Accessing data from journey object/event in Emails using Journey Builder

Question

I am using Marketing Cloud Journey Builder to send emails to Contacts when a related Custom Object (via Lookup field) is inserted.

In my Event Source I have select the Salesforce Object and selected all the fields I'd like from the Custom Object and the Contact in the Event Data tab (when selecting Entry Source).

When selecting an email which contains any of the fields i.e FirstName, no matter which tag I use whether it be %%FirstName%% or %%Contact__r.FirstName%%, when I click Test on the Journey an error is returned because the email fails validation. If I take out any of these tags the test passes so it's definitely the related data.

Can someone tell me what the correct way would be access the related data in my Emails?

Answer 1

You can access data from your entry event like this:

First you need to find out the path of the data you like to access:

1. Go to Email Studio -> Subscribers -> Data Extensions
2. Find the automatically created Data Extension for your Salesforce Data Event (starts with the name of your entry event)
3. Click on the Data Extension
4. Check out the column name containing the required data (e.g. SalesforceObjectName__c:RelatedObject__r:Fieldname)

After that you can read this value and store it in a variable using the following code:

%%[
    Var @field
    Set @field = SalesforceObjectName__c:RelatedObject__r:Fieldname
]%%

Code to output the column content in your HTML-Code:

<p>%%=V(@field)=%%</p>

To demonstrate, this is done inside HTML and not an AMPscript-block I did output the value in a HTML-paragraph in my example.