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How to trigger a Smart Campaign in Marketo Engage using the REST API and tokens

Last update: April 17, 2025

Topics:
REST API

CREATED FOR:

Experienced
Admin
Developer

This tutorial walks you through how to trigger a Smart Campaign in Marketo Engage using the REST API, and personalize the email using My Tokens. This use case is ideal for customer-triggered notifications like webinar reminders, onboarding steps, or post-purchase follow-ups.

Use case

A person registers for a webinar through an external platform (e.g., custom app, Pendo, Eventbrite). You want to automatically:

Trigger a reminder email from Marketo Engage
Personalize it with:
- The person’s first name
- Webinar title
- A unique join link

This can be done using the REST API and My Tokens.

Step 1: Create the Smart Campaign

Go to Marketing Activities, and under your Programs folder, create a new Smart Campaign called Send Webinar Reminder.
In the Smart List tab, add a trigger to allow the campaign to be called via the API:
- Select Campaign is Requested as the trigger
- Set the Source to Web Service API

Smart List trigger setup

Step 2: Define the email content

Create or edit an email asset that references both Person and My Tokens.

NOTE

Make sure to insert the tokens directly into the email content, as shown below.

Hi {{lead.First Name:default=Customer}}

You're registered for **{{my.WebinarTitle}}**.

Join here: {{my.JoinLink}}

If you’re using a token to dynamically inject an image URL (e.g., {{my.WebinarImage}}), you must wrap the token in an HTML image tag:

<img src="{{my.WebinarImage}}" alt="Webinar banner" />

IMPORTANT

Marketo Enagage will not render the image unless the token is placed inside a valid image tag.

Email editor showing token usage

Step 3: Add tokens to the program

To pass values dynamically via API, the tokens must already exist in Marketo Engage. You’ll need to create them under the My Tokens tab of your Program.

Go to the My Tokens tab of your parent Program.
Drag in a Text token from the right-side panel for each dynamic value.

{{my.WebinarTitle}} - Text token
{{my.JoinLink}} - Text token
{{my.WebinarImage}} - Text token (this will be used as the src in an <img> tag)

My Tokens tab in campaign

Step 4: Set campaign qualification rules and activate campaign

Configure the qualification rules to control how often a person can run through the Smart Campaign.
Once configured, click Activate to enable the Smart Campaign to receive API-triggered requests.

Smart Campaign qualification rule

Step 5: Trigger the campaign via REST API

Find the Campaign ID

To trigger a Smart Campaign via API, you’ll need the campaign ID:

Find and select the Smart Campaign you want to trigger.
Look at the URL in your browser. It will look something like this: https://app-XXX.marketo.com/#/classic/SC1234A1ZN38.
The 4 digits after SC is your campaign ID, in the above example the Smart Campaign ID is ‘1234’

Use the following endpoint:

POST /rest/v1/campaigns/{campaignId}/trigger.json

Example:

POST /rest/v1/campaigns/1234/trigger.json

Example Request Body

{
  "input": {
    "leads": [
      {
        "id": 1002200
      }
    ],
    "tokens": [
      {
        "name": "{{my.WebinarTitle}}",
        "value": "Scaling Customer Engagement in 2025"
      },
      {
        "name": "{{my.JoinLink}}",
        "value": "https://webinars.company.com/join/abc123"
      },
      {
        "name": "{{my.WebinarImage}}",
        "value": "https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/marketo-learn/tutorials/events/media_1c6f338a518ada11550084c8ab3a6bbf554ff6eac.jpeg"
      }
    ]
  }
}

IMPORTANT

Replace 1002200 in the body example above with the correct person ID from your Marketo Engage instance.

Authorization

All Marketo REST API requests require an OAuth 2.0 access token.

To retrieve your access token, use the following endpoint:

GET /identity/oauth/token?grant_type=client_credentials&client_id=XXX&client_secret=YYY

Once you receive your access token, include it as a query parameter in all API requests:

Authorization: Bearer YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN

Best Practices

Add fallback/default values to your tokens for testing and QA
Use {{lead.token}} for person fields and {{my.token}} for campaign-scoped dynamic values
Marketo Engage supports up to 100 people per request
Persons must meet the Smart List criteria, otherwise, they are silently skipped

Summary

With this approach, you can personalize communications using Smart Campaigns that are triggered from external platforms via API. This is useful for scenarios like webinar registration confirmations, onboarding emails, and transactional notifications—all while injecting real-time data using My Tokens.

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