I talked about Trigger Tokens on this blog before, but Marketo came up with a change that forces me to make an update. Here’s what the release notes stated:
Trigger Tokens For Any Activity Attribute
- Triggers on Smart Campaigns can be used as Tokens.
- Provides the ability to access all trigger activity attributes via tokens so that users can map any available data from triggering activities into campaign flow actions.
Trigger Tokes for any activity? Let’s see what this means.
Let’s use the trigger “Data Values Changes” as an example. What trigger tokens could be available here? There is no documentation on that out yet – at least as far as I can tell – but we have an indication.
This is my test trigger. It’s supposed to fire whenever the value in “First Name” changes.
In the Flow Step of this Smart Campaign we try to write all available Trigger Tokens into another – meaningless – field via “Change Date Value”. And Marketo shows us what’s possible:
The forecast displays all available tokens for the “Data Value Changes” trigger. Great – now what do they do?
I changed the first name of my test person from “Michael” to “Katja”, and these were the results:
| {{trigger.name}} | First Name |
| {{trigger.trigger name}} | Change Data Value |
| {{trigger.Attribute Name}} | First Name |
| {{trigger.New Value}} | Katja |
| {{trigger.Old Value}} | Michael |
| {{trigger.Reason}} | Manual Person Edit |
| {{trigger.Source}} | Lead update |
“Well, that’s amazing, Michael”, I hear you say, “but what is good for?” Sorry, I don’t know yet. But here’s the first thing that comes to mind. These tokens not only work “so that users can map any available data from triggering activities into campaign flow actions.“, but they also render on emails. So you can for example send an alert to Sales whenever a phone number changes and use these tokens:
| Smart List (trigger) | Data Value Changes “Phone” |
| Flow Step | Send Alert |
| “Dear sales person, the lead {{lead.First Name}} {{lead.Last Name}} in Company {{company.Company Name}} changed their phone number from {{trigger.Old Value}} to {{trigger.New Value}}. Your Marketing Automation Team” |
{{trigger.New Value}} would be equal to {{lead.Phone}}, but the value in {{trigger.Old Value}} would no longer be in the database (except for the Activity History of course). So that’s a way to capture a former database value.
Now, is that cool or what?