Personalized URLs

[hermana]

Hi All, 

My team would like to send an email to around 1400 with a personalized link to register for an event. The link is unique to each person. Does anyone have any insights on this topic? Is it best to import the list with their name, emails and link? Are there any custom tokens that worked for others? In there a character count for personalized URLs in custom tokens? I was reading other articles it was recommended to be around 225.

Thank you.

[SanfordWhiteman]

When you send emails using Marketo, by default every link is automatically personalized via the addition of the mkt_tok query param. Therefore, if the link is to a Marketo-hosted Landing Page, there's no need to do anything, as pages can use {{lead.tokens}} and {{company.tokens}} specific to that user.

If you're sending people to a non-Marketo LP, every Marketo lead has a unique value {{lead.Marketo Unique Code}} which is always safe to include in a URL (doesn't require URL-encoding, you can just do ?uq={{lead.Marketo Unique Code}}). Then if the remote website has a list of leads and their unique codes, it can display relevant content.

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I was reading other articles it was recommended to be around 225.

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There's no such limit.

[hermana]

@SanfordWhiteman Following up, I see what you are saying each link by default is personalized, but the content on each landing page is personalized for the individual person. I need to make sure the correct link is sent to the person. Is there a token you recommended? Thank you. 

[SanfordWhiteman]

We don't have enough information about your environment yet to answer.

What exact user data does the page use for personalization? That's the data you need to pass. And is it a Marketo LP (I'm guessing not)?

[saralott]

Correct, it's not to a marketo LP. 

The page is personalized for each email address including their company name, address, etc. It's a contract/exhibit form page that already has basic details filled out to try to help with exhibit conversions. 

We have a list of 1,400 targets (email addresses) each tied to a custom URL where we want to drive them to. Is this possible using a Custom Object? Or possible to do dynamically in the email editor?

[SanfordWhiteman]

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We have a list of 1,400 targets (email addresses) each tied to a custom URL where we want to drive them to.

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See, this still isn't clear. What's "custom" about the URL? Does it expect some specific single query param, like contractid=12345? Or is the pathname (i.e. /path/to/filename.html) different for every lead?

Can you please give concrete examples of two such URLs, so I can see how they differ across leads?

Because it sort of sounds like what you want is cross-domain pre-fill which you can set up using my widely used guide. But then it also sounds like your webserver already is hard-coded to expect a specific URL structure, but it's not clear what that structure is.

P.S. There wouldn't be any advantage to Custom Objects, they would only make things much more complex.

[saralott]

I see what you're saying now, thanks. 

Here are 3 example URLs: 

The unique-ness is in the query I believe, it's not a pathname

. 

https://events.nrf.com/summer2021/Public/e_boothsales.aspx?Li=~oFG8FRAcphNkedU3GG9dIBonIgmnAXRHI7O3E...

https://events.nrf.com/summer2021/Public/e_boothsales.aspx?Li=~omMMCpmTGV1Ej4CDAKdezgoDUOcSGzNRs9vyp...

https://events.nrf.com/summer2021/Public/e_boothsales.aspx?Li=~L2wF6v8uPY5iqpWkHFR8Rizry8IVuhdvbLOmY...

[SanfordWhiteman]

OK, so where do all those Li pararameters live? Are they somewhere in Marketo already? Or in (say) a Sheet, or in another system, or... ?

[saralott]

They live in an excel sheet, the data does not live in Marketo. The data/URLs were pulled from a third part platform, the unique parts are an encrypted CoID (LI=...)

[SanfordWhiteman]

OK! Now we're approaching the actual requirements.

If those values are already guaranteed to be URL-safe — the 3 examples you provided are indeed URL-safe — then you should

• create a custom String field Last Encrypted CoID
• export the Email Address and the corresponding value from Excel as a CSV
• import the list into Marketo

That'll merge the field into the database, (using Email Address as the lookup key).  Then you can include Li={{Lead.Last Encrypted CoID}} in your URLs.