Questions on event registration forwarding

[peteaxtell1]

I have tried reading various other posts, but am unable to find a definitive answer to this scenario. We are going to run an event with the following setup:

- Add program members with 'invite not sent' status

- Send email to program members with link to landing page/form to enter email/name etc and register attendance

- On submission of form, program member status changes from 'invite not sent' to 'registered'

There will certainly be recipients who forward the email or share the link with colleagues. Using a custom 'forward to a friend' link is not suitable, we have to assume the email or link will be manually shared. 

What I would like to understand is:

1. What happens if the email entered in the form does not match the email that we sent the invite to? 

2. What happens if after clicking the link and filling in the form, the recipient then forwards their email to a colleague who is not part of the program. Does that second submission add a new member to the program? 

3. What happens if someone visits the landing page manually, not having come from the email link, and submits details that match a program member? Does the program member status update correctly? 

I need to make sure that we 

a) make sure anyone who submits the form (whether in the program or not, and whether using the email link or not)  is recorded as having registered

b) no lead email addresses get updated in the database if multiple people submit the form from the same email link

Any help appreciated.

[peteaxtell1]

having tried a few tests, it seems it is entirely based off email address. regardless of whether coming from the email, or going direct to the page, I am seeing:

- if email matches a lead, update the program member status

- if email does not match a lead, add a new lead and update the program member status

this is my preferred behaviour, but goes against what I expected with cookies and the tracking link. perhaps getting confused with how marketo handles activity history and cookies. 

[SanfordWhiteman]

Further to Chelsea's points, I think what might be confusing you is that you can leverage tracked Marketo links to ensure that the original recipient record is the one that fills out the form, but you don't have to.

The default behavior is to associate Clicked Email, and subsequent Visit Web Page and Clicked Link activities, with the recipient unless/until a form is filled out with another email address.

You can pre-fill and lock down/grey out the Email field on your forms, or omit it completely. Then the original recipient will continue to be used. But by default, the Email field is writable by the end user, so naturally a form fill will upsert into a new lead.

[Chelsea_Stinnet]

A few thoughts about your questions...

First, Marketo form fills are tracked using the email address as the record identifier. If a person fills out a form with a different email address than an invite email was sent to, it would be tracked on a different record. If the email address is new to your database, it will create a new record. If the email address exists, it will be a new activity in the existing record with the same email address. Your registered campaign will catch everyone who fills out the registration form in a Fills Out Form trigger if the correct form / landing page are used as trigger constraints and there is no additional filter that someone has to be a member of the program or received the invite email to qualify for the campaign.

For email forwarding, this is tricky in Marketo because if a new recipient clicks a link in a forwarded email without using the "forward to a friend" functionality, Marketo will cookie the new user as the original recipient. All future activity of the new recipient will be tied to that user. If that person then fills out a form with a new email address, their activity will be tied to a new record with the email address inputted in the Marketo form fill.

For your program tracking on this particular event, you can identify form fills from people who were not sent an invite by creating a static list and including a flow step in your registration campaign that adds someone to the static list if they do not have the program status set in the send email campaign. Your next flow step would update their program status to Registered. Program status tracking is dependent on what statuses have been created for the channel you are using, so you may have limitations on what statuses you can assign. With that said, I would recommend using statuses for Invited, Registered, Attended and No Show. 

There's a lot to unpack here, but hopefully this information is helpful! 

[SanfordWhiteman]

Why is your status called Invite Not Sent? That seems wildly misleading – somebody looking at your instance would never assume you had sent them an invite, but that's exactly what you do next.

Typical event statuses are:

- Pending (or just Member)
- Invited
- Registered
- Attended
- No-Show

You can also add more frills like Registered for On-Demand and Attended On-Demand for recorded events.

[SanfordWhiteman]

@peteaxtell1 please return to your thread and check responses.