Build an email to embed a table from excel of contact to add an opportunity

[CristinaLeo]

Hello Community,

I have been requested to build an email template that shows the following:

A table with "opportunity" + "company" + "associated contacts", that shows also a button for every associated contacts, to select – “add to opportunity”, “not related to opportunity”.

It's a quite new request to me, so I would like to know if this request it's feasible or not in Marketo, here below an example of the content the email should display.

Thanks in advance for your feedback! 😊

[Jasbir_Kaur]

Hi @CristinaLeo,

This is not possible in Marketo Email Templates. In Marketo Email Templates, we can't use any script or any type of functionality.

Let me know in case of any concerns.

Thanks!

Jasbir

[Michael_Florin]

Let's see if I understand this request. 🙂

You're supposed to build an email - not an email template, I suppose - from an Excel file that displays a table? Surely you can translate that table to HTML and bring it onto your email.

Or is that table supposed to be dynamic? Using which data? Custom Object data or Opportunity data? And there's a button on that email that adds a person to an opportunity? Where? In Salesforce?

And who is supposed to receive this email? Sales people? This looks to me as if someone wanted to build a process that should be native to Salesforce but as they can't do that, they try it in Marketo.

But these might all just be assumptions. I guess we'd need a deeper process description in order to understand if that is possible in Marketo or not.

[CristinaLeo]

Hi Michael,
thanks for replying and asking these questions, they're definitely helpful to clear my ideas.

The email will be an internal distribution to be sent to the sales team. Basically, they want to make it easy for the salespeople to determine which contacts they can add to an opportunity and who can they discard.

The idea is to pull the information from an Excel file which contains the opportunity and a list of contacts associated with the account of the opportunity, the table can be managed in HTML not dynamic.

Within the email, next to the contacts' email addresses, they want to see a button that will help sales select which contact can be added to the opportunity and who's not the case to add and do a report on the choice.

I'm just trying to understand if this is feasible in Marketo, or if I should look for another solution.

I hope this provides more background.

Thank you! 🙂

[Michael_Florin]

Okay, let's try to break this down some more. 🙂

---

The email will be an internal distribution to be sent to the sales team.

---

An internal distribution? So one email sent x many sales reps? Is it the same email for everyone? Or does each sales rep get a list of their contacts?

Within the email, next to the contacts' email addresses, they want to see a button

That button - is it just information? As in

Person A

Email Address A

Button: Add to Opp

Button: Discard

Or is the button supposed to do something. Meaning: A link you click and then someone is added to the opp. Is that link already in that Excel file?

Let me put it like this: If this is supposed to be a dynamic and scalable procedure, you have will have to bring opportunity information into a Marketo Custom Object and render it on an email through an email script. That script could create that link that adds a person to an opp. You will need substantial brain power and Marketo knowledge to make that happen.

But if you just want to send some information to a list of sales reps, why use Marketo at all? Use Outlook and attach an Excel file.

[CristinaLeo]

Hi Michael,

Thank you very much for your patience ‌‌

The email should be sent to each sales rep to get a list of their contacts.

About the buttons' action, it is not required for the link to add people to the opportunity, that's why I was thinking to create a fake link with a query string to record just the click in Marketo, for instance, www.ops-feedback.com?val=email addres, but I'm not sure if this will work.

I think the solution of an Outlook email attaching an Excel file, is the easiest way and the one with fewer efforts, I've played with velocity script in the past for simple tasks, but I can't say to be a developer!

Best,

Cris

[Michael_Florin]

Let's try something else. 🙂

As you speak of Opportunities, one might think you're talking about a Marketo instance that is integrated with a CRM. Is that so? Salesforce? So far I was only guessing, but I think haven't confirmed that.

So what you probably could do, is create Smart Lists for each of your Sales Reps with some filters like:

Sales Owner Email Address = abc@example.com

Was Added to Opportunity in past x days

And then create subscriptions for each Sales Rep that send them these Smart Lists on a daily basis.

In these Smart Lists you would need to include all fields a Sales person might be interested in. Probably even add a field that you populate with your fake link to add to an opportunity.

All that would assume that you don't even need an Excel file as the source, because you have the information already in Marketo. 

Just a thought...

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

Expecting Click Email events to log only human activities is unreasonable. Even with bot detection heuristics, you may be logging clicks from mail scanners.

Even if you believe you control the infrastructure (i.e. all email goes to your domain) this sounds like a very, very poor choice.

[CristinaLeo]

Thanks to putting it bluntly 😊