Syncing into Salesforce.com Custom Table

This doesn't really answer your question, but I'm curious what you have in your custom section that you wouldn't get from simply syncing your Marketo programs to a SFDC campaign? We use the native Campaign History section for our sales group to see the various marketing activities and what the status is for each lead/contact in Salesforce.

We sync high level actions (clicked link in email or filled out form) to a SFDC campaign, but wanted to sync anyone who recieved the email to a custom table we have in SF ("Marketing Activity History" Section). Sales wants to be better kept in the loop about who received an email, so this is what they suggested. But i'm not sure it's possible to sync to a custom table!

We actually have a status of "Sent" or "Delivered" for our campaigns and use the trigger of email was delivered to change the status to this so that our sales group can see who received the email. We add everyone to the campaign with a status of pending so they can see that the ones that remain as pending after an email goes out are the ones that have either unsubscribed in Marketo or have a bad email address. They use this as a list for updating our database.

Back to your question, I don't know if it is possible to sync to a custom table like that. We've never tried to sync to ours before.

That sounds like a really good idea. So you have a smart campaign with a Smart List step of : "Email is Delivered" , Flow step of "Add to SFDC Campaign" (Status = Delivered)?

How did you get "Delivered" to be a status? My drop down only shows "Sent" or "Responded". Also, can you explain how you add all pending to the smart campaign? Do i need to add in an additional trigger or filter?

Hi Kelly,

You can customize the campaign status in Salesforce options by clicking "Advanced Setup" on the top of the campaign page. Then click edit, and you'll be able to add new options.

Hope that helps.

First, you need to make sure that your channel has the tags for pending and delivered in Marketo, before any of your other values. In Salesforce you also need to make sure that the campaign has Member Status that match these as well.

Depending on how you do your workflow, we actually don't use Marketo to create our campaign, but I can't see it being much different. I create my campaign in Salesforce & my program within Marketo, then sync them together. Depending on how I am pulling my list, there are 2 ways that I get pending status. If I am uploading a list or using a smart list within Marketo, as soon as that is completed, I create a campaign to change the progression status to "Pending" for anyone on that list. But most of the time, I pull a list in Salesforce and add them to the Salesforce campaign with a status of pending. Then my smart list for the email is actually "Member of SFDC Campaign" when I send it.

I create a trigger campaign that is "Email is Delivered" and then the flow step is simply change status in progression to Delivered.

Thank you both for your help! This was very useful!

First of all, I really like the solution that Amber suggested and would recommend you use such a solution. If you create the SFDC Campaign from within the Marketo Program, it will automatically create the Campaign Membership Statuses in SFDC to align with the Program's Progression Statuses. If you prefer to create the SFDC Campaign in SFDC, you may want to create a "template" campaign that has the correct membership statuses: instead of creating a brand new campaign, you clone the existing Campaign, so you don't have to manually create the membership statuses every time. 

And for the record: Marketo can read Custom Objects from SFDC, but cannot update Custom Objects, so it wouldn't work for your requirement. 

Finally, you can use the "Add Task" flow step to create Tasks with status "Completed", which will show up in the activity history in SFDC for the affected Lead or Contact. 

Best, 
Jep

Is there any way we can pass the latest activity for the lead or the contact along with the lead record or contact record to Salesforce? then from there we can create a trigger on Salesforce to insert the latest activity to the custom object. Having a custom object for marketing activities is a requirment on our situation and the campaign trick won't do it for us. Can someone verify that we can extract the latest activity and pass it as a contact or lead field?