Segmentation and dynamic auto-reply emails

[Terry_Cen]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to set up a rather complex event campaign (or maybe I'm over-complicating it)

• The event is held in 3 locations, A, B & C.
• A landing page with a Marketo form that lets them pick A, B or C.
• Their reply populates a marketo field which puts them in the corresponding Segment - at the same time, a confirmation email with dynamic content (based on their segmentation) is sent out - saying 'Thank you, we'll see you at location A (or B or C).

• Here's where the problem starts, it appears Marketo doesn't get data from the Segmentations fast enough - the thank you reply email is always the previous selection every time I fill in the form. Eg, I fill in the form with location A, I get the default segmentation. Then I fill in with location B, I get the thank you email for location A. Then I fill in with location C, I get the thank you email for location B.

My solution to this problem was adding a 2minute 'wait' step to my flow before the email send out. But I'd like to know if there are better ways to do this?

Thank you!

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

That segmentations aren't real-time is a known reality. But wait steps are far too fragile as a workaround. Instead, use a Velocity {{my.token}}.

[Terry_Cen]

Thank you, I've actually looked into Velocity quite recently and didn't think that it could be a solution to my issue!

[SanfordWhiteman]

It definitely is. And don’t be surprised if you realize Velocity is better at segmentation-type things than segmentations proper (as long as you can handle the coding part).