Re: Workaround for Marketo Multi-select field limitation.

Anonymous
Not applicable

Workaround for Marketo Multi-select field limitation.

Hello,

We have encountered an issue with trying to map a Multi-select field from our external form to a Marketo String field. The issue is as follows...

The Multi-select field on our form is designed to capture and write multiple sector interest values. If a person comes to the form and selects "all" of the sector interest options, there is a potential that the values written could exceed the 255 character limit, which is imposed on standard String fields in Marketo. Thereby, the values we are writing to Marketo are being truncated. I've been told that Marketo does not support Multi-select field types, so from what I can see, there are two potential options/workarounds:

1. Instead of writing the full sector interest names, we could revert to using shorter sector interest codes, which would overcome the character limitation issue with standard Single field types in Marketo. The only issue I see with this option is that these codes wouldn't be intuitive enough for our marketing users, when they are building Smart Lists for their campaigns etc.. We could potentially add a program to translate the codes back to the full names (maybe on a separate field) but this wouldn't be an easy or scalable solution.

2. Marketo also has a larger Text Area field type, which doesn't have those character limitations. However, I'm not certain if there are other limitations (i.e. with searches, filters, reporting) that need to be considered. Having worked with other MAPs, Large Text Area fields are typically designed to be used for additional comments and descriptions, and not to capture segmentation data, like product preferences. I have seen several limitations in other MAPs with using these fields for those purposes. Also, I assume that mapping a large Text Area field from Marketo back to a Salesforce Multi-select field could result in synch/update issues?

Could someone confirm if there are any limitations to consider in Marketo with Text Area fields. If no, then would this be a viable option to overcome the issues that we have encountered with our form integration?

Thanks

Timo

2 REPLIES 2
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10 - Community Moderator

Re: Workaround for Marketo Multi-select field limitation.

Check this thread: Multiple Selections Option on Form Field Editor

tl;dr: Textarea is fine, also consider multiple Booleans, which are more efficient overall.

Anonymous
Not applicable

Re: Workaround for Marketo Multi-select field limitation.

Thanks again Sanford!

I would love to go with the multiple Boolean options, but unfortunately this client is capturing up to 40 multi-select options on each field, and they have a total of four fields

40 x 4 fields = 160 values

Not sure that this would be a viable option

So just to confirm... as far as you are aware, there are no additional limitations in Marketo for Text Area fields?

Timo