RSS Feed Emails in Marketo

[megsie_k]

Hi All, 

I've read through what I can find about RSS feeds in Marketo Email on here and searched in Google as well. But I have a very specific scenario and was hoping to get some help from the experts! I've only been using Marketo for around 4 months.

My scenario:

I have a list of Candidates, which is basically a list of resumes, in an RSS feed that includes several custom fields. I send an email each week with the latest 10 listings in the RSS feed, regardless of if we have sent them previously. 

I also have an RSS feed with a list of job vacancies. This is sent daily but only with the newest listings since the last send.

We actually send approximately 248 RSS generated emails a month as we filter our RSS feed by location and industry e.g. Candidates in Coffs Harbour with experience in the Aged Care industry get sent Aged Care industry Employers in Coffs.

My question:

I've been investigating the easiest method to implement this in Marketo and am currently trialling FeedOtter. However, I want to know if there is another solution that doesn't require an integration?

Due to the number of RSS generated emails we send, I was hoping to use dynamic content to streamline the process. If anyone has a similar scenario could you let me know how you achieved this in Marketo?

Thanks in advance, Megs.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Nothing can do this entirely within Marketo. FeedOtter (or alternately Digesto) is the way to go. Or you could also use a custom webhook-based setup, but that also wouldn’t be using Marketo alone.

[megsie_k]

@SanfordWhiteman Thanks for responding.

I did contact Digesto and they said they can only send the newest in the feed since the last send and not the latest 10 listings.

How does the custom webhook-based setup work and what else is needed in addition to Marketo?

Thanks again.

[SanfordWhiteman]

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I did contact Digesto and they said they can only send the newest in the feed since the last send and not the latest 10 listings.

Are you sure they understood the question? (Or maybe I don’t understand the requirement.) Do you want to re-send some of the latest 10 listings even if they’ve been sent before? Or only if they haven’t been sent yet?

[megsie_k]

Latest 10 even if they have been sent - sounds weird but that's how we do it since we can't guarantee there are 10 new listings from the last send.

[SanfordWhiteman]

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Latest 10 even if they have been sent - sounds weird but that's how we do it since we can't guarantee there are 10 new listings from the last send.

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Makes sense. Yeah, a lot of syndication tools (I use a different one for my blog posts w/the same restriction) only send net new articles. You could get around this if your dev team could always generate a unique article ID when the feed is read.

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

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How does the custom webhook-based setup work and what else is needed in addition to Marketo?

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You need a service that

• is compatible with being called as a webhook (i.e. stateless, no extended OAuth stuff)
• can fetch the RSS feed and parse it (i.e. XML to JSON, easy in any modern language)
• can write back the results to a Marketo {{my.token}} using the REST API, and schedule the batch campaign for the intended audience

You have a special resource lead in Marketo for each of your RSS filters. Each resource lead runs Call Webhook once per day/week.

Of course it’s not necessary to have the jobs be kicked off via resource lead + webhook (it could have its own internal scheduler) but I like doing it this way because you can use a relatively generic service, keeping it “headless” by using Marketo’s existing scheduler and passing the filter criteria/etc. in the webhook payload, so you have complete control over when it runs and don’t need to log into anything else.

You’d probably find it much easier to roll out FeedOtter if you don’t have a developer, but I didn’t want to imply you can only use a robust 3rd-party service as the technical requirements are relatively low.

[megsie_k]

Thanks again Sanford.

That is making more sense, and I do recall being told I could use webhooks for this. 

We're working with some developers at the moment so I will bring this up with them. I was hoping to be able to implement this myself but I just don't have enough hours in the day!

FeedOtter may be the solution also, but a lot of decisions come down to costs too.

Appreciate your help!