I recently encountered an issue where a webhook I was working with kept failing. The lead fields I was passing over in the webhook via tokens I knew were correct, yet the webhook continued to fail.
Here is part of the webhook payload:
“&first_name={{lead.First Name}}&last_name={{lead.Last Name}}&country={{lead.Country}}&email={{lead.Email Address}}&parent_email={{lead.Parent’s Email}}”
Did you spot the issue? It’s very, very subtle.
Okay, let me put it like this – do you see a difference between these two values?
lead.Parent’s Email
lead.Parent's Email
Yep, it’s that seemingly innocuous “curly” apostrophe in the first value. What Microsoft likes to call a “smart” apostrophe versus a straight one. Guess what? It’s a unique character compared with a straight quote, and one that many data systems can’t read/process. When the webhook was built, it had been built in a Word document and then copy/pasted into the webhook payload template in Marketo. And since it came from Word, Word automatically turned the apostrophe curly.
If you’re building webhooks, be sure to copy/paste from Notepad or a similar plain text program. Better yet? When it comes to data, apostrophes and punctuation is generally best avoided if you can.
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