Transactional Emails not recording Opening

[STO555]

Is anyone else out there encountering issues with transactional emails not recording opens and clicks? We have been trying to solve an issue where transactional emails which we rely heavily on in our company are not systematically recording opens and clicks. We found out that Marketo is setup in a way that for opens/clicks regardless of what type of email, Marketo only records one time per record. We cannot create multiple records each time a transactional email is sent since it is too time consuming and inefficient. 

Does anybody know a workaround or third party solution to having transactional emails record if someone opened/clicked them?

Has anyone tackled the same problem and found a solution or workaround? 

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Alon

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

First, the way you're describing the behavior isn't accurate.

Marketo does record multiple Click Email activities for a single email asset sent multiple times. So this area is not a concern and you must have been testing incorrectly.

However, it's true that a single Open Email activity will be recorded for an asset, that is, Marketo does not record unique opens.

It's possible to create a custom integration that records unique opens as individual Custom Activities. An experienced Marketo API developer can help you help you build this. However: it isn't possible to write those CAs in real-time; they must be batched hourly/daily, unless you are 100.00% certain that your daily volume fits within daily API limits.

Note you will still want to record no more than one open per email per day, per campaign run. Otherwise your volume estimate will be way off (in other words, your integration separately stores whether you've already seen that asset+campaign on a given day before logging an open).

[STO555]

Thanks Sanford, your explanation is great and if that can be done I will reach out to a Marketo API developer. If its not real time its fine and one open recorded per unique record is fine too.

Thanks for your help.

AH

[AdrianMillsTD]

Hi Sanford,

Is this a recent change to behaviour?

[SanfordWhiteman]

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Is this a recent change to behaviour?

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Nope.

[AdrianMillsTD]

Turns out I assumed otherwise.  

Expectation - Marketo registers everything else uniquely in activity history (send, delivered etc.)  so assumed it included opens.

vs 

Reality - don't count opens.

[SanfordWhiteman]

That's right. But also, remember what counting every open would mean: whenever someone switches views in their inbox, or absently tabs/arrows through emails, there's a potential for the pixel to be downloaded again (most clients do cache, but not permanently). Plus — is it really 2x the engagement if someone opened the email on phone + desktop, or Outlook Web Access + Outlook?  There's a huge amount of chaff if you count all those pixels.