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Michael_Florin-2
Michael_Florin-2
New Participant
November 1, 2022
Question

Preference Center and 300 new fields

  • November 1, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 3040 views

Hi all,

 

we're just discussing how to build a preference center in the best possible way. And when I read about this, people usually say: Create Boolean fields for the various preferences. Okay, I understand that, and it seems to to be the ideal way, both from a customer facing form perspective and from internal handling and segmentation perspective. BUT: My current case has 20 business lines and each business line has up to 15 preferences. That would make 300 new Boolean fields in Marketo.

 

Is that a problem from any point of view? Performance-wise?

 

Thanks!
Michael

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1 reply

Darshil_Shah1
Darshil_Shah1
Community Manager
November 1, 2022

I haven't heard about Marketo having a hard limit on the number of custom fields that you can create. I've worked with clients who literally had over 1000 Marketo-only custom fields. Of course, they were not able to manage the data integrity, hygiene, etc. for most of the fields. I think the ability of marketers and Marketo to be able to keep up with the increasing hygiene and data integrity needs as one goes on about creating more and more custom fields is more so of a concern (and, a bottleneck too) when it comes to creating and managing the custom fields. 

 

Instead of creating 300 custom fields for managing people's preferences, would it be possible to aggregate preferences for a few similar business lines together and try managing the preferences in lesser complicated and powdered form with fewer fields? Worse comes to worst, you may also need to create campaigns (mostly triggers) to manage and update the email compliance fields (tracking, history, last opted-out date, marketable fields, etc.) as these opt-in fields get updated for each preference and/or business line.

 

Happy to hear what others here in the community have to say/advise regarding this.

 

 

Michael_Florin-2
Michael_Florin-2Author
New Participant
November 1, 2022

Instead of creating 300 custom fields for managing people's preferences, would it be possible to aggregate preferences for a few similar business lines together and try managing the preferences in lesser complicated and powdered form with fewer fields?

Yes, I was thinking about that too. Using a field like "BL A Preferences" as the Checkboxes type on a form looks certainly viable. It saves various values as a semicolon-separated string which allows for segmentation via "BL A Preferences contains..." But: We also need to import these preference and the import data look more like 

 

Preference A - true

Preference B - false

 

So that would need to be substantially re-formatted first.

 

I also thought about storing preferences in Static Lists or in Program Member Custom Fields, but nothing really convinces me.

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
New Participant
November 1, 2022

With that much complexity I'd choose Marketo Custom Objects. The catch being that you have to build an intermediate gateway to read and write them, of course. But the Marketo user experience is much, much smoother, and you can easily bulk import.

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