Forward to Friend Variation

[Hank_Hansen]

The Forward to a Friend fields capture name and email info but this feature does not allow the sender to enter a customized message to the recipient referal.

As a workaround, I was thinking about simply adding "refer a friend" text/button to the email which would link to a page on our site with an embedded Marketo form fill. This would ask for the referal name and email and a custom field for a message to be included in the email. The message text field would be used to populate the email sent to the referal (triggered from the form fill). The message text field might even default suggested text which could be edited by the sender in the form before submitting.

It would be made clear to both parties that the recipient referal would not receive any further unsolicited emails after the intial referal email.

Are there any faults with this approach? Is this not advisable since the form fill that populates the new lead record is completed by the existing lead and their associated munchkin activity would populate the new lead record?

[Alex_Stanton1 · Accepted solution]

Hank, you could test your approach but it might break all the reporting connected to the "refer a friend: functionality that is described in this article: 'Forward to a Friend Link' in Emails - Marketo Docs - Product Docs. ​

You are right to think that the munchkin would tag the referrer, which also poses its own set of problems. You could remove the tracking code from that specific page - more info here: Stop Cookie Tracking on 1 Marketo landing page 

[SanfordWhiteman]

Actually, removing the tracking code from the referral page will not suffice (I've tried to make this point a lot, but it keeps getting lost because of so many related questions).  Any preexisting cookie will be sent with the form -- per the definition of how browsers + cookies work.  You need additional JavaScript special sauce to fix this.

Details here: Can you have landing pages that *don't* track?

I'll be giving a talk at the August NYC MUG in which I'll go over the proper path to a referral form, so if anybody's in the area, come on down!

[Hank_Hansen]

Thanks for the replies. I think we'll stick with the default functionality.

[Alex_Stanton1]

Brilliant!

[Josh_Hill13]

Sanford Whiteman​ did you post this talk somewhere?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Slides are here​ but there's no video or audio, alas.