Marketo Dynamic Content Testing: Expert Tips and Strategies

Velocity script in Marketo is a powerful tool that enables dynamic content personalization and data manipulation in emails. By leveraging stored data, conditional statements, loops, and more, marketers can create sophisticated and targeted email content to enhance engagement.

However, it's important to be aware of a caveat when testing dynamic email content using the Preview By Person method in Marketo. The platform automatically de-duplicates the dropdown options, ensuring only one record per email address is available for previewing the email content.

So, if Marketo ends up referencing a duplicate record that you haven't validated the output against, it may mistakenly lead you to believe that there's an issue with your dynamic content logic (tokens, velocity script, etc.). This can result in hours of debugging, attempting alternative approaches, and whatnot. 🤯

To mitigate this risk, it's advisable to add the test records to a static list and utilize Preview By List instead. By doing so, you not only avoid referencing the wrong person in the case of duplicates but also gain the ability to quickly navigate between people using the directional arrows highlighted below.

Although this method requires some upfront work of loading the relevant people into a list, it is however a less error-prone method.

A few weeks back, Sandy (Sanford Whiteman) and I encountered this very firsthand while debugging a Marketing Nation user's velocity script involving custom objects. In the end, we found that unintentionally they’d referenced the wrong person record in the Preview By Person dropdown, as Marketo had hidden the one with the custom object data due to duplicate records in the database.

Have questions? Comment ‘em below and I’ll make sure to answer them as soon as possible.

Happy Marketo’ing!