Tagging Individual Contacts Based on Interests

Question

I’m looking for the best way to tag individual contacts based on their interests. Specifically, if a contact engages with content related to a specific product—such as clicking on an email about our postcard product or filling out a form related to it—I’d like to automatically tag them with “Interested in Postcards.”

I’d like to set this up for multiple products so we can better segment and personalize our marketing. What’s the best approach for implementing this in Marketo?

SanfordWhiteman · Answer

There are a few takes on this. I’ll tell you what we do w/clients and then what most other people do.

We prefer to use DateTime fields, not Boolean fields or multi-valued text fields for this. Each interest gets a DateTime which represents not only that they’re interested, but when they became interested. It’s way better than a Boolean; individual Booleans have no advantage over DTs, you only lose info.

Where this DateTime model stops being practical is when you go over, say, 30 different products. (The exact number is arbitrary, it’s just the you-know-it-when-you-see-it moment when things get unwieldy.)

What people usually do, and what even we do when DateTimes get out of hand, is use a text field with semicolon-delimited values. The key concern is you must avoid delimiter collisions and partial matches. That is, you can’t use “orange” and “orange theory” as 2 different products, because Marketo must use [contains] to match the sub-values and “orange” would match both of these! Instead, surround them with distinct delimiters: “<orange>” and “<orange theory>”, for example, so the full falue is “<orange>;<orange theory>”. Then include those angle brackets in any Smart List filter and you won’t have any screwups.

What I would say is the best way to store product interests is in a Custom Object, which we do in a couple of Marketo instances. However, some code is required to transform a form fill into a CO. The end result is very cool but not practical without a savvy developer.

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