Triggered Send on Custom object - how to get object details?

Question

I'm working on using Marketing cloud instead of apex to automate some email sends. I've got the Marketing Cloud connector set up to integrate between Salesforce and Marketing Cloud.

The process I'm envisioning goes something like this:

1. User creates a record in the custom object "Transaction". This record may have some associated child records "Transaction Line Items".
2. Salesforce responds to the new record by firing off the triggered send.
3. Marketing cloud gets the triggered send and sends an email to the user. The email is dynamically created based on various aspects of the transaction record and the presence of transaction line items.

Right now, I'm able to automate sending the email, but I've got no data to work with once it his MC. Any efforts to use ampscript to look up the transaction record won't work because I don't have the record ID. All I have is the email address.

I don't know what is available in the call from Salesforce to Marketing Cloud, but I suspect it has to do with the all-subscribers list vs data extensions. The documentation isn't especially helpful on this, and I'm finding that the UI in the Marketing Cloud Connector doesn't show any data extensions when I click the folders, regardless of whether I use the template or create manually.

Is there another way I should be doing this? It seems fairly typical - transaction happens, email is triggered and populated/personalized based on the content of that transaction.

Answer 1

You are on the right track, you would want to use the ampscript function RetrieveSalesforceObjects() to retrieve the transactional line items from salesforce. But, you are correct, you'll need to know the record ID first.

I have two troubleshooting tips that might help:

1. Triggered Sends can pass additional information to SFMC by mapping subscriber attributes to salesforce object fields.

2. You can enabling logging in the Marketing Cloud Connector tab, trigger an email, and then review the REST call. The Marketing Cloud Connector logging is written to a plain text file under the Documents tab in a folder named 'Marketing Cloud Documents'.'