Leads with Shared E-mail Addresses / Writing to External Databases

Anonymous
Not applicable

Leads with Shared E-mail Addresses / Writing to External Databases

Is it possible to write form data to an external database from a Marketo form page? I'm interested in writing the data from specific form fields to a database table outside of Marketo to store those fields' values for each individual form submission. Does the API allow for this, or would I just add some custom JavaScript into the form page to write the data to that database on submission? I'm looking for a solution to capture registration data that might be unique for the submission but where the e-mail address might be the same as previous submissions. (Where registrants are actually sharing an e-mail address.)

I know that there's an option to use a composite primary key, but there appears to be warnings on various​ (1) posts ​(2) by experienced users that this is a dangerous path to travel down. Similarly, dupe rules appear to be fraught with complexity and potential consequences. We could use a partition in combination with dupe rules, but we'd actually like to be able to tie the data back to leads whenever possible.

If we create a custom data object, could we populate some of the data into that object so that the e-mail address can actually store unique data points for the individual submissions on submission? Do we need to leverage the API for this? (From what I read, as well as a previous thread I had started, it sounds like the values stored in data objects can only be updated via the API.)

I have concerns about either an external database or using a data object as each submission essentially represents a registration, but those registrations won't be accurately represented in the program status. (Making it harder to track the number of registrations for live events to verify we don't exceed our caps.)

My preference would be to force users to register using a unique e-mail address, but that would require changes in some processes that would require the buy-in of other business units and we are meant to launch the registration pages in early August.

At a higher level, can anyone provide their take on managing leads with shared e-mail addresses? From my perspective, it's more sensible, in the long term, to push users to provide individual addresses in order to improve registration processes for events and webinars and strengthen other services on the site that might be built on the back of e-mail communications. Has anyone made that sort of transition before? (From allowing multiple leads to share e-mail addresses to expecting a single e-mail address for each lead.)

Apologies. Long post. Just trying to weigh all the options. (And perhaps uncover some that I haven't thought of.)

2 REPLIES 2
Pavel_Plachky
Level 5

Re: Leads with Shared E-mail Addresses / Writing to External Databases

Hello Osman,

Having JavaScript on your form page write to an external database would require a server component to avoid exposing database login credentials in your web page. Since you are going to use a server component anyway, it may make more sense to extract the Form submission data from the Marketo database using API. All the data is already there, it is just difficult to report on. I mean you cannot get a simple report of all form submissions, with the data as was submitted at that time, but you can get to this information through the API.

I hope this helps in your deliberation.

Pavel

Anonymous
Not applicable

Re: Leads with Shared E-mail Addresses / Writing to External Databases

Yes. The more information the better, Pavel. Very helpful, thank you!