Backfill SFDC campaigns after insert?

[Matt-Stone]

I'm in the process of migrating from Pardot to Marketo, and while 99.9% of Marketo is an improvement, there's a few things about Pardot that I liked. One such thing was that you could add someone to a Salesforce campaign without it triggering a sync—and if that person was inserted into Salesforce later, it would remember that campaign and add them to it at that point.

I'm not planning on syncing SFDC campaigns to programs, and I won't be keeping SFDC and Marketo a 1:1 mirror, but I'd still like to retain that SFDC campaign membership once someone "graduates" to the CRM.

Right now my smart campaign flows simply look to see if the person exists in SFDC, and if so, to add them to the campaign. But I'm wondering if anyone has a clever way of adding them to the campaign later on if they're not already in the CRM. My initial thought would be to add the campaign Id to a string field, then use automation in SFDC to parse the entries and add the person to the campaigns upon insert.

Any other ideas?

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

Yep, we have a client doing exactly this. Here are the ingredients:

• requestable campaign that uses Add to SFDC Campaign
• an SFDC Campaign token {{my.Addable Campaign}}
• Textarea field Queued SFDC Campaigns to hold queued campaign IDs
• simple custom service, designed to be called via webhook

When leads are queued to be added to a campaign later, the campaign ID is appended to the Textarea field (using Change Data Value) which holds one ID per line.

When the time finally comes to add them to the campaign, Call Webhook passes the {{lead.Queued SFDC Campaigns}} value to the service. The service loops over the list and uses the Request Campaign Marketo API endpoint to add them to each campaign in turn, passing the value in the {{my.Addable Campaign}} token. Then it returns the empty list.

[Matt-Stone]

Good solution if the SFDC flow method proves too tricky splitting apart a comma-separated list. Thanks!

[SanfordWhiteman]

You can for sure do this on the SFDC side — that would be easier overall but in some orgs it takes months to get an SFDC item resolved. As we're usually empowered to do whatever we feel like on the Marketo side that's a much faster implementation. 🙂