by Dorottya Dvorak 
One of the most common requests I come across is: “How can users forward Pardot emails to their customers?“. Whether it is for an event invite or a promotional email, simply forwarding a tracked Account Engagement email can cause serious issues.
Note! This blog post has been updated on 19 September 2023.
When users forward emails all the tracking gets forwarded as well, which will create false activity data for your prospects. What does that mean? It means that any activity happening on that forwarded email will be recorded against the original recipient. This can include email link clicks, registrations, or even unsubscribes.
How to solve it
If the issue has already occurred and you have identified the original recipient, you can debug the situation. Use the Audit tab of your prospect record and follow Sophie’s instructions to remove the association.
How to prevent it
My recommendation is to prevent this issue before it happens, you can use either of the following options:
AddThis connector (retired in May 2023)
Previously, one way to forward emails without any issues was by enabling the AddThis connector and including the forwarding link to all email templates. However, the AddThis connector has been recently retired (May 31, 2023), so the “Add Social Media Buttons” and the “Forward to a Friend” option are no longer available.
If you currently have emails with AddThis links, you need to remove them to avoid your emails displaying broken links. This is not the first time that most of us have done a mass update of email templates. What I recommend is to share the workload, put on some music, and dedicate time to doing it. While you are at it, consider using Dynamic Content for that part of your emails, so you can avoid updating everything again in the future.
Zoe Fisher Principal Marketing Automation Consultant
Looking for help with Account Engagement?
Zoe Fisher
Principal Marketing Automation Consultant
Looking for help with Account Engagement?
One-to-One Email Templates
Use Salesforce to send one-to-one emails to your leads and contacts, based on email templates you prepared in Account Engagement. You will be able to keep your original email design as well as see how your emails perform.
User Training
This might not come as a big surprise, but lot of cases users themselves forward Account Engagement emails causing a lot of association issues. In the worst-case scenario, they send themselves a test email and forward that to their contacts – in which case they will actually see the following message:
“You have clicked a tracked link from a test email. If this were a real email, dorottyad@nebulaconsulting.co.uk would be cookied and redirected to [link]. You will be redirected to that link (uncookied) in 5 seconds.”
Make sure you educate all your users about what this would cause, and either include their contacts in your mass email segmentation or introduce them to One-to-One email templates.
Do you need help?
If you want to learn more about how you can prevent your users from forwarding emails, don’t wait until the issue occurs, contact us for support instead.