Automating Internal Distribution List Management

Tom_Kerlin2
Level 8

Automating Internal Distribution List Management

Hello,

 

I'm in the process of updating several internal distribution lists. While it's not difficult to update a list, it's a time-consuming process when you have 5+ lists in need of updating. I'm wondering if there's a better way to go about this and if there is a way to even automate the internal list management steps.

 

At first I looked into a possible integration between WorkDay and Marketo, but such an integration doesn't exist. Someone else was also considering doing the same thing: https://nation.marketo.com/t5/Product-Discussions/Workday-Marketo-SOAP-API-Integration/m-p/48907#M19...

 

I'm sure it's possible to automate list management from CRM tools like Salesforce, or to at least remove and delete invalid hard bounces with triggered smart campaigns, but are there other ways I can try automating? If you know another way or have a best practice please share!

 

Thanks,

Tom

Tom Kerlin
2 REPLIES 2
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10 - Community Moderator

Re: Automating Internal Distribution List Management

Hi Tom,

 

It depends on how/where the list is accessible.

 

If it's available over the net somehow, it could be pulled in via a webhook-started process you schedule to run daily (using a scheduled Marketo batch). Can it be accessed via a secure LDAP request? An HTTP download? Some other server?

 

Of course internal lists may not be available from the outside at all, even with authentication. In that case, you'd have to download the list using an internal app and then import it to Marketo using the API. The major difference with the webhook-initiated process as described above is that app and its cron/scheduler has to live somewhere, and that's exactly what can make such designs crumble because they're too fragile... running the process on your PC, in other words, isn't reliable.

Phillip_Wild
Level 10 - Community Advisor

Re: Automating Internal Distribution List Management

Yep. You could do something like.....new User is created in Salesforce, grab their role, use the Marketo API to update the relevant lists. And the same when a user is deactivated. But unless you are a really large business with lots of people being added and removed all the time I would guess that's not worth the substantial development work.

 

Do you have your internal lists as segmentations? We run it like that, and just reference the segmentation. So yeah, it's manual updates, but it's in one place.