Journey Builder Custom Entry Event - Send to All Subscribers

Question

I have been told by Marketing Cloud that my custom Entry Event is not sending contacts entered thru event trigger via POST /interaction/v1/events to the All Subscribers List.

While I am awaiting followup call, I wanted to reach out here with a couple questions to see if the community knows anything.

I used the VERY LIMITED Marketing Cloud documentation regarding creation of Custom Events and activities, some ideas provided by the community here,and a ton of what amounts to basically trial and error to get this working originally. The issue, as per Marketing Cloud support, is that contacts entered who are not already in the All Subscribers list fail in the Journey when it is configured to use an Email in the Contact as the sendable email address in Journey configuration - which makes very little logical sense to me. Further, Contacts are being synced on a 15 minute basis from Salesforce CRM and there ARE contacts in Marketing Cloud that match the failing contacts provided in the POST /interaction/v1/events and there seem to even be Subscribers that have a Subscriber Key matching Contact key -- does Salesforce sync not add Contacts to All Subscribers properly?

Configuration in the config.json the Event calls out to is pretty sparse - it essentialy matches the example given in Marketing Cloud documentation, minus the region/language support.

{"workflowApiVersion":"1.1","metaData":{"icon":"img/ApplicationImage.jpg"},"type":"EVENT","lang":{"en-US":{"name":"NAME","description":"DESCRIPTION"}},"configurationArguments":{"applicationExtensionKey":"APPEXTENSIONKEY"}}

The schema my with which my event is created via the Postmonger events during Event configuration is pretty basic. It has a sendableCustomObjectField which is created as a column in the data extension along with a SendableSubscriberField to link this custom object field to Subscriber.

    {
        "sendableCustomObjectField": "FIELDNAME",
        "SendableSubscriberField": "_SubscriberKey",
        "fields": [
            {
                "name": "FIELDNAME",
                "dataType": "text",
                "maxLength": "254",
                "isNullable": false,
                "defaultValue": ""
            }
        ]
    }

Looking at other payload examples provided by documentation, for instance the event definition schema, there is no configuration for specifying a contact's placement into the All Subscribers list.

I know I can create subscriber, which does an upsert, via SOAP call to get a Subscriber into the All Subscribers list, but this is a very expensive and non performant call. There is a Rest call for Create Contacts as well as Update Contacts, etc., but I see no reference to All Subscribers in this documentation -- can these be used, or is the only solution these slow SOAP calls? Am I missing something in Marketing Cloud documentation regarding the addition of contacts via entry into All Subscribers?

Answer 1

The answer is that Salesforce Contact Sync adds the CRM Contacts to the Marketing Cloud Contacts ONLY. It does not add the Contact to any Subscriber List, All Subscribers included. Seems silly as there are very few instances where a Marketing Cloud user or admin would not want a synced contact to be part of a Subscriber List.

So I am going to back to SLOW CreateSubscriber calls prior to Entry Events firing via SOAP calls as an interim solution. There is no REST equivalent nor any sort of bulk operation available via SOAP (as far as support could tell me).

They provide this help link that I will investigate further.