Retrieve data from Google Sheets or web

[nitenichiryu]

I would like to reflect the latest # of users in the mail contents every time I send the mail for the mail campaign (this e-mail will be sent every 2 weeks), I would like to do the following: 

1. Share the google sheet which includes # of users

2. Fetch the E13 cell data in the Google sheet via script token and update # of users in the mail contents

Question:
a) Could you tell me the best practice for updating the contents based on the web for fetching the latest data?

a) Is it feasible to do the above in Marketo?

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

You cannot use Velocity to connect to external services.

You can use a webhook-compatible service to do this, but it’d be quite wasteful to update a person field for everybody, when it’s the same value for every send. Instead I would call the webhook-compatible service only once per day (in the context of a special person we call a Resource Person) and have it use the Marketo REST API to update a single shared {{my.token}}. (Alternately, you could use your own scheduler to call the REST API once per day, but I like the simplicity of having a service be passive until something from Marketo deliberately triggers it.)

By the way, I think you mean “leads” or “people” or “users of our product” not simply “users”. From a Marketo perspective, users are the people who log in. Better to be clear about the business meaning of such terms.