Dynamic content and tokens on Marketo Landing pages

[alsorobd]

I'm trying to setup a basic email confirmation flow using segmentation to control language and tokens to control unique landing page links.

As a user I recieve an email that says "please confirm your email address"
I click a button that says "please confirm your email address" and I'm redirected to a landing page.

The landing page contains a personalised link to my email preference center.

I have an email that uses segmentation to control dynamic content. Email content is displayed in the correct language based on the segment the user belongs to. This all works fine. If I have a German lead, the German lead gets the email with German language content. All good so far.

The email, "please confirm your email address", links to a Marketo landing page, "thanks for confirming your email address" which should exhibit the same dynamic content behavior for language display AND pull a single token from the lead record to customise one link on the landing page "view your email preference center".

I've checked links in the "please confirm your email address" email,  "mkt_tok" and "track" are both true.

I've also previewed the Marketo landing page content, "thanks for confirming your email address" against customers in a list. The landing page content displays in the correct language based on the person segment, in the preview. So far so good.

Now I want to test the entire process to make sure everything is working and the landing page tokens are correct.

I send myself a preview email using "person data" from our database that I know belongs to our language segment, and also contains a value for the token I'm using on my landing page.

I send the email to my address. Dynamic content is working. The email is in the language of the person I chose in our database.

Now I want to test the link. Instead of clicking it and opening it in my browser, I copy it and paste it into an incognito browser. I want to make sure the Marketo landing page identifies the person based on the token in the link in the email.

The link looks like this: 

https://www.ourmarketolandingpagedomain.com/KLMzLUlQUS05MzQAAAGOa5U5teGOp_1KLsVH1DLjXHGb1jR5fErfA3Uj...

When I paste this into an incognito browser, Marketo loads the URL with the token and then automatically redirects to the "thanks for confirming your email address" landing page. This is where it fails. Marketo is unable to identify the person from the token. The content on the page is loaded from the "default" segment, not the language segment of the person used in my preview email. Marketo also doesn't pull the lead token used in the link on this page. All I see is default content and no token values.

Preview works, real world testing doesn't.

I've tried adding a visible {{lead.ID}} to the Marketo page to test what's going on and see if it displays the correct ID on page load, I've noticed this is empty until I reload the page, which suggests to me Marketo thinks this is an anonymous person on page load, cookies them, and then displays a lead ID on second page load for this anonymised visitor.

Why is Marketo not able to identify the user on the page from the token passed via the link in the email? This should be the expected behavior of the system, right? Surely I don't have to cross my fingers and hope the user is already cookied by Munchkin in order for all this to work? If this is the case, what's the point of passing the token in the first place? It's like saying, this person's name is Bob, now forget that and ask them to fill out a form to tell you what their name is. What's the solution here?

[Michael_Florin · Accepted solution]

Do I understand this correctly: You're sending a sample email to yourself with person data, and then click on a link in that sample email and expect the personalized LP to render for your person data person?

I would tentatively assume that this cannot work and is not supposed to work. I need to be cautious here, as I pretty much never use sample sends. They are just too different from real sends in too many aspects. I'd suggest to create test persons in your database that fall into various segments but all have email addresses you can receive. (Gmails plus-addressing helps here. first.last+english@gmail.com, first.last+german@gmail.com, first.last+spanish@gmail.com and so on). Use these email addresses and real Smart Campaign sends for your testing. Also clear your cookies regularly when testing, as they tend to create conflicts.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Absolutely right. You can’t use samples to test LP dynamic content. By definition dynamic content requires a Munchkin session to be associated with the person, and samples don’t alter your session.

[alsorobd]

After combing through other posts and reading replies it looks like the issue lay with me sending myself "preview" emails, as you correctly pointed out, since previews don't generate the correct tokens.

After setting the flow live and enrolling some test contacts the tokens all work as expected. I thought I was going crazy!