Sending a monthly email to people who fill out a form online.

[PROD_-_Deborah_]

We are in the process of transitioning an email campaign currently being managed in another system to Marketo. There are two input files.  The first is a manual file created monthly and loaded into Marketo.  The second is a list of potential recipients who have filled out a form online.  The goal is to send each list an email with a white paper link.  Each month there will be a different email with a new white paper link.  We do have a naming convention that can be loaded into the custom field when the manual file is loaded.  This will allow us to pull the correct content for that file. At issue are those clients that fill out the form online.  How can we make sure those records have the custom field updated with the same value in the manual file?  Or is there a different way to create the emails so that the same name can be used each month? 

Thanks for your help.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Are you planning to update a lead-level field for every applicable lead, even though it's going to have the same value?  That's really convoluted.  Use a program token.

[PROD_-_Deborah_]

Hi Sanford.  Thanks for the quick response. I'm new to Marketo.  Can you point me to documentation that would describe how this would work or could you go into detail?  I'm not sure how the token can be used to substitute for an email name. I'm also not sure how to make it dynamic enough to automatically change each month. 

I may be thinking about it differently than you mean.

[Jenn_DiMaria2]

Sanford is right that a Program Token would be the best way to go for this. You would just go into the Program and create a text token called something like "Whitepaper Download" that you can change every month (to, say, JUNE.PDF). The link in your email would look something like:

http://info.YOURCOMPANY.com/{{my.Whitepaper Download}}

Then before sending your email, you would just change the token to the next month (JULY.PDF) and it will update automatically for everyone on your Smart List.

More information about my.tokens can be found in the product docs:

• Understanding My Tokens in a Program - Marketo Docs - Product Docs

[Anonymous]

Im a little confused with this post. Are you concerned with duplicates. i.e. you dont want the people that fill out the form to receive an email twice?

[PROD_-_Deborah_]

Jenn,  thanks for the explanation.  It's been very helpful.  It sounds like there isn't a way to set it up to automatically run each month with the new email.  Modifying the token each month will be the best way to handle it.

Matt, I wasn't concerned about duplicates.  My concern was how to setup a process that would automatically update itself without being touched.  It sounds like that is not possible within the platform.

[Jenn_DiMaria2]

There are a couple ways you could go about setting monthly batch campaigns to run and change the value for you, but that requires creating new fields and managing some other items upfront. In this case, I'd do it manually for the first couple runs just to make sure it's working the way you'd like and everything is trackable.