Adding Custom Product Specs to Email

[noahpeters]

Fairly new to Marketo and could use some guidance. We have the ability for customers to customize our product to fit their needs on our website. With this tool, they can choose from a variety of options such as changing the tire type or adding specific attachments from there they are given a quote of what this custom product would cost. 

We would like to send the customer a follow-up email with the custom product specifications and quote attached. We have relied on custom fields and tokens in the past for dynamic content, but given that there are quite a few customization options using custom fields and tokens does not seem like a viable option here. Anyone have any experience creating order confirmation and/or product customization quote emails? Any ideas about how we should go about getting this done? 

Thanks

[SanfordWhiteman]

There are 2 viable approaches here:

1. Use a single Textarea field and store all the fields in your custom product specs as a JSON object.

Advantages: each product is dynamically extensible with whatever properties you want; can be displayed however you want in email or LPs.

Disadvantages: Smart Lists do not see "inside" the object for filtering; implies the field will be overwritten on each form post, though if the objects are small enough you could actually fit many of them into as history field at the same time.

2. Use a Marketo Custom Object for each customization.

Advantages: a lead can have multiple products in motion at the same time, no need to overwrite; Smart Lists recognize individual fields in each record.

Disadvantages: forms cannot natively create COs, you need to pass the form data (temporarily stored in a JSON field as in option 1) to a webhook-compatible service that then writes the CO using the REST API.