Sept Release: Shorter URLs affects

[Anonymous]

In regards to the following update in the September release:

• Shorter URLs – email URLs have been given a trim to be click friendly to the recipient, while preserving all tracking functionality

Note:  Any link in an email sent out prior to the September release will stop working 90 days after this release
 

We actually see a decent amount of activity trickle in from past emails that have been sitting in someone's Inbox for a few months... even up to a year or more. (Makes sense when you focus on content marketing and people keep these messages or clean out their Inboxs and have a moment of interest due to the value they perceive.) We'd hate to miss out on these chance Opportunities, especially since it's from money/time already invested.

Is there a way to address this problem?

[Anonymous]

Posted idea, because I'm not sure how to escalate this to the product team in time. Those who are concerned, please vote:

http://community.marketo.com/MarketoIdeaDetail?id=08750000000J0QFAA0

[Anonymous]

Thank you Erik! Perfect.

[Anonymous]

@Joy - The new type of link happens automatically when the emails are sent out. You don't have to do anything to the emails themselves in Marketo, anything sent once you have short URLs enabled will be sent with the new style links.

No need to go editing or making drafts that might mess up your Nurture campaign.

[Anonymous]

I echo the concerns of some other customers above. We have some emails where this won't affect much, but we have some other emails whereby we'd like the links to stay active for longer than 90 days.

Question for an employee: If we go back into a current email (say in our engagement/nurturing program), can I update all links, save the draft, and it'll now have the short URL? I'd hate to see this mess up the 9 emails already in our nurture/engagement stream. Thanks!

[Anonymous]

We are DEEPLY concerend and have spoken with Marketo support about this.
From our point of view - 90 days is an unacceptable period; we are concerend that people click on links in old email messages and land on a 404 error page.

[Anonymous]

We echo the concern of lost oppurtunities here.

[Anonymous]

We too would like to see it increased by a few months.
Also, what would happen if someone clicked on an old link? A 404 error, a redirect somewhere - this is not explained at all. 

[Anonymous]

We also have traffic from emails sent many months back.  I'm concerned about the 90 days as well.

[Anonymous]

Appreciate the response Erik, but that doesn't really address the concern at hand. We're talking about the actual value of post 90-day activity we are getting from many months or even years of distributed email content. Will Marketo consider extending the 90 day period?

[Anonymous]

The vast majority of email link traffic dies off after three days, based on our analysis. Increasing it to 90 days gives us a large buffer on top of that.

With the new shorter URLs we need to sunset the old style links, both for consistency and because there are some security concerns that had been raised with the old style links.

[Anonymous]

We are also concerned with the drop of functional links after 90 days - we have a lot of historical click through that comes in 90 + day

[Anonymous]

I was curious about this too, thanks for the post!

[Anonymous]

Agreed. We still get clicks every day from newsletters we sent out back in March, April, May, etc. It's going to be chaos for our client relations team to deal with suddenly broken links in old emails that people still use.