QuestionQ13

Section 2A: Marketo Data Architecture Design

Some of Unicorn's customers use multiple financial products and services. Marketing wants to launch a "Weekly rollup" email to customers who are opted in for email, showing a quick snapshot of how each product/service that customer holds with Unicorn is performing.

The data needed to send these emails must be synced to the Adobe Marketo Engage instance for each customer. Each customer can own multiple instances of the same product, as well as a number of different products/services.

How should this data be pushed into Marketo Engage so it can be used most effectively?

  • A Sync this data on the “Person” Level in a number of fields for “Product” or “Service” Build Segmentations for Product and Service.Add Segments into the Email as Dynamic content for personalization.
  • B Create a maximum of 3 fields for each piece of data for both Products and Services onto the “Person” Level.Add each field into Email Scripting tokens then use to turn the module on or off if they have less than 3 products.
  • C Build two Custom Objects, one called “Products” and one called “Services” to link onto Person with relevant fields.Use an Email Scripting token in the email so it can be personalized for each email recipient.
Explanation

Because a customer can own multiple instances of the same product or service, the underlying data is a one-to-many (or many-to-many) relationship, which cannot be represented reliably using a fixed number of fields on the Person record — any field-based approach caps out once a customer exceeds the allotted field count or holds duplicate products. Marketo Custom Objects are purpose-built to model this kind of relationship: separate "Products" and "Services" Custom Objects can be linked to the Person record via a link field, letting each customer have an unlimited number of associated product/service records with their own attributes (e.g., performance snapshot data). Email Scripting (Velocity) tokens can then pull from these Custom Objects at send time to dynamically generate personalized content for each recipient's actual holdings, regardless of how many products or duplicate products they own. This is the standard, scalable pattern described in Adobe's Marketo Engage documentation on Custom Objects and Email Scripting for building relationship-based, one-to-many personalized content.

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