Real-time Dynamic Content for Landing Pages Based on Activity

Question

&#9888;&#65039; The claims made in this post are not technically reliable in the current version of Marketo Engage. Please read responses and clarifications from other users.
 
A teammate had suggested using dynamic testimonials on a landing page based on the nurture product email that person had opened. It was a 3 series email nurture, each email a different product promotion. They would then be able to click in each email over to the landing page. So when building the segmentations for the dynamic content on the LP I noticed its easier with data points like Industry or Job Title, but not so much for activities like opened email or clicked in email. I also needed the person to move through the segments as they opened the each unique email and I needed the LP to update quickly because if they clicked in the specific product email to the LP I would want the testimonial to be relevant to the product email. So I:
 
Created three email assets for three different products all with a link to a single LP
Setup the nurture series (3-emails)
I created three lists (one list for each of the three products)
I created three segments based on the lists, as people are added to the static list, the segment dynamically updates
Added relevant dynamic copy to the LP based on the segment
I created three smart campaigns that would place the person in each list based on the email they opened. Smart campaign one (triggered by first email open) added them to the first email list, the second smart campaign (triggered by second email open) removed them from the first email list and added them to the second email list, the third smart campaign (triggered by the third email open) removed them from the second email list and added them to the third email list. 
 
So these people as they open the emails are 1. changing lists in real-time 2. changing segments in real-time, and as they change segments the landing page updates the dynamic content accordingly. This process was helpful because now we can create segments based on trigger activity, which helps increase real-time personalization and allows us to use behavior and interest to help influence our dynamic content.

SanfordWhiteman · Answer

This approach is certainly not recommended. It has an obvious race condition: segments are not guaranteed to be updated by the time the page is viewed, because the trigger firing, the list membership change, and the segment change happen in the background (i.e. asynchronously). Marketo’s resource governor doesn’t let you wait for the segment to be updated before viewing the page, so the actual results across your audience are inconsistent. What you should instead do is pass the desired segment in the query string. For example, if the segmentation is called “Promo-Stage” with segments “Stage-1”, “Stage-2”, and “Stage-3”, link to https://pages.example.com/mypage?Promo-Stage=Stage-2. Marketo will display the Stage-2 Dynamic Content regardless of the person’s actual segment at the database level. Let their segment get permanently changed in the background, but you cannot (and need not) rely on it on the front end.

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