Marketo custom objects - many to many relationship

[Phillip_Wild]

Hi brains trust

I'm reading through these docs around Marketo Custom Objects: Understanding Marketo Custom Objects - Marketo Docs - Product Documentation

Here's what I'm trying to do...we have a list of about 600 SKUs, and these sales are stored in Salesforce custom objects (which syncs through to Marketo). Each of these SKUs have associated "extras" that can be bought. This information will change every few weeks or so, and there might be 10 for a SKU, or zero.

Would the right structure for using this in emails be:

* Create a Marketo Custom Object called "extras". This would have a field called "SKU Code", along with any other fields I would want to use (eg. cost, description, active or not).

* Create a Marketo Custom Object called "SKUs". This would have a field called "SKU Code", and one called "MarketoID". "SKU Code" would be the link field to the "extras" object. "MarketoID" would be the link field to Persons in Marketo. Both fields would be "dedupe" fields.

* Populate.

* Use email scripting to see if a person has bought a particular SKU, and if they have, show them possible extras they could buy.

If the data doesn't change super often, then I could update that "extras" custom object every couple of weeks with minimal risk, right? I'd only want to show extras that are active, and that are on a SKU that a person has bought.

Is all this possible? Is it the right way to be attacking this?

[Justin_Norris1 · Accepted solution]

Hey Phillip Wild

Many-to-many custom objects in Marketo are elegant in theory but of limited use in practice, because the second level CO is not accessible via velocity (the official docs are quite misleading on this point).

You are probably better creating a flat object (either in SFDC or Marketo) that connects the person to a list of eligible extras and contains the associated SKU ID of the product they have purchased.

You can use this object for segmentation (on SKU ID) then in sending your campaigns you can crunch this data in velocity.

The pre-processing work to create the flat object would need to be done in SFDC via apex or within a data integration tool.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Justin++

[Phillip_Wild]

Thanks a lot Justin. That's great background. I'll leave it alone

We run everything through Velocity these days so having it accessible there is key.