Content Recommendation Engine & Marketo

[Chirag_Agarwal1]

I'm wondering what are the best practices on Marketo to send daily emails with content recommendations fed through API.

Essentially, our content recommendation engine (housed outside Marketo) matches users with fresh posts every morning and we'd like to send this feed to our users every day. We're looking to achieve tracking (what posts were recommended, what was clicked on), visibility in sales insight and flexibility in using different variations of email templates to send these recommendations.

Does anyone have experience with anything similar and would like to share ideas? Among the following, what would be the best approach if any?

Option 1 -

Send HTML with all content recommendations for the day in a custom field via API and place this field as token in email template

Option 2 -

Build snippets and feed HTML via API with content recommendations and include in email template.

Option 3 -

Custom object?

Ideas?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Meant to respond to this last week.

The answer depends on how many recommendations per user you're going to be generating at once.  In general I lean strongly toward Custom Objects for this need. But it won't be practical to add COs to every lead in your database every day, let alone multiple COs per lead per day (you should at least consolidate recommendations into a single CO w/multiple fields).

[Chirag_Agarwal1]

Thanks Sanford. We're looking to send between 5 and 40 recommendations to every lead in a day. This number varies from lead to lead based on many business factors.  I agree, managing multiple custom objects could get very complex but consolidating into a single custom object with all recommendations may be possible. If we decide to go with this, what would be the best way to structure all the recommendations in fields?

[SanfordWhiteman]

We're looking to send between 5 and 40 recommendations to every lead in a day. This number varies from lead to lead based on many business factors. I agree, managing multiple custom objects could get very complex but consolidating into a single custom object with all recommendations may be possible.

You won't be able to store more than about 30 recs in a single CO due to field limits. (But an email with > 30 recommendation links is going to be pretty out of control anyway!)

How many leads are there?

[Chirag_Agarwal1]

Makes sense. We have under 30K leads in this campaign and want to be flexible in # of recommendations we are pulling. Is Snippet or My Token a more practical approach?