Link to previous email

[Meredith_Galliv]

I am sending out an email in which I need to reference back to a previous email. What is the best way to link to that email?

[SanfordWhiteman]

You mean link to, for example, the View as Web Page view for another email? Can you please be specific about what you're trying to offer to recipients of the email?

[Meredith_Galliv]

I am sending an email out where I reference an email sent out previously, let's give it a send date of Feb. 28. I'd like to link to the Feb. 28 email so I don't have to repeat content. I had been doing this by opening the Feb. 28 email in View in Browser and using the link or saving the page as HTML and loading as a document. However, that does not seem to be working now. I get an error saying, "Cannot get email content- Customer does not belong to any POD." I've seen posts about this issue elsewhere, when trying to test in sample emails, which is also happening. I'm just wondering if there's a way for me to link to old emails and get around this error which seems to be causing issues for many.

[SanfordWhiteman]

I had been doing this by opening the Feb. 28 email in View in Browser and using the link or saving the page as HTML and loading as a document.

That was always a bad idea because if you took Lead A's old link and sent to all Lead A, Lead B, and Lead C that would have catastrophic effects on tracking. After the recent change, the link is "neutered" immediately after loading by stripping the personalized info from the URL, which is perhaps more punitive than we'd like but if it stops people from doing what you were doing it's worth it.

The only safe way to do what you're trying to do, as far as I know, is to use something like ShareMaker.

Or of course you can open the view-source of a View As Web Page link (I mentioned this elsewhere, prepend view-source: to the URL before pasting it into your location bar and you will get to the raw HTML) and save that offline.

[Meredith_Galliv]

Sanford Whiteman​ it is very apparent I do not have as much experience as you do using Marketo and I am fully willing to admit that. But I would never respond to someone asking for help in such a belittling way.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Don't see what you're seeing in my response. I provided 2 unique solutions for your problem, and the second (prepending view-source:) lets you get direct access to the HTML you need to create a separate HTML snapshot of the earlier email. I didn't expect you to figure that out on your own, that's why I told you about it!

As noted in the official Support article on the subject (this isn't my view, it's merely the technical fact) forwarding View as Web Page links from other people always killed tracking -- not to mention the closely linked privacy concern -- so it never really worked.

[Sant_Singh_Rath]

You can upload your email in the design studio and then use the url in the second email. When that person will click on the that link, this email will be downloaded. You can also convert the email in pdf file and then upload it. Which will help with different outlook file compatibility.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Well yes, but the prerequisite is getting a rendered version of the original email in order to download it and re-upload it as static HTML. For which the View as Web Page view is the most suitable, but it no longer works by default.

[Cody_Stubben]

Hi Sant,

How do I upload it to the design studio where I can pull a URL or how do I convert it to a PDF?

[SanfordWhiteman]

What's your exact expectation of the saved HTML?

The problem, as described above and elsewhere, is if you take your saved HTML from an email that was sent to a particular person in your db — and especially if the links were tracked, as is the default — then the saved HTML is going to be associated with that lead.

If you use a relatively "neutral" internal lead to generate the email, that's slightly better, but the links are still tracked to that person, they're not generic.

The way to get generic links is to (a) copy the original href for every <a> to a custom attribute data-href, then (b) replace all the hrefs in your saved HTML with the data-href. That makes a generic saved email that's safe to share.