outlook add-in - false positives if opening messages from sent box?

[Anonymous]

I have some of our inside sales team using the Marketo for Outlook Plug-In.  I also have Marketo set up to send them alerts if a lead opens or clicks one of these emails.  

One concern they have is that they are triggering "false positives" when opening these emails in their sent folder in Outlook.

Here's a use case:

They want to ping someone that they sent a message to last week – and when they ping them, they want to have the original message underneath my ping.
 

So, they go find the message in their sent folder, open it, add their comments / ping to the top of the message, and send again.

Every time they do this, will it trigger an “open” alert?  

Has anyone else run into this issue?  Is there a way to block or gate the alert send action by IP address, so we can exclude opens by our company's internal IP addresses?

I think I found a solution.  I can use the "inferred company is not" choice on the alert send action itself.  Hmm... Maybe not.

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

We've had the same issue - every time the email loads, it counts as an open, regardless of whether its in an Inbox or Sent. Suppressing your inferred company would keep alerts from going out, but you might consider setting up a counter (it would work just like lead scoring) that shows them the number of times the most recent email to a lead was opened. I imagine getting a count of opens is better than getting an alert for each open.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Ouch!  I had never noticed this, but was able to reproduce it.  This is a big issue and I don't think there is anything we can do since the Open / Click tracking is automatic. 

Which brings up another problem we have.  More often than I would like, after sending an email using Send and Track in Outlook, the sender not only opens the sent email, but they click the decorated links in the sent email, which then causes all of the sender's subsequent online activities on our website to be added to the original recipient's lead record.

It would be great if Marketo would provide an option to not enable open and click tracking on the sent email.  David - will you add an Idea for this?

[Anonymous]

Hi Elliot and Eric,

I'm glad to know I'm not the only one seeing this.  I will submit the idea of disabling the open and click tracking from the sent box in outlook.  

Hopefully they can run a "sent by vs opened by" rule and if they are identical (maybe off of IP information) they can suppress the tracking action.  

We have a counter set up that shows in SFDC how many opens and clicks.  But, my worry is that the sales team will look at this, get disenchanted by false information, and ignore it as a habit.

Thanks again for the great suggestions and input.

[Anonymous]

Has this still not been looked into in more detail by Marketo? This is a major disappointment, after spending so much money on this software, is there anything we can do to stop these false opens??

Many thanks,
Aaron C

[Anonymous]

Bumping this thread. This is a huge issue for us as well.

Can someone from Marketo product please address this?

[Kelly_Schmid3]

Any update on this? We're experiencing the same issue.

[Peter_1_Kim]

Just wanted to add to this thread as this has become a big issue for us. This issue has pretty much rendered the new Sales Insight Email Performance Reporting functionality useless for us as it is a common practice among our Inside Sales reps to locate the message in their sent folder, open it, add their new message to the top of the original message, and send again. We've been seeing unbelievable open rates and realized that this issue was overinflating the numbers.

[Ada_Okoli]

We are experiencing the same issue. For now, I just told my colleagues not to open sent email - However, its not a viable solution in the long run. Is there any other way to solve this problem?