Re: Crazy Internal Campaign And My Head Is Spinning

Sergio_Azevedo1

This is going to be a doozy, so I apologize in advance to anyone that actually takes the time to read this. You are appreciated!!

Project

Internal campaign notifying 'site owners' of an upcoming transition from one platform to another (couple thousand people?)
Many are owners of multiple sites
Four emails (Four levels of priority)
Two forms with different sets of questions (Only for Emails 1 and 2. The other two are just notifications.)
Depending on how they respond, they will get an email with a link to book a meeting with IT

It would go something like this:

Priority 1 Email > Fill out Survey > If answers one way, send Priority 1 Meeting

> If answers another way, send Priority 2 Meeting

Priority 2 Email > Fill out Survey > If answers one way, send Priority 2 Meeting

> If answers another way, send no meeting necessary

Priority 3 & Priority 4 Emails are just notifications

That all sounds straightforward and pretty doable, right? Well, here's the problem:

IT wants the emails to display the names and urls of the sites that each person owns within the emails. Now, it would be simple enough to just add ten sets of tokens to each email and whatever they have, the tokens would update. However, that brings up a few issues and challenges: One, if someone only has one site, it would show a large space in the email which IT doesn't want. Two, the meeting times available won't be long enough to accommodate discussing more than one or two sites. Three - and this is the big one - if someone has more than one site, a single form won't cover all of the sites.

So, because IT just wants one site per email, the only thing I can think to do is create the following:

10 x Custom Fields for P1 Site Names
10 x Custom Fields for P1 Site URLs
10 x Custom Fields for P2 Site Names
10 x Custom Fields for P2 Site URLs
10 x P1, P2, P3 and P4 Emails with one Site Name and one Site URL token each (40 total emails)
10 x Priority 1 Forms with 5 questions each
> Custom Field for each question x 10 = 50 fields
10 Priority 2 Forms with 4 questions each
> Custom Field for each question x 10 = 40 fields
10 x 2 sets of logic triggers for the forms

This all sounds pretty insane, but I can't see another way to do it through Marketo with their requirements???

Did I mention the data provided wasn't even fully separated by row and almost everyone had cells with multiple data points in them??? If it wasn't for Copilot's help in fixing it, it would've taken us days to clean it all up!

One thing I would LOVE to do would be to just send a generic notification email that takes the user to a form page that prepopulates a set of checkboxes with their sites. User would then select which ones they are actually the owner of and then a set of questions for each site selected would appear beneath.

Anywho... That's my current dilemma. It's either find a way to better incorporate automation into this or do a crap ton of manual work. 😭

Thanks for reading!

SanfordWhiteman

Use a Custom Object! There’s no need for all those extra lead fields (ugh). Each CO record represents a Site and is related to the Site Owner (i.e. Person). It has fields Name, URL, etc.

Alternately, you can use one big Textarea with JSON on it, what I’ve called a “poor man’s Custom Object.” The JSON can easily store an array of hundreds of Sites per Site Owner.

Then you use Velocity to output one Site’s info per email. (COs are accessible directly in Velocity, of course, but you can also break down the JSON into its constituent Sites using Velocity.) You don’t even need a separate email asset for each possible Site. You can do it with separate emails, but you can also have one email that you call from different programs. A program-level {{my.token}} can determine which item 1-10 gets sent.

Using different programs in turn lets you use Program Member Custom Fields to store form data. You don’t need to create tens of Person fields for every combo of Site Owner + Site (again, super ugh). You have 5 PMCFs defined and they have different values per program. A related question is whether you even need 5 fields for permanent storage or can just ask those 4/5 questions on the form, apply the logic (“is meeting required” et al.) in JS, and concatenate all the values in one PMCF in case you need to look at it later.