Marketing Cloud Email Send - merge fields from Salesforce Report not populating?

Question

I have Marketing Cloud Connect installed and running. I am trying to send an Email from Marketing Cloud (single email send) by using a custom Salesforce Report created. I am able to do the send, but I would like to populate some merge fields in the email as well based on the report fields. Is this not possible?

Thank you in advance for any tips.

Answer 1

When you send to a Salesforce Report, Marketing Cloud only cares about one of four fields ("ContactID", "Contact ID", "LeadID" or "Lead ID"). All the other fields in your report are ignored and are unavailable for personalization.

The high-level workflow of a send to a Report (or Campaign) is as follows:

1. Marketing Cloud runs the report and looks for either a Lead ID or Contact ID field in the report
2. A Sendable Data Extension is created in the root Data Extension folder containing all the mapped attributes
3. The IDs from the report are then used to retrieve the records of all Contacts or Leads contained in the report from CRM to populate the Sendable Data Extension
4. Your email is then sent to the Sendable Data Extension

So, if you'd like to personalize your email when using the standard Send Flow, there are one of two approaches:

1. Map the profile attributes you require for personalization in the Subscribers -> Profile Management section of Email Studio

   FirstName: %%FirstName%%
   

OR

2. Use the RetrieveSalesforceObjects() AMPScript function to get the fields you need for personalization using script:

   %%[ var @rs
       Set @rs= RetrieveSalesforceObjects('Contact','Id,FirstName,LastName', 'Id','=',SubscriberKey)
       Set @FirstName = Field(Row(@rs,1),'FirstName')
   ]%%
   FirstName: %%=v(@FirstName)=%%