Unsupported Date Token in Campaign?

[Anonymous]

Could someone help me out here as I am in the dark about what I am doing wrong in this campaign which should be triggered by a date token (see below).

Goal of the campaign is that a lead receives an e-mail to inform that his/her Exam Certificate for one of our programs is expiring in 6 months time and urging the person to renew it.

There is a specific date field containing the date when the lead passed the exam, but when I use the date field Ias a date token in the waiting step I receive the following error:

"Smart Campaigns may not be run with an unsupported token in Wait Step:{{lead.bePART Sales Certificate Acquired_}}" Could someone help me out here? Thanks

[Anonymous]

Hey Jonas,

When you entered the token in the wait step, did you type the whole thing in? Did you copy and paste? How did you enter it?

Also, what type of field is {{lead.bePART Sales Certificate Acquired_}}? Meaning is it a date field, or boolean, or something else?

[Anonymous]

Are you creating a batch campaign?
I believe that as of the December release date tokens can only be used in trigger campaigns.

[Anonymous]

Hi Jeff, Cathal,

The field is a date field. When I entered the token in the wait step I typed it, as I considered that pasting was the reason it didn't work.

Do any of you have an idea for a work around, to tackle this issue? How can I have an e-mail sent 18 months after they passed the test for certificaition, informing our contacts that they have 6 months to renew it. Using the date field mentioned above?

Thanks

[Anonymous]

Hey Jonas, 

You are on the right track. To Cathal's point, is this a batch or trigger campaign? Also, I have noticed that Mkto can get fickle and if you don't select the token from the drop down, the system will think that the token does not exist, thus creating an error.

One suggestion would be to create an expiration date field and use that minus 6 months for your wait step and see if the system is more agreeable to that. 

Another suggestion would be to change 732 days to 18 months. Maybe the number of days is causing an issue.

[Anonymous]

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for your feedback. 

To answer your questions, at the moment I try to make it a batch campaign which runs daily at 9 AM in the morning. Reason being that I don't really see how to use a trigger in this case, as I want to use a date field  (lead.bePART Sales Certificate Acquired_) which contains the exact date when a person passed the exam. Also, I am using data going back to 2011, when were not yet using Marketo + each value is different (people did not pass the exam on the same date).

Concerning your suggestion, what would be the best way to go at it, as it would mean creating another field in the database just for this purpose?

Also it seems that you can only add a value in number of days, see below:

[Anonymous]

Hey Jonas,

Since it needs to be a trigger, could you not use a Data Value Changes trigger (at least for your new leads moving forward)?

To this point, you could potentially cause a Data Value Change on all of the existing leads, which would satisfy the Date token use.

Hope this helps.

Greg

[Anonymous]

Hey Jonas,

Yes, I would just take the date they passed and add two years to a newly created field. Is this field updated by the system or manually?

I really don't understand why the way you have it set up is not working. How do you have your smart list set up? I think you may want to contact support so they can take a look in your system.

I'm sorry I couldn't help you resolve this!

[Anonymous]

Hi Jeff, Greg, Cathal,

To answer your question Jeff, it is a field that is updated manually.

I've did some tests using a data change trigger, adding a certain amount of days (tested it with 732 days) and it seems to work, which is very positive. Only thing I need to do is an export of allt he data and re-upload it so that the campaign is triggered.

Don't really know why batch campaigns are prohibited from the 'date token'?

Thank you all for helping me think about this one.

Warm regards and already wishing you a joyful holiday season.

Jonas

[Anonymous]

Was there even a resolution to this?

We want to run a nurture campaign to existing customers starting 30 days from an upgrade date.  The idea is to a regularly add customers to the campaign and let the wait token do the heavy lifting.

If not below, any workarounds?