Acquisition Program as a token?

[Anonymous]

When I attempt to do that exact same thing, here is what I get:

My default value for the APN is (blank), and that is what has been appearing even when leads have an APN.

Here is what my lead record looks like (same one as above), showing an acquisition program name:

Perhaps I have just a technical problem on my hands and I should create a ticket? I just assumed I was doing something wrong.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Is that the EXACT name of a program in your instance?  Is this an example of where Marketo auto-populated the value with the APN - or did you force it?

[Anonymous]

In this case, I forced the value of the APN. It is my lead record so it often gets used for testing things out, which means my true acquisition program has long since been overridden. So in this case I "changed data value" for myself and set the acquisition program. Could that be causing the problem?

As for the name of the program, yes that is exact. I chose it from a dropdown of all our programs. Here it is in my program Marketing Activities list:

[Dan_Stevens_]

Before opening a ticket with Support, I would try using another record - actually a brand new lead (do you have multiple personal email addresses that aren't in Marketo yet?).  Build out a test smart campaign - with a form, in an existing program - and enter Marketo that way.  Then try out the alert using this new lead instead.

[Anonymous]

Ok that is a good idea. I will do that.

The reason this came to my attention, though, is that my co-worker noticed many internal alert emails coming in where the lead's acquisition program name line was left blank, yet when he clicked through to that lead record, it showed an acquisition program name. And in those cases it was not a factor of the email being sent before the acquisition program name field had a chance to populate, which we can see based on the timestamps of when the email was sent v. when the acquisition program name was set.

That's what started me digging into this in the first place.

Now that you asked about Marketo-generated vs. me forcing it, I am thinking about some Marketo cleanup that I did at the end of of last week where I had to manually change many lead's acquisition programs - and then change them back. (This was necessary to do the unrelated cleanup to some of our channels.)

Since we just started noticing this problem on our internal alert emails this week, I'm wondering if that is correlated and if somehow by me manually changing the leads' acquisition - it no longer works to generate this data via a token. Could it be?

I will also test with some brand new leads, but I'm concerned about the not brand new leads too.

[Dan_Stevens_]

I think that's a real possibility.  And remember, APN can never be defined with a token.  The value must be hard-coded.  And if the value already exists - and you change it - that too can lead to issues.

[Anonymous]

Ok, I'm suspicious too since this problem has just started after I did all that cleanup.

I also created a brand new lead and had her sign up for a number of whitepapers. Never did the alert email include her acquisition program name. That would have been an example of a Marketo-generated, never-touched acquisition so I would have thought that at least that would have worked.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Actually, this is one attribute that you cannot use tokens to populate the value.  Kind of annoying since we use tokens in almost every flow step.  However, this specific one will not work with tokens.  Here you can see we have to hard-code it in every program (instead of using {{my.Program Name}}😞

[Anonymous]

Thanks, Dan.

I think I'm referring to something slightly different, although perhaps it still applies. I am wanting to use a token in an internal alert email we send to ourselves when someone fills out a key form. We'd like to quickly be able to see some key info about the lead, including their acquisition program - without having to click through to their full lead record.

Here's what it looks like from my "edit email" screen:

You can see I'm trying to use the Acq Program Name token, but it is always generating my default value (nothing, in this case) instead of the actual name of the acq program.

I've also tried the other very similar token called just "Acquisition Program" but that generates a strange 4-digit number which I don't understand.

Is this an appropriate use of the acq token and if so, what am I doing wrong to cause this problem?

Thanks!

[Dan_Stevens_]

You've defined the token properly (as "APN" and not "AP").  It sounds like the issue is the APN value doesn't exist in the lead record when the alert gets sent out.  Try adding a wait step so Marketo has time to properly populate the APN field.