Are individualized images in emails possible?

[Anna_Bruning1]

We are trying to automate a process where we send emails to prospects with custom information about them that may be relevant and pique their interest. We can do most of it with tokens, but we have a specific image for each prospect that we want to include in the email. Has anyone found a way to automate adding unique images to emails? This is not a situation for Marketo dynamic content because it's custom to each lead, not full segments. We have a bright team of developers who can help us out with APIs but I haven't seen this happen before and don't want to send them on a rat chase if it's not possible.

Ideally, we want someone on our team to be able to fill out a form with all the relevant details as well as the image and have that all populate automatically in the email using tokens. Would love to hear if there are vendors that can solve this or if anyone has worked some API magic to find a workaround.

Thanks!

Anna

[Jenn_DiMaria2 · Accepted solution]

The only thing I can come up with off the top of my head would be to create a new field that your team member populates with the image URL for each lead and then dump that field's token (something like <img src="{{lead.custom image}})"> into the email. Might be a bit manual, though.

[Geoff_Krajeski1]

How 'individualized' are you asking?

It may be possible based on some common values/set to write logic for the image.

One way I've attempted to do custom data in the past is to utilize SFDC ID or some other unique value on your leads, and have the content (image in this case) be that same ID, (i.e. <img src="{{lead.SFDC Id}}.jpg>), and upload those images en masse to a particular section of your Images and Files area in Design Studio.

[Geoff_Krajeski1]

Another method that I've seen is using an image writer that can parse data on the fly.

This was many many moons ago, but passing a value (hashed or not) in the querystring and then decoding & writing into the image through an engine like Imagemagick or something...

[Anna_Bruning1]

I like this idea! So even though the image and lead aren't connected technically in SFDC, I could predict the URL for the image use that in a token in the email. Great idea!

This would happen individually with our sales team populating in data that would trigger a series of emails to go out. I guess the next question I need to figure out is can we upload the images easily via API. I'm trying to keep the sales team out of Marketo and make the process as simple and replicable as possible. Ideally the fill out a form with the details for the email and at the same time are able to upload the image. I don't know if you have any ideas on the easiest way (or if there is a way) for the sales team to upload images actually going into Marketo. We're up for building custom API connections if that's what's necessary.