Chicken or fish?
It’s as if every program or event has some random, custom field requirement. Dietary restrictions at an event, questions for a webinar, or a time slot for an in-person consultation. Fields aren’t exactly hard to create in Marketo, but they live on forever once they’re created, and can lead to a ton of confusion later. Avoid the temptation to add new fields in every scenario. There’s a much better way to deal with this, and I’ll show you how.
Instead of creating a new field for every random request, create a small handful of temporary “burner fields” that you can use over and over again. Just remember these aren’t to be used for data you want to hold on to. Nothing critical like contact info, lead profile info, etc. Just single or temporary-use data.
In fact, for truly temporary data, it’s a bad idea to keep this sort of data around permanently – if you ever run a similar program again in the future, you run the risk of referencing old data in the new program. Not to mention it creates a complete mess when trying to find the proper fields to use.
To start, you’ll want to create at least one string field, but you may want a few of these. Give it distinct names like Temporary Text Field 1, Temporary Text Field 2, etc.
Add your temporary field to a form – here’s an example of a multi-location event registration form.
Once you add one of these fields to a form, you’ll need a way to record the temporary value, and then clear the field so it can be used again later.
Set up a smart campaign that triggers when your form is submitted (this may already exist for something like an event registration action), with specific actions for dealing with the value just stored in your burner field. And your method here may vary a bit depending on the data you’re capturing.
For example, if you’re running a multi-location roadshow, and you want to use one registration form for the entire series, you might want to use your temporary field to display a selection of all the events in the series.
In the smart campaign that triggers on the form submission, use the value in that field to add the lead to the appropriate sub-program, or static list.
Then, follow up with a data value change of the temporary field, and set a new value of “NULL”. This will clear the field of it’s value for that particular lead.
Here’s the same roadshow example on the smart campaign. Marketo sorts through the temporary field values, assigns to the proper program, and then clears the value out.
Alternatively, if the data is something more open-ended like dietary restrictions or webinar questions, consider setting up an email alert that fires when the form is submitted, which will essentially stamp that value in an email for future reference, even if it no longer exists on the lead. If email alerts won’t work, you could also opt to add all the leads to a static list, and subscribe to it. Then set a timed smart campaign to clear out the field of any values after your event or whenever the data will be used.
Now you have a field for every occasion, and you’ll probably discover new use cases for them all the time. If you ever have concerns about the use of a field overlapping across programs, you just add another temporary field, or better yet, assign your burner fields by use case or region to avoid any accidental crossover.
This post originally appeared on www.jeffrshearer.com
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