Social Sharing in Emails

[Anonymous]

Please disregard, it's a strange function, or lack thereof, in the share window that pops up - I tested the share and it worked!

Thanks for this tool - MUCH better than trying to manually update these URLs

[Anonymous]

Hi Michelle -

I'm glad you found my tool helpful.  It was born of my sheer frustration at trying to update the share URLs manually!  I completely agree the share functionality in emails should be baked into Marketo, but this works in the interim even though it requires a good bit of extra work.

[Michael_Sogunro]

Hi Evan,

Thanks for sharing your tool. I really appreciate it.

Our emails include links to various blog posts, events, reports, etc. I want to be able to give my subscribers the opportunity to share the email, not just a link to one blog post, event, or report. With ExactTarget we're able to run reports on how often the share feature is used and we know its used a lot by our subscribers.

How can I include an option for our subscribers to share the entire email?

[Anonymous]

Hi Michael -

I have tried and tried to figure out how to do that, but haven't succeeded yet.  The only way I can think to do it is by using the "View as web page" link. However, that URL is email-specific and dynamically generated by a token, and I cannot get it to work when it's within the Share code.  Using {{system.viewAsWebpageLink}} as the URL creates a working Share link, but the URL generated does not contain the email-specific portion - the Share URL is only your Marketo domain URL.  In other words, instead of "http://info.mycompany.com/index.php/email/emailWebview?mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRojvq3IZKXonjHpfsX56O4pW..." which would take you to the web version of your email, only "http://info.mycompany.com" shows up.

I'm still hammering away at it, so if I ever come up with a solution, I'll let you know!

[SanfordWhiteman]

I have tried and tried to figure out how to do that, but haven't succeeded yet.  The only way I can think to do it is by using the "View as web page" link. However, that URL is email-specific

... and lead-specific!  I'd say you're lucky you didn't get this to work.  The possibility of data leakage is huge. I think even a mild customization like "Dear Evan" is not something I'd want in the shared page.

It would, in theory, be possible to delimit parts of the email you don't want to be public (think class="per-lead"). Then build a service that strips that content out on the fly, attempting to revert to a template-like view.  But if you have the dev skills for that, it'd probably be easier to build something that straight-up reads the template content via Marketo API.

[Anonymous]

Wow, Sanford - I am lucky indeed I never succeeded in getting this to work. I can't believe I didn't think of the URL being lead-specific.  Thank you so much for pointing it out!

[SanfordWhiteman]

I have a solution. Oh man, do I have a solution.  DM me and I'll show you a demo of the mighty ​ShareMaker.

[Anonymous]

Hi Michael,

This sounds like the Forward to a Friend option might work for you.

It allows the email to be forwarded on in a way that resets the lead information so nothing from the original recipient is passed on (other than in the back end where the leads are connected through that feature), and you can collect new lead information (be aware of CAN SPAM if you reside in Canada or your recipients are likely to forward to anyone in Canada).

By having the Forward to a Friend feature enabled, recipients can share the entire email with others (via email); I don't imagine that anyone would want to share the entire email on social, for example - outside of the lead information sharing, it's not really good form to share in that medium anyways.

Just a thought!

Michelle

[SanfordWhiteman]

Sharing the latest issue of a newsletter isn't good form?

[Anonymous]

You would share it as the newsletter email itself though - not as a post on social for example.

You might share PARTS of the newsletter on social etc, in which case, you might want to use that link generator that Evan created, or even something like Click to Tweet that allows you to choose select pieces of text for readers to share on Twitter.

Hope that clarifies