Is there a way to link a csv with event information, but no customer data, to leads in Marketo, based on Zip Codes?

[Anonymous]

Hi all!

I'm looking to send out emails to customers that refer upcoming events, based on their zip codes. We have hundreds of events every month, occurring across the country.

Unfortunately, our CRM does not update lead information with the upcoming events in their area; instead I'd have to refer to a separate file based on their zip. Is there any way to do this?

For instance, I get a .csv file with the upcoming events, their addresses, and maybe a list of zip codes that are within a certain radius of the event, but no customer data associated with it. How can I then put that into Marketo, so that my tokens can refer to it in an email?

Alternatively, is there a way to put the document into Marketo, and update a lead's field value for an upcoming event, based on their zip code? Ex, "If Zip Code matches [x], update [field] to [upcoming event]."

Thanks!

[Josh_Hill13]

The faster way is to run this matching in Excel first, then upload the correct matches to marketo somehow.

But what you are asking for would work  better with Custom Objects and Velocity Scripts.

[SanfordWhiteman]

You have to think of this as 2 tasks:

1. Selecting applicable leads for each event based on geofencing, or at least primitive association based on zip.
2. Sending only to applicable leads for each event.

The reason to look at these separately is that a Velocity script can easily --  if you first loaded the zip-to-event file as a Velocity token (you'd have to convert it to JSON but that would be pretty easy) -- send an email that dynamically displays only the applicable upcoming events for each lead.

The catch is that Velocity can't qualify people for the send because it only runs after a lead has matched a Send Email Flow step.  So if there aren't any matching events you'd have to have a fallback text like "Nothing found in your area this month" rather than not sending them the email at all.

So if you need to pre-select people to get the email in the first place, you'd want to also use a webhook.  You'd pass every lead to the hook and have the hook find upcoming events (you can say what "upcoming" means, next week, next month, etc.). Then that would set a Datetime field on the lead like Next Upcoming Event which you'd use to filter the campaign (continuing to allow Velocity to actually populate the event data).

[Anonymous]

Thank you, Sanford, this is exactly what I was looking for!

I can select based on zip code prior to sending out, so that’s good. How would I go about loading the file to a velocity token?

[SanfordWhiteman]

How would I go about loading the file to a velocity token?

You'd want to rotate it into an object like this:

#set( $EventsByPostalCode = {
  "10009" : [
    {
       "date" : "2018-02-01",
       "location" : "Grand Army Plaza",
       "details" : "..."
    },
    {
       "date" : "2018-02-15",
       "location" : "Battery Park",
       "details" : "..."
    }
  ],
  "13760" : [
    {
       "date" : "2018-02-09",
       "location" : "Nirchi's on Taft",
       "details" : "..."
    },
    {
       "date" : "2018-02-20",
       "location" : "The Garage",
       "details" : "..."
    }
  ]
} )

That can be in one token. Then you'd use another token to look up the latest event in $EventsByPostalCode[$lead.PostalCode].

[Anonymous]

In this case, there are hundreds of events, so that would be potentially time consuming to do by-hand. Is there a way to import a csv and automate picking out that info?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Oh, I wouldn't expect you to convert it by hand but to use an export-to-JSON tool.

You could paste the CSV content as-is into a Velocity token, but you'd need a more advanced Velocity dev to read it... and there aren't too many of us around.