Identifying visitors automatically

While the preferred way to associate a visitor’s browsing session to a contact record in your email marketing platform is to leverage RightMessage forms or pass a contact ID over to your website, RightMessage can attempt to automatically identify visitors on your website.

Here’s how that works.

Form tracking

RightMessage can be configured to automatically monitor any and all submits of forms on your website.

If a form is submitted, we’ll look to see if there were any fields in that form had an email address.

If we find an email address, we store that email address in their browser’s cache.

On the next page view (which, for a form submit, will probably be some sort of “thank you / check your email” confirmation page), we’ll attempt to find their contact record in your email marketing database.

And, finally, if we’re able to find a contact for that email address, we’ll then permanently store their unique contact ID. This will then enable all of RightMessage’s synchronization functionality on your website for that visitor from then on out.

Enabling this is easy.

Right before you load the RightMessage script on your website, add the following <script> tag:

<script>
window.rmpanda = {};
window.rmpanda.trackForms = true;
</script>

<!-- load your RightMessage script here -->
...

Caveats and Gotchas

There are a few things to keep in mind:

Someone could use this to easily impersonate someone who they know exists in your email database.

If a bad actor knew that bob@gmail.com was a subscriber of yours, they could go to your website, fill out an opt-in form with bob@gmail.com, and then RightMessage would this this is actually that person.

Any segmentation that’s then triggered based on the data you have about this contact, or any personalization that occurs, could be manipulated by someone who isn’t actually bob@gmail.com

Not every form tool processes in real-time

If you’re using an intermediary service like Zapier or Make with your opt-in form, there’s a strong, strong chance that a contact record won’t be created before the visitor is redirected to your thank you page. (This is because these services tend to operate “asynchronously”, and redirect prior to confirming that a contact record has, indeed, been created.)

This means that even if we know someone’s email address (because they just opted-in), the record for that email address might not exist yet in your email marketing database. This can cause issues if you want to segment people immediately after they join your email list.

Not every form tool “plays by the rules”

Some form tools don’t handle form submits traditionally. If you’re having any issues, please let our support team know.