Tracking the actions of non-leads

[Anonymous]

Right now we are setting up a campaign that sends out an alert to a homebuyer's real estate agent (the homebuyer is the lead, the real estate agent is an email address field we created on the buyer's lead card called 'realtor_email') when they reach a certain part of their homebuying journey. Seeing as a single real estate agent may be attached to multiple buyers in our system, we want to limit the number of times that the email address in the field realtor_email can be sent this particular message (essentially once per 6 months).

We currently do not want to make the addresses in realtor_email individual leads, as we already have too many leads in our system (these agents are contacts in CRM however).

This is the sort of logic we want to set up:

"if {{lead.realtor_email}} was sent alert (x) in last 6 months, do nothing"

Is there anyway to track whether or not the email addresses in 'realtor_email' were sent an alert, and reference those emails in a smart list (without creating new leads for the agents)?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Patrick,

This would be possible using 2 webhooks:

1. The first one calls a web service in SFDC that would log each time a given email address is sent an alert, using a "Realtor Alert" SFDC custom object attached to the realtor contact in SFDC with the same email address. You may want to sophisticate a bit this one and pass some info about the alert you just sent.
2. The second one calls a web service that counts the log over a period of time for a given email address and returns the count. You will be able to call this one before sending the alert and test the result to decide if you want to send the alert. You may want to make the duration a parameter so that you can potentially change this later on (let's say you want to set a limit over 3 months instead of 6 months).

The difficulty you would have is that web services are not "synchronous", so Marketo does not wait for the answer to continue the flow (see Are webhooks synchronous?​). You will need to add a few minutes wait between the second webhook call and testing the result.

This will take some APEX development in SFDC to develop the web services.

And you may want to vote here :

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Thank you so much!

Unfortunately we use microsoft dynamics, would a similar solution be available for that CRM tool?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Patrick,

I am not an expert on MSD Development, but I am quite sure the same kind of web service development should be possible. A key point will be to make them accessible from Marketo if you have an on premise instance. With a cloud instance, that should be really feasible.

-Greg

[SanfordWhiteman]

The difficulty you would have is that web services are not "synchronous", so Marketo does not wait for the answer to continue the flow (see Are webhooks synchronous?). You will need to add a few minutes wait between the second webhook call and testing the result.

I'd trigger on the ​Data Value Changed ​event, not rather than using a wait step.