Send eCard to gift recipient on behalf of buyer

[Averil_Case]

Hi there,

I am trying to set up a program in Marketo where a person can use our website to select a Ecard (e.g. birthday, mothers day etc.) to send to a gift recipient.

The flow should be:

1. send confirmation email to buyer

2. wait step - (selected date/time of send)

3. send ecard to gift recipient referencing the buyer as the the gifter

I have thought of doing this by creating new fields in the buyers record, eg. giftRecipientEmail, giftSendDateTime, giftFirstName and then in the program flow step adding giftSendDateTime as a token in the wait step and giftRecipientEmail as a token in send alert.

However the problem is that if the buyer selects another gift before the previous gift is fulfilled, the fields will be overwritten.

I have also considered creating a record for the gift recipient and marking them as not opted in, but I'm not sure how to reference the buyer in the gift email.

Any help on this would be much appreciated!

Thanks,

Averil

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

You're right to be concerned that only one gift can be "in motion" at a time if you use a simple lead field. That doesn't seem sustainable.

I would instead create new lead records for the recipients -- this is how we run referral programs.  You can add the email address of the buyer (technically, the last buyer) as a lead field on the recipient. Then your only remaining worry would be if more than one person sends a gift to the same recipient.