How to build a Marketo Subscription Center

[Edward_Masson]

With the launch of the new Forms 2.0 from Marketo, I wanted to update an oldie in Marketo Community; Subscription Management. A Marketo Subscription Center. Below is a presentation I did last February at the Boston Marketo User Group. The old Marketo subscription center needed JQuery to check and unchecked boxes of the users unsubscribe and choices. This can be daunting to someone who does not have coding experience. I wanted to focus around creating smart lists and smart campaigns to do the heavy lifting. Having a smart campaign trigger to listen to changes to static lists using custom fields of topics to subscribe to by opting in and opting out. And of course play with the new Forms 2.0. Feel free to download from SlideShare or attached PDF.

[Kristen_Malkov1]

This is awesome! 1

[Edward_Masson]

Many thanks, thought I'd play with an oldie. Now playing with blog post in this platform.

[Justin_Norris1]

Ed Masson​ thanks for sharing this. Very nice setup!

Wondering if you could expand on the reasoning behind the various smart lists/static lists.

I typically just filter on the subscription preference checkboxes themselves directly in smart lists, which seems a bit simpler then maintaining a static list, but I can see that static lists could speed up performance.

Have you found there is a significant performance benefit to instead adding leads to static lists based the subscription checkboxes? I'm assuming that's the reason it was designed that way but just wondering.

Thanks!

[Jean-Pascal_Mer]

Sweet kangaroo! Exactly what I was looking for.

Thanks Ed.

[Anonymous]

Question! When I go to "New Custom Field" the Checkbox type you mention is not an option.

The only options are:

Boolean

Currency

Date

Datetime

Email

Float

Formula

Integer

Percent

Phone

Score

String

Text Area

URL

[Tim_Marcacci]

This was exactly what I was looking for. Cheers!

I do have one question though that I'm hoping someone in this thread can answer. We have a customer newsletter that needs to be included in the subscription center. However, we don't want it displayed for non-customers as an option. Would this require building out two completely separate subscription centers (which sounds like a headache having to make sure things don't potentially overlap with custom fields and all), or is it possible to somehow have a dynamic form that excludes the Customer Newsletter. I'm not exactly sure how this would look if it's even possible.

Thanks,

Tim

[Anonymous]

I have a similar need as Tim above. I have a Partner Newsletter filter that I only want to be accessible to those users in our database that meet a certain criteria. All other filters should available to the public.

[Anonymous]

FYI I have moved forward assuming that I am to choose "boolean" here and later chose "checkbox" when in the actual form edit. The directions in the slideshare say to chose "checkbox" from the start which isn't an option but since being subscribed or unsubscribed is true/checked or false/unchecked I believe this is the solution and it appears to be working.

[Jean-Pascal_Mer]

Yes, I've built mine with boolean and confirmed with our trainer that this was the way to go. You should be all good.

[Anonymous]

One caveat and a major pet peeve of mine when using boolean is that if not explicitly set it will default to value = "null".

In Marketo world, boolean = null = false but there's no way to differentiate a null/false vs. false/false. This is a nightmare for filtering or for smart campaign workflow constraints.

I can't for the life of me understand how a boolean value can technically be 3 values (null, False, True)...seems to completely violate the boolean standard of true/false.

Am i missing something here or should we be using a different field type to avoid this problem (such as checkbox)?