Auto-Reply Email with Variable Content from Multi-Select Form?

[Anonymous]

Hoping someone can help me out - here's the scenario:

1. Visitor to my landing page is presented with a form that has multi-select options
   • "What content would you like to receive? Select as many as you like."
   1. PDF
   2. Demo Video
   3. Product Coupon 
2. The visitor selects the content ther are interested in, then enters their personal data.
3. Upon submit, the system sends them an email containing ONLY the content they selected.
4. I can then segment form submits by "interest" and drop them into different nurture paths.

How can I make ONE EMAIL with variable content blocks that are either visible or not based on the form selections?

Example (and please disregard the lack of actual code):

Hey {John},

We got your request, and here's your content:

{if PDF selected = visible}

{if Video selected = visible}

{if Coupon selected = visible}

Hope it brightens your day! We'll be in touch.

#-#

I've done this in Hubspot and Pardot, but can't figure it out here.

Thanks in advance,
Cameron

[SanfordWhiteman]

There are a few angles of approach.

You can create such "variable content blocks" using email scripting, which is the feature most directly suited for this task.

You can use tokens for things like {{Lead.First Name}} and you can ensure tokens will exist for {{Lead.Wants Video}} and {{Lead.Wants Coupon}}, but you won't be able to suppress/write content like you've described.  One of the chief hurdles is that you can't rely on CSS to show/hide content in HTML email as you can in a web page. You need to not have the content written to the email body at all if you don't want any user to see it -- plus, the very attempt to have hidden content makes your email look suspicious.

A "cool" way to do this, as people who follow my posts probably are dreading/expecting, is to use the Forms 2.0 API to write the email snippet onto the lead.  That is, create a field like "ResponseEmailDynamicBlock" and have the form assemble data into that field before posting.  The disadvantage here is that if someone peeked into your HTML/JS code they'd be able to jump right to the links.  If that's a security concern you could do a similar thing by using a Flow step to assemble that field on the Marketo side.

Then there's also giving them a single link to click to taking them to a landing page with their downloads, and it's way, way simpler to do the variable content on an LP where you have lots of CSS and JS options.  Some say that giving the users a single CTA in the email is smarter than giving them 3 non-exclusive links to click (which may mean they have to switch back and forth from their email client).