Executable Campaign Send Email Use Case

[markfarnell]

Would be interested in anyone else's experience of using Executable Campaign to send an email.  Use case is an auto-response type email e.g. fills out a form, trigger campaign in program sends email from design studio using my.tokens to populate name of content and link to content in email (for example).  We have this currently working across all campaigns; but if I want to change what email is being sent e.g. one based on a new template, I have to change each individual program.

Given that executable campaigns support my.tokens and you can use the parent campaign context I figured we could have one executable campaign which was called by each content program.  If we needed to build a new email, such as for when a new email template is built, we can then just change the email in one place rather than in every flow where that email is called.  The current method we have means its easy to change the email, but not if a template change is required.

However, none of our testing has been successful.  The executable campaign is sitting in a central folder where I had planned to hold all my executable campaigns, also tested in the same folder as all the content campaigns.  None of the my.tokens from the parent campaign populate, nor if I repeat them via a folder to to put the executable campaigns in are they overridden.

Support have informed me that in this specific use case the executable campaign only works if it is in the program, which kind of defeats the object if I have to have an executable campaign in each program.

Perhaps the documentation is just not clear enough in what it supports but wondered if there was any other experience on this in the community.

Added 10th October 2021:   @yukotakagi1 's suggestion (https://nation.marketo.com/t5/product-discussions/executable-campaign-parent-token-apply-on-email/td...) to move the my.token to a lead.token (you may need to create a new field for this) does work, and doesn't create a lot of admin since you can make that update in the executable campaign flow rather than the parent campaign, providing your send email step is after your flow step to update the lead.token.  This is working well for me.

[yukotakagi1]

I just posted this!

I think we had exact same question. 

https://nation.marketo.com/t5/product-discussions/executable-campaign-parent-token-apply-on-email/td...

I'm thinking to do a data value update for a temp field right before the email sent but was hoping to hear from the community if there are better ideas! 

[markfarnell · Accepted solution]

I had some feedback from Marketo on this via a case we were working on:

'The ''Use Parent Campaign'' context allows you to use the parent Campaign my tokens in the FLOW Steps of the Executed campaign. Not in the Emails of the Executed Campaign.

So it doesn't look like my use case is supported yet.

[SanfordWhiteman]

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Added 10th October 2021:   @yukotakagi1 's suggestion (https://nation.marketo.com/t5/product-discussions/executable-campaign-parent-token-apply-on-email/td...) to move the my.token to a lead.token (you may need to create a new field for this) does work, and doesn't create a lot of admin since you can make that update in the executable campaign flow rather than the parent campaign, providing your send email step is after your flow step to update the lead.token.  This is working well for me.

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Caveat about this is it’s major wear-and-tear on the db that you would not otherwise incur. For a small send it’s OK, but one of the reasons we have {{my.tokens}} in the first place is so there doesn’t need to be a database update for every recipient.

[yukotakagi1]

Very true. For this reason too I would love for this executable campaign's email to take parent campaigns my tokens!

[yukotakagi1]

I'm working with the support and finding something interesting.

My token doesn't pass to the executable campaign, but when we tried with program name,  {{program.name}} then it worked on the email so it is not that this doesn't work with email tokens, but looks like it doesn't work with the my.tokens.

I will update if I find out more!

[yukotakagi1]

I thought this may be helpful for you @markfarnell .

I worked on this with Marketo support and the support found out that my token won't work on emails but program token does.

We are not sure why this is the case but if you can use program name or program description in the token (for my use case, I can update the program description to the event name which I use in emails)  then it actually works!