New to Marketo and setting up Field Management: Multiple answers for Custom String Fields? | Community
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A
Anonymous
March 7, 2016
Question

New to Marketo and setting up Field Management: Multiple answers for Custom String Fields?

  • March 7, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 1132 views

We have a lot of custom fields we would like to be able to segment by, and need to set them manually since we are not using a CRM integration. To get ourselves started we will be uploading lead lists from quite a few different places.

Our Marketo consultant said to make the custom fields all strings. We want to allow multiple answers to nearly all these custom fields. What happens when we upload a new file for import that has a duplicate with a new answer? We don't want to delete the old one, we simply want to add the new information to the field for the lead.

For example, if Mark Smith has been previously tagged with an "Interest" of "Organization Management," we upload another list with Mark Smith on it and this time he's said he's interested in "Restructuring," I don't want to just replace Organization Management with Restructuring, I want to add Restructuring to it.

The consultant's answer also left us in a jam when trying to control for errors. If I only want 10 options under "Interest," and someone accidentally puts an 11th into an upload sheet (or a typo), under the String option, the 11th interest will sneak its way in without anyone noticing. The consultant's answer was to keep a spreadsheet of all possible answers to a field and manually control this. Is this really the best way out there?

Thank you!

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1 reply

Josh_Hill13
Josh_Hill13
Level 10
March 7, 2016

You need to look into Multi-select boxes on forms and you would still use String or Text fields.

The challenge is that in Marketo, Multi-select are not handled well. You essentially get:

Value1;Value2

So you would use a filter of CONTAINS "Value1"

or you can use the comment history trick to concatenate values. All of this can be researched on the community.

    A
    Anonymous
    March 7, 2016

    Thanks for your reply, Josh.

    Moving forward using Marketo forms seems to help control some of it, but for uploading, we'll be pulling high volumes of leads from 5 different sources, and I know we'll have lots of duplicates. Any advice on how to upload multiple inputs and add it all to one field in the preferred "Var1; Var2" format?

    Josh_Hill13
    Josh_Hill13
    Level 10
    March 8, 2016

    you would have to use concatenate in excel as part of the data prep process.

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