Leveraging In-store transaction data in Emails

[Anonymous]

Hi, we need to send in-store data to our Marketo account (via API) and then use that data to trigger customer journeys and reference specific data in the email template. More specifically, we want to trigger a customer journey when a person opts for a digital receipt in a store. We then want to send them a follow-up Product Rec type email from Marketo based on their in-store purchases "x" number of days after.

What would be the best way to do that? Should we set up a Custom Activity to first initiate the e-receipt trigger to start a customer journey? Then pass the transaction data values (e.g., SKUs, Colors etc.) we need for the emails via Custom Objects, so that we can refer to them via Tokens? Or is there a better/easier way to accomplish this?

[SanfordWhiteman]

No need for Custom Activities here. You only need a Custom Object.

The only advantage of CAs are that they are non-repudiatable (that is, read-only additions to the Activity Log -- until they age out) and they're easier to scan for in the ActLog.  In all other ways, COs are superior, including the ability to be included in emails via Velocity tokens, as you mention.

With COs, just be careful of API limits.  A high volume of small-ticket purchases wouldn't be feasible for either COs or CAs.

[Anonymous]

Thanks. What is the API limit for the COs?

[SanfordWhiteman]

You'll need up to 2 API calls (create Lead, create CO) for any insert, and your limit is 100K (across all integrations) per day.

If you bulkify your inserts there's less to worry about but you can't immediately action the purchases then --and you also have a ton of triggered activities at once.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Sanford. I have 2 follow up questions.

• Does Marketo automatically exclude customer emails that are opted out from email marketing, or do we need to do something to exclude them?
• How do we exclude people who have made a purchase from follow-up emails? For example, once we send a upsell email, how do we know whether to send them a follow-up if they have not made a purchase?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Tomaz,

Marketo automatically exclude form emails people whose unsubbscribe field equals to True. This will work for you if your opt-out process does check that field AND if the email is not marked as operational.

You need to have a way to flag the purchase in Market, though a CO, a status, etc.. if order to filter out.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Thank you.