Estimated setup time: 10 minutes

Welcome to Avochato for Marketing Cloud!

This guide will take you through the steps on how to install Avochato for Marketing Cloud and enable Avochato messages to be sent via Journey Builder.

I. 🔗 The Link

Avochato for Marketing Cloud has a simple web link that will install the package into your Marketing Cloud instance. Go to our AppExchange listing, click the “Get It Now” button, follow the dialogues, fill in your Marketing Cloud login details, and watch your Journey Builder messaging dreams come one step closer to reality.

II. 🤝 The Handoff

In order to enable your Journey Builder for Avochato message sending, you have to give your Marketing Cloud Account ID to your Avochato representative.

Simply click this link 👉 here 👈 to shortcut to your Setup → Company Settings in Marketing Cloud. Copy that Account ID and send it over to your Avochato representative and they’ll be able to activate your Avochato account for Marketing Cloud goodness. Phew that was painless enough! 🥑

III. 🗝️ The Keys

For every Avochato message activity, we verify the Avochato account with Avochato API credentials.

If you already have API credentials, then find them and keep them handy for the next section. For first time users, you can acquire some new keys by following the gif below:

For those who prefer lists over gifs, follow these instructions below:

Go into Avochato, click Settings, then click API Access

Select a user you’d like to create the API credentials for. Whatever Avochato accounts & inboxes that user has access to in Avochato will be the access they have when sending messages from Journey Builder

Click the friendly green-ish Generate Credentials button

Yay! API Keys FTW!

Save the Auth ID and Auth Secret somewhere safe. You’ll need to use them in your Avochato message activities in Journey Builder

IV. 🏹 The Journey

Now the messaging fun begins. Within Journey Builder, you should see a new custom activity called “Avochato Message” with the cute Avochato icon

Drag that into the journey wherever you’d like. When you click on the activity, you’re prompted for those Avochato API credentials. Put those in and click Find Accounts. If the page just hangs, double check that you have the right Auth ID and Auth Secret values.

Once authenticated, you can choose the Avochato account / inbox & user to send on behalf of, as well as select the phone field to send the message to, and the message itself:

V. 🧞‍♂️ The Magic

Within the Message text area, you have a number of neat messaging options at your disposable.

Merge fields from Marketing Cloud entry source data

You read that correctly! Using the %% merge field notation that you know and love from Journey Builder email templates, you can use the same mechanism in Avochato messages! Simplest example – add that first name personalization touch:

Have some rich Salesforce order details being fed into your Journey? How about a personalized message to a customer who just purchased a particular coffee:

Note (getting a little 👓 technical here) – these fields are based on the Data Entry Event or Data Extension of the Journey. If you’re using a Data Entry Event, you should follow the exact field names in the Entry Data section right there in the journey. If you use a Data Extension, you can go into the data extension definition and see the exact field names there.

In the example at the right, we can get the Contact Owner’s email using the exact syntax: %%Contact:Owner:Email%%. Whatever is not specified in the Entry Data will not be available in the merge fields.

In the example data entry event above 👆, the Contact Owner’s first name wasn’t included in the journey, so %%Contact:Owner:FirstName%% will show up blank as well 😐 .

Lastly, case is sensitive here, so firstName is not the same as FirstName. Follow exactly the field spelling and capitalization in the Data Entry source and you’re good to go!

Merge fields from Avochato contact data

You betcha! Use the Avochato $ notation to bring in captured data from Avochato, like standard contact information or even a survey response to your favorite ice cream:

Notice you can use both Marketing Cloud and Avochato data merging together in the same message! The joy!

Kick off a survey and record responses automatically

“Did you say survey response for ice cream flavors”? Yes! You can create surveys in Avochato and save responses into custom Avochato fields like $FAVORITE_ICE_CREAM (and even sync those automatically to Salesforce and to Marketing Cloud 👀 👀 ). Simply use the $ and survey name to start a message survey:

See this wonderful post on how to setup and use Avochato Surveys 💁

Tag your messages

As you already know and love, Avochato tags are a great way to categorize your contacts in Avochato. Now you can also add different tags at every step of their Marketing Cloud Journeys!

Simply fill in a comma separated list of tags in the Avochato Tags (Optional) field, and we’ll apply those tags to the contacts that went through that part of the MC Journey 🎉

Avochato for Marketing Cloud - Quickstart Guide