Building a subscription page

[smane]

Hi

I'm hoping to get some advice on building out a subscription page in Marketo and the type of fields I need to create in Salesforce.

The company I work for produces lots of different content topics. The team and I created a mock-up of what the page could look like. https://xd.adobe.com/view/c3aac8e0-b75c-4db3-94d4-81f44964c8b2-96f9/

Yes. I know it's a lot of topics.  Well - my question is what type of field should I create in Salesforce?

My initial thought was to create a multi picklist field in Salesforce. However, when reading through discussion posts here some have used a single checkbox field for True/False. 

While a multi-picklist seems to be the most straightforward, the company will also create forms with only one of the topics area for users to subscribe to and I think that would override the previous submissions so I'm unsure if that would work. 

Any help would be greatly appreciated. 

Thanks

[Balkar_Singh · Accepted solution]

If your fields for data for different topics are different, different forms would not overwrite them unless you use them again in those forms and if you do that, it should be fine. Using Boolean is easier to work with later as well, as you just need to select true/false while creating campaigns. It's relatively better structured - as each category gets a field. In a larger set of values, picklist can seem easy, but the data storage gets messy. You'll need to use 'contains' operators and may run into issues where parts of words may qualify for filters which they shouldn't. It's taxing to manage especially when you want to store more than one value for an interest field. Even if you create a dedicated form, the maintenance of this data is cumbersome.

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

I lean toward DateTime fields, actually, because they indicate when someone became subscribed as well as the fact they subscribed, in a single field.

If not DateTime then Boolean; there are not so many here as to make Booleans untenable.

Multi-select (i.e. String or Text under the hood) is tempting but suboptimal.. Not really because of your concern with not showing all options on all forms — that can be managed easily using JS. But because Marketo does not natively parse multi-valued fields into their subvalues the way SFDC does. Instead you’re left with sloppy [Contains] filters which are prone to subtle errors.

[smane]

Thank you both your replies.