Personalizing the emails with 1-to-many relatioship (manager with team members)

[Kristof]

Hey Community,

at my company the HR team would like us to send automated communications to all managers about their new hires and re-hires. 

It will be a drip sequence of several emails sent out periodically based on the new hire phase, i.e. onboarding, review, trainings, feedback after 3 months, and so on.

So if there is a new joiner > send email 1 to their manager with both manager's name and new joiner's name > then send email 2 personalized the same way, and so on.

At MktOps we are wondering how we could automate this process by personalizing these emails with manager's name and with their specific new hire's name. These teams = fields are available in Workday > and in Salesforce. But the trick is, this is a 1 to many relationship. So does this mean that we would need to create custom objects for this? Is there a simpler approach to this? 

I was also thinking about PMCFs / velocity scripting / custom activities such as date stamp that would "tag" the new joiner and trigger the email. But the challenge is to populate the accurate peron's name in each email...

Any ideas would be appreciated 🙏🙌

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

Hmm, this is tough out of the box.

Can you send alerts instead of emails? That would make it much easier, since the alert can go to the {{lead.Sales Owner Email Address}} or other fields straight away. The catch will be you can’t track clicks, if that matters.

[Kristof]

Many thanks @SanfordWhiteman, I also thought about the "sales person" approach, as it has the same 1-to-many relationship, as in case of managers. Great idea about alerts! But still the challenge is how we would customize the alerts by populating new joiner's name in them? I thought, for example, the HR team would submit a simple form for each new hire with the manager's and their new team member's name, but this is in a way a "revolving door" - new hire in January, then a new hire in April for the same manager. So not sure if any token would cover this...

[SanfordWhiteman]

Well, the alerts are running in the context of each new joiner. So not seeing why there'd be a problem with multiple joiners in the same period of time, they're separate records.

[Kristof]

The thing is, there will be a sequence of ca. 8 emails sent out throughout 6 months after each hire... So for example, there is a Hire 1 in January, BUT there is another Hire 2 in March for the same manager. So I assume that the token value will be overwritten in the earlier alert drip sequence during March. Because the communication that starts in January should continue till June. Would custom activities with date stamping be a solution here?

[SanfordWhiteman]

It's different hires, so why would the field be overwritten? The field is on the Marketo record for the hire.

[Kristof]

Gotcha, thanks a bunch @SanfordWhiteman!
I just tested it and it works well, many thanks 🤝