Double-Opt-In process: What's the best trigger - click link or visit web page? | Community
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Michael_Florin-2
Michael_Florin-2
New Participant
May 12, 2022
Question

Double-Opt-In process: What's the best trigger - click link or visit web page?

  • May 12, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 3995 views

Hello all,

 

I usually don't like it when trigger actions are based on "Clicks Links in Email" or "Visits Web Page". But for a double opt-in process where a person has to click a link that says "Please confirm your email address here", I see no other way.

 

These links usually lead to a Marketo Landing Page, so "Clicks Link" and "Visit Web Page" should be functionally identical. Yet I see pretty regularly that e.g. "Visit Web Page" occurs in the Activity History, but "Clicks Link" does not. Or "Clicks Link" is delayed - in my current case even by ~20 minutes.

 

What would you recommend to use as the trigger for this case? Clicks Link, Visit Web Page or even both? Or something else entirely?

Thanks!
Michael

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1 reply

Darshil_Shah1
Darshil_Shah1
Community Manager
May 12, 2022

This is definitely a gray area! If I would have to make a choice today, I would consider choosing "Clicks Link in Email" trigger with "Is Bot Activity" constraint set to False (assuming bot filtering is on, and bot activities are logged). Adding in a filter for the "Visited Web Page" activity would help, but there's a chance that this may prevent genuine people (who clicked and visited the webpage) from flowing through the campaign due to delay at Marketo's part to log the visit web page activities. There's a hacky way to keep people in a wait step for some time and then check if they visited the web-page before updating the Double E-mail opt in to True, while this can be helpful to a certain extent but, as you would guess this certainly isn't 100% accurate too - there are scanners that can follow the web-page from the email link and log the Munchkin hit. 

 

I think, a better and more resilient solution is to have the user submit a form on the webpage. The form can just have a single email address field visible to user and a hidden Double Email Opt in field set to TRUE. With prefill enabled, Marketo's native prefilling can take care of auto-filling the email address for the person coming in from the tracked email link. Given that prefilling works as expected, it'd certainly take an extra click for the user to confirm their email preferences in this process, but I believe this process is more reliable and trustworthy. 🙂

 

    Jo_Pitts1
    Jo_Pitts1
    Community Manager
    May 12, 2022

    @24475 ,

    your approach with a pre-filled form is exactly the approach I take as well.  That solution get's my vote.

     

    An potentially interesting extension of that would be a hidden form on the landing page, with code to force the submit under the hood.  That way there is no additional friction for the user, but you still get a (fairly immediate) event coming in about the form fill.  Thoughts?

     

    Cheers

    Jo

    Darshil_Shah1
    Darshil_Shah1
    Community Manager
    May 13, 2022

    Good thought, Jo! Submitting form via JS did come to  my mind too, but I'm and have been a little skeptical in implementing that - if the email scanners could possibly execute the JS on the linked webpage (I know not all scanners do that at present, but the most advanced ones could possibly do), the entire setup would essentially fall apart and fail to serve its purpose in the first place. These email scanners are gonna get more sophisticated and advanced over time!

     

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