Automating campaign with personalised emails and leads

[MariaT]

We have an external application that prepares highly personalized outbound email campaigns, and we want Marketo to own the actual sending and reporting. We want to use the REST API where it’s supported.

What our external app does

• Builds a campaign:

  • One logical “campaign” in our system.

  • A list of contacts/leads (with identifiers we can map to Marketo).

  • A base email template with placeholders (name, custom text, etc.).

  • Per-recipient personalized values for those placeholders (each contact gets its own content).

• For each campaign:

  • We can create/update leads.

  • We can decide who should be included in this specific blast.

  • We can generate personalised variables  for each lead that could be mapped to Marketo fields / custom objects / My Tokens.

• then, we want to go into the Marketo UI, open the Program/Smart Campaign created for that campaign, review:

  • The audience (who is going to receive the email).

  • The email content (already personalized via tokens / Velocity / custom fields).

• Then manually trigger the send from within Marketo (e.g., run the batch Smart Campaign, schedule it, etc.), so the final send is initiated and controlled from the Marketo UI, not from our app.
  
  
  We are looking for the recommended Marketo API pattern to implement this flow: which assets to prebuild manually, which assets to clone or update via API, and how best to structure personalization (fields vs. custom objects vs. My Tokens/Velocity) so that a Marketo user can still inspect the campaign and trigger the batch send from the UI.
  
  Do you know what is the way to achieve this?