Unsubscribe Best Practice & risks

[Moritz_Trollman]

Hi all, 

we are looking to revamp our Unsubscribe process to the following:

1. User clicks on unsubscribe link within a Marketo EMail 

2. User lands on a Marketo Landing page containing a Marketo Webform without form fields - Button only

3. User clicks the button to confirm his decision to unsubscribe

4. unsubscribe is set to true as part of the webform submission

Whilst technically this is not difficult to setup, I am wondering how reliable and safe the above setup will prove to be.

-> How reliable is the Marketo webform to identify the existing marketo record when traffic is generated only via the unsubscribe link within a marketo email ?

-> What is the likelyhood for this to fail ?

-> What risks do we need to consider with the above setup ?

BR,

Moritz

[roadshowhannah]

Hi @Moritz_Trollman,

Our company currently uses this exact 2-step unsubscribe process and it works well.

We've had it in place for 12 months now.

Obviously open to other user suggestions but wanted to share our positive sentiment for this method.

Thanks,

Hannah 

[Chargotra]

I have used this process for one of my organization and it works well depending upon industry to industry, well you can test this process for few months and then replace if needed, thanks!

[Michael_Florin]

I think the most used procedure is this one:

1. User clicks on unsubscribe link within a Marketo Email 

2. User lands on a Marketo Landing page containing a Marketo Webform with one field "Email Address". That field would be pre-filled.

3. User clicks the button to submit the form with their email address only.

4. unsubscribe is set to true as part of the webform submission

No additional effort for the user, but a more solid procedure as you have the form submit on the unsubscribe form instead of only a click on web page.

[Matjaž_Jaušove2]

Hi,

we use similar process, but with an additional verification step:

1) click unsubscribe link in an email

2) lands o a page containing a button "Yes, I want to start the unsubscribe process" (the reason for this is that people fwd emails, and we do not want their personal data being displayed by a click to others or giving somebody else an option to unsubscribe them).

3) if clicked, a person gets additional email with a link to the page where they can adjust their subscription preferences and/or unsubscribe

;m

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

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-> How reliable is the Marketo webform to identify the existing marketo record when traffic is generated only via the unsubscribe link within a marketo email ?

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100% reliable. A form that identifies someone only using the mkt_tok value specific to an email send will not fail to find that person.

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-> What is the likelyhood for this to fail ?

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Effectively nil. It doesn’t even require cookie support.

[Matjaž_Jaušove2]

Hi Sanford,

what if a user enables Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection - "Query Parameter Stripping"? If I understand it correctly, then the identification should fail because the mkt_tok value is removed? (never tested it, though, pardon my laziness).

Thanks!

;m

[SanfordWhiteman]

Yeah, deliberate measures like that, which have to be enabled by the end user, can always interfere. But I’m referring to default behavior in current browsers.

You can easily fall back to revealing an email address input if there’s no mkt_tok. Anybody with the Firefox feature enabled is expecting that kind of experience.

(There may also be workarounds such as appending the token as an additional path segment instead of in the query string.)