loads the preferences when they visit the page. But I do think that means we are missing the unsubscribe activity.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Meaning the REST API?  Gah, bad idea... and yes, you will not get the email that provoked the unsubscribe that way.

Why are you doing it this way (with the DoS vulnerability and no upside)?

[Amy_Goldfine]

Our web developer does not feel that Marketo forms are reliable. It was a decision made long before I got here. Our company specializes in network monitoring and we are extremely diligent about security, so I'm sure that we are preventing/mitigating any DDoS issues.

I do know that we definitely cut down on bot form fills this way.

[SanfordWhiteman]

I'm sure that we are preventing/mitigating any DDoS issues.

It's actually impossible to do so: you don't have enough REST API calls in a day for that.  Marketo forms are massively more scalable, orders of magnitude more, than a REST API-based external form. Guarantee I could halt service to your forms now and couldn't if they were standard forms... just FYI.

At any rate, now you know the other things you sacrifice this way.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Sanford, this is really helpful. So I do have the unsubscribe set up correctly where it's being marked directly in the form. With that being said, how exactly would I configure the HTML code in the admin section so that it shows up correctly in the footer for every email and drives them to the correct URL that's on our CMS?