How to Send Custom HTML Weekly Support Emails in Marketo

[Anonymous]

Our customer support team is currently using an outside vendor to send weekly emails to our customers that contain account specific information (weekly update).  They send the vendor hundreds of unique HTML files each week, one for each customer account, which the vendor embeds in an email and sends to the email contacts for that account. Now our leadership would like to send it through Marketo so we can start tracking opens, etc. and seeing the email history at contact level in Salesforce (via our integration). 

How would I set this up to send in Marketo? If I had a blank email template, what is the best way to configure it to insert this HTML file as the content for each email address?  It is unique for each company name, which would then have multiple recipients.  Do I need to use an API call to pull in that content from an external file server?  Can I upload a CSV file each week that has the names, emails, and HTML code in another field?  Or is there any other way to  easily upload these unique files into Marketo each week and send?

Looking for any suggestions, or direction on which option I should research in more depth.  Thanks!

[Cory_Gabor1]

Hi Rob,

Does your data that you need in the email live within Marketo on each contact? If so, you can make a template and use tokens to pull in all of the data automatically.

I do something very similar to this. I have a template for our weekly updates to all customers, real estate agents, etc. I then setup a batch campaign that runs each week and sends to anyone that meets the specific criteria (in the loan process).

For the re agents I am sending to their email address via a token/send alert. Since I am using the token, it needs to be a trigger campaign. So I run a batch (to anyone that meets X criteria) and then have another smart campaign that I use "Campaign is Requested" to make it a "trigger".

Let me know if this generates any ideas or if you have any questions.

Thanks,

Cory

[Anonymous]

Hi Cory - Thanks for the quick reply!  None of the data that they populate in this weekly support HTML email file is stored in Marketo (except name, email address, title and company name).  The HTML email contains dozens of data points and graphs specific to that individual customer, that they produce each week. Duplicating the template in Marketo and pulling those dozens of fields and images in Marketo is not something we are planning/hoping to do. So I'm hoping there is a way to reference the entire HTML file with an email address in marketo, and then send out.  Just not sure how. 

[Cory_Gabor1]

Hi Rob,

No problem, I am not sure as I have always used data within my instance.

Interested to see if anyone else in the community has experience in what you're trying to do.

Have a great day!

[SanfordWhiteman]

Do I need to use an API call to pull in that content from an external file server?

Not an API call as you might be thinking (inbound REST API).

You can use a webhook (which is Marketo's outbound API) to pull the data onto the lead, in a textarea field designed for this.

But that's quite a lot of wear-and-tear, potentially.

How large are these HTML blocks (in bytes) and how much do they differ by per account (are they 90% identical)?