Track Alert Emails?

[Anonymous]

Hello fellow Marketo users,

Is there an easy way to track open rates for alert emails? And if not, has anyone discovered a work-around? We have thousands of channel partners who receive leads from us via lead alert emails. I haven't found a good way to determine who is paying attention and opening these alerts, and who is ignoring them. 

P.S. -those channel partners do not have access to our CRM system (too many, and they wouldn't know where to start) so I cannot use Sales Insight.

Thank you for any help you can offer!

[Grant_Booth]

There's not a good way to track opens or clicks in alerts that I know of. For that purpose, I'd recommend also having it create a task in your CRM, assigned to the channel partner in question, and tracking whether or not those tasks get followed up with. Salesforce for example has a variety of user licenses intended to meet this need, so that some users have very limited access.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Grant is right. Alert emails are not tracked. No Opens, No Clicks. Only email perf reports, but it will not provide the details persons. Furthermore, the addressees of the alerts have no reason to also be leads in your instance.

-Greg

[Josh_Hill13]

Why can't you use the Email Perf report? It tracks those emails too if you point it at those emails.

Now, you may not be able to use a smart list in this case because most of those people won't be "leads".

[Anonymous]

Hello,
Thank you all for responding. I've tried to set up email perf reports on 'Alerts' unsuccessfully. My set up filters include "marketing activities emails", and I select the operational alerts (emails) I'm looking to track. My smartlist includes the contacts who are my channel partners. The report results I receive are "no data found".  My CRM is Dynamics and is connected to Marketo btw. These channel partners are in the construction industry and are not tech savvy - they would not use CRM (even with limited licensing privileges). I'm just trying to get a handle on who is opening the lead alerts that I send them so we can determine who stays and who goes! This tracking info is requirement of the system. I wasn't aware that alerts were not trackable (person details or audience detail as a whole). That doesn't make such sense to me. I'm not an expert, so any help you can provide would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[Grant_Booth]

Hi Kerri,

Assuming there's too many of these people just say "Reply to confirm you received this" and then update a table manually, you're going to need help from a developer to make this work.

You would need a custom tracked link or image. If there's a link that these people *have* to click on to do their job, then I'd go with a tracked link. If they don't have to click it, maybe have text that says "click here to confirm you've received this" or something like that. Or you could use an image and (as long as they download images in the email) that would work.

If you have a field that specifies who the alert should go to (like "Alert Recipient Email Address"), then you could use that token in the link's URL. Since you aren't integrated with a CRM, the regular Lead Owner fields will be reserved for that system so you wouldn't want to use them. Something like this:
https://mycompany.com/AlertTracking?email={{lead.Email Address}}&owner={{lead.Alert Recipient Email Address}}

And at that location https://mycompany.com/AlertTracking your web developer could have a php script or something which updates a table based on those email and owner parameters to show which owner followed up for which lead at what time. Or it could do an API call into Marketo to update a field saying that the lead was followed up with and by who.

Basically, a huge headache for anyone who isn't really confident in what they're doing. I wouldn't recommend doing this unless you have access to an experienced Marketo consultant.

Grant

[Grant_Booth]

Meant to say "since you ​are​ integrated with a CRM"