Custom Fields - What are Alternatives | Community
Skip to main content
S
sg-3
Level 2
March 25, 2023
Solved

Custom Fields - What are Alternatives

  • March 25, 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 3809 views

Hi

 

I am looking for any alternates to Custom Fields in Marketo. The reason being, I do not want to add custom fields for every Department's Marketo Forms. 

We are running Marketo instance in the University and some of the Departments are running Marketo Forms/Google Forms to capture data from Students and want to leverage that data in Marketo for sending notifications/communications/newsletter.

These are not standard data and specific to the Department.  Creating a Custom field for each of these departments does not seem to be a good solution, as there are 20-40 dept's each requiring 10 fields and it will be too many on the lead data, which may be of limited use.

 

What is the best way to store this kind of form data on the lead record?  Custom objects or Program Member data or something else?

Best practices followed by people will be very helpful for us to move forward.

 

thanks

-Sree

SJSU

This post is no longer active and is closed to new replies. Need help? Start a new post to ask your question.
Best answer by SanfordWhiteman

As Darshil mentions, COs are not a full solution if you need 40 depts x 10 fields = 400 fields.

 

You'd still end up having multipurpose fields, typically implemented as <attribute>:<value> (i.e. color:orange) or for greater portability a standard JSON object ({"color":"orange"}).

2 replies

Darshil_Shah1
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
Darshil_Shah1Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
March 25, 2023

You can create a single custom text field to store the form data of all the form submits in a properly formatted way (JSON, CSV, etc.). Since you have a different set of fields for each department, creating a custom object may not be the best idea as you're limited to 50 fields in total. You could coalesce data into JSON and store it in a single field for a person in a CO record, similar to how you would in a custom person field. I wouldn’t recommend going with PMCF as you'd need your assets (email, etc.) to be housed in a program to reference data as they don't work on the design studio assets. Also, do you expect people to fill in the same form multiple times? If so, then it would be a task to update the existing coalesced data in the custom person field, it'd be rather easier to update the custom object record (again, you can have a CO field for storing each dept form data in coalesced format).

 

    S
    sg-3Author
    Level 2
    March 27, 2023

    Appreciate your response.

    Do you haver an example script or some suggestions about creating that JSON data from a Marketo Form, which can be saved as One Custom field on a Person attribute.

    -Assuming If I go with this approach, how do identify list of users in a Smart list using that Custom field (JSON data) to send notifications

     ->  How to create a Smart List from this example JSON data for a Referral: Web search

    (assuming here is my JSON data)
    ({ 
       Status: Graduate,
       Program of Interest: MBA,
       Referral: Web Search,
       Contact Type: Email
    })

    Example Values

    Referral (drop-down)

     

    Web Search/Social Media/Outreach

    Program of interest (drop-down)

     

    MBA / MSA/MSF

     

    thanks for your support

    Darshil_Shah1
    Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
    Darshil_Shah1Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
    Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
    March 27, 2023

    When storing data in the coalesced manner, you should follow a set format for storing data, e.g., you could have something like below: 

     

    [{"Status":"Graduate","Program of Interest":"MBA","Referral":"Web Search","Contact Type":"Email"}, {"Status":"Post Graduate","Program of Interest":"Engineering","Referral":"Paid","Contact Type":"Email"}] //indicative only JSON

     

    You'd want to store data in the form of a JSON array as you're likely accepting and storing multiple form submissions in this field. You could use the contains operator to check whether the custom field contains "Web Search", and if you wish to specifically target people belonging to a particular Program and/or Status and/or Contact Type, you'd need to include the entire JSON-like-format in the contains operator (as other inputs in the array may also have the same Referral value.) 

     

    Alternatively, you could also parse the JSON string in the velocity and check whether the person meets the reqd. criteria or not and then introduce a poison pill so the email doesn't get sent out in case the person doesn't meet the required criteria for the email send.

     

    In case a person fills out the same form multiple times, you'd want a proper setup that ideally updates the existing values in the custom person field (storing and overwriting data in a CO field created for each form-data would be more convenient in that case, as mentioned earlier!)

     

    SanfordWhiteman
    SanfordWhitemanAccepted solution
    Level 10
    March 25, 2023

    As Darshil mentions, COs are not a full solution if you need 40 depts x 10 fields = 400 fields.

     

    You'd still end up having multipurpose fields, typically implemented as <attribute>:<value> (i.e. color:orange) or for greater portability a standard JSON object ({"color":"orange"}).

    Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement

    Loading footer...