Merge data into email blast

[Anonymous]

We have an email blast planned that will go out to about 100 contacts from our Salesforce database. My challenge is that I want to insert a custom section of content in each email that relates to each lead (i.e. their current subscription status). This content is available from an external Excel file. How best to do that? Do I have to create a custom field in Salesforce, import data into it, then insert this data as a token in my Marketo email? Or can I somehow do a mail merge in Marketo that can pull this information directly from the Excel file?

So, I am a little confused and could use some advice here.

Thanks

[Anonymous]

Hi:

You are going to have to import this data into Marketo to get it into the Email.  To do so you can either sync the data from your salesforce instance, or you can create a custom field in Marketo and import the data from the excel spreadsheet it currently resides in.

Good luck!

[Josh_Hill13 · Accepted solution]

You can do this, but it may require a velocity script if the data is more complex.

[Anonymous]

Great, thanks Josh. This looks it could be what I was looking for. Up until now, I had never heard of this.

[Anonymous]

I'm looking to do the same thing...  Josh, could you elaborate a touch on how you would use velocity for this?  I see in the documentation how you can access data stored within the marketo db, but not how to reference data stored in an external excel document.  Our instance is shared among departments (we don't use salesforce) so I can't add custom columns to the marketo db to import and store the extra custom data there.  Like Rick, I am preparing a small mailing, so even if I could, adding extra columns to all our leads seems like a lot of overhead for just a small mailing.  Or am I missing something?  Thanks much for any insights!

[SanfordWhiteman]

Velocity cannot reference data stored externally. It can access data stored in Marketo lead fields or on connected objects.  But what it can do (do to some degree) is parse data that is in a single lead field into a number of different fields when an email is sent. For example, if you had a field with the data "a|b|c" you could use Velocity to piece out the "a," "b," and "c" without having to create more fields on the lead. You'd still have to create one field.

That being said, Velocity + custom lead fields may not really be the right choice here, though it may be easiest for you. This would be a better fit for Custom Objects​ but there will be a learning curve.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Jamie!