Refer A Colleague On Landing Page?

[Anonymous]

I am trying to set up a way for contacts who register for a webcast to be able to invite their colleagues from within the redirected "thank you for registering" page.

What I originally planned to do was, on the "thank you for registering page", include a new form that contacts can fill out to give us the information we need to invite their colleagues. I created new fields (Referral First Name and Referral Last Name) and also ask for "Colleague's Email Address" (using the standard "Email Address" field).  My original thought was that since the original referrer would be typing in a new email address in the email field, this would theoretically create a new lead, and then I could use smart campaigns to fill in first name/last name from the Referral First Name/Last name fields. This would trigger an email that goes out to the new lead, referencing the original referrer's name.

I have discovered that this won't work, because the information that the original referrer writes in to invite their colleague doesn't create a new lead -- instead, the email address information just overwrites the email address info that we previously had. Is this expected behavior? If so, are there any other suggestions or practices you use to enable this "invite a colleague" functionality after a form fill?

Thanks for any insights!

Steve

[Chris_Johnston]

It is expected behavior. The way that Marketo tracks is through cookies and updating the e-mail field will always overwrite it. The way to do this is to have the person share the sign up form, via e-mail, via social ect and have the colleague sign up for themselves.

[Sara_Greaves]

Dayna Lessig​ did a campaign that sounds similar to this. Maybe she can help you out.

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

Hey Steve, long time no speak!

The answer here is to follow the well-established Referral Form pattern.  If you search the Community you'll find a wide discussion and this blog post is instructive (the code is somewhat bizarre-looking, but thanks to quirks in the Forms 2.0 API, it works).

[SanfordWhiteman]

... and you can also build a more expansive ​bidirectional ​referral form, where the referrer gets credit for the referral(s) they make, and the referrals get a back-reference to the referrer that invited them. Takes some more JS work but the result is nice to have.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the tip Sanford! Long time, no speak indeed!

I will give this a shot and see how it turns out. I appreciate your help!

Have a great holiday!