Testing email unsubscribe activities

[Anonymous]

I'm trying to test our handling for unsubscribe events in Marketo. Currently we're polling and caching all activities for all leads in our CRM which works fine.

I setup an unsubscribe test campaign in our sandbox. It's just a form on a landing page that allows me to enter my lead's email address and unsubscribe. The smart list is a Fills Out Form action pointing to the correct form and the flow action is Change Data Value setting the attribute Unsubscribed to true.

I filled out the form, went to the lead in the Marketo database, checked that the unsubscribe value was false (unchecked) then went to the activity log tab to verify.

This is where I am confused: when I poll the activity types from the API, I found "Person unsubscribed from Marketo Emails" so that's the type I'm looking for. However, this never comes in from Marketo and the activity log in the lead database has the activity type as Change Data Value (as expected from the flow). The only activity types coming down from the API for this lead are 'Change a Status in an program progression' and 'Call a Webhook'.

In the actual activity attributes I can pull down, two for 'Change a Status in an program progression' sets New Status ID  = 36 which was 35. How do I find out what this means?

My questions:

• How does a person in a real life scenario unsubscribe?
• What triggers the "Person unsubscribed from Marketo Emails" activity type and how do I implement it?
• Is my testing method completely flawed?

[Josh_Hill13 · Accepted solution]

I'm very confused about your goal here.

The default Marketo Unsubscribe is how your leads would unsubscribe. This default page (in Design Studio) uses a special token to flag the Unsubscribed From Email log entry. The Page uses a hidden field: Unsubscribed=T that passes the value to the db.

If you want to create a custom page or subscription center, there are tons of articles on this. Most involve using fields on the Form to change the data value. The only reason to include a trigger on that Form is if you want to update an Interesting Moment or other fields dependent on the Unsubcribe value. (like other opt in fields).

If your trigger is not set to Every Time, you could get failures.

If you are using the API in some way, please tell us more about what your goal is.

Also check docs.marketo.com as there is more detail on mkt_tok=

[Anonymous]

The reason I was trying to use a form to unsubscribe leads was so that I could enter email addresses in the form and unsubscribe them rather than through the link sent in emails. I'm not sure if we're going to have a custom subscription center, I was just testing the capabilities.

For now I'll be processing things only with the unsubscribe link as I tested that and it's sending the expected activities down. Thanks for the pointers!

[SanfordWhiteman]

The reason I was trying to use a form to unsubscribe leads was so that I could enter email addresses in the form and unsubscribe them rather than through the link sent in emails.

Nothing wrong with this goal, but if you want to have this form not do other very disruptive things aside from unsubscribing, you need to make sure it doesn't submit the Munchkin cookie.

As Josh mentions, you can't track unsubscribes down to the email level this way (since there's no email context to draw on anyway) but you can set to people to Unsubscribed = True.

[Anonymous]

That flag is what I was testing against. My thought was that the activity stream would hopefully include not just the entries for the value change but also the "Person unsubscribed from Marketo Emails" activity when that flag flips.

If that were the case, I could just simply handle only that activity to mark contacts in our CRM as unsubscribed and not have to worry about the various use cases of Marketo and our CRM once in production.

[SanfordWhiteman]

That flag is what I was testing against. My thought was that the activity stream would hopefully include not just the entries for the value change but also the "Person unsubscribed from Marketo Emails" activity when that flag flips.

Right, that activity only applies when the person takes action at the email level (including clicking the Unsubscribe button in Gmail or other apps).