Personalized emails where a deal contact references a contact with a different association label

[IUlbrich]

Is it possible for an email in a deal workflow, sent to one contact, to include personalization about another contact on the same deal?

Here's my use case. My organization offers courses for teens and young adults, and so often the Student and the Purchaser are different people. I've set up association labels for these two parts of the deal. So let's say that Sam is the Student and Pat is the Purchaser.

I created a deal workflow that sends some emails to Student Sam -- you're registered, the workshop is tomorrow, the workshop starts in 30 minutes.

But I'd also like to send an email to Purchaser Pat to say, "Thanks for supporting Sam and purchasing that workshop for them!" I can set up the workflow to send this email only to Purchaser Pat, and I can create the email with customization tokens about Pat, since they're the contact who will receive the email. But how do I get "Sam" to show up as personalization in Pat's email? 

[SaraMae]

This is great!

We have something similar where I have contacts with an associated custom object (our product, boats) - I'd love to build automated campaigns for contacts that were interested in a boat but have not been engaged after so much time... the ideal is being able to pull associated custom object properties into an email campaign.... "Hello John Smith - Still interested in that Boat you were discussing with your Account owner?" etc etc...

Excellent workaround @danmoyle! I'll report back if I can get this working and/or if I run into other considerations or creative solutions as I execute! Populating a contact property with the most recently associated custom object would work (and is prefered) for our application. 

[MiaSrebrnjak]

Hi @IUlbrich,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community!

A Deal workflow usually sends the same email to all contacts that are associated with the enrolled deals and can only pull up information into the contact personalization tokens for one contact at a time. Having information about multiple contacts pulled into a personalized automated emails is, to my knowledge, not possible. 

I also wanted to tag a couple of subject matter experts to see if they can think of a workaorund:

Hi @Olivia_Bagnall, @danmoyle,  @Bryantworks, do you have any advice for @IUlbrich? Thanks!

Cheers
Mia, Community Team  

[danmoyle · Accepted solution]

@IUlbrich I'm thinking the same as @MiaSrebrnjak here. Personalization tokens only pull from one object at a time, not associations from the same object as you're describing you'd like. 

I like to brainstorm, so I'm not sure if this would help. But here's where my mind goes for now. One workwround could potentially be: Create a custom property in Contacts where you could cross-reference the Purchaser or the Student, copying it via another workflow. But that feels overly complicated. It would also be limiting. For instance, would a Purchaser buy for multiple Students? This would overwrite the Student property each time you've associated a new Student. Pros and cons with this workaround. 

[IUlbrich]

Thanks @danmoyle and @MiaSrebrnjak ! Dan's solution is along the lines of what I was thinking of, and I think it will work for most of our cases. We're small and growing, so I can try to catch outlier cases as we go.

[MiaSrebrnjak]

That's great, you're very welcome @IUlbrich! 🙂 

Thank you for your insight @danmoyle! 💛