Removing Duplicates in List?

[Anonymous]

My company came over from MailChimp and I am struggling with Marketo. Right now, my struggle is with lists and smart campaigns. My company wants to send out an onboarding email to new members who've just opened an account or loan (we are a credit union.) I created a list - "Onboarding 2016" - and a smart campaign set to email anyone new who had been added to the list each Saturday at 8am. The flow is wait until Saturday at 8am and then send email.

I set the campaign so that people could only go through the flow once (the idea being that if they opened an account, and then a loan later, they don't need the same welcome email.) The plan is to simply upload a new list each week that we pull from our core account system (we do not have salesforce or a CRM that directly connects to Marketo.)

To test this, I added myself to the list and waited. At the specified time, I got the email. To make sure that no duplicates would happen, I added myself to the list again (with the same email) and it added me as a new Marketo Id lead. So now there are two of me in the list with the same email address and different Marketo lead numbers.

At the specified time, I once again got the email. How can I keep duplicates from entering the flow? We have a lot of customers that open multiple accounts and loans throughout the year and we don't want to keep sending them the same email.

[Anonymous]

Hello Caroline Moore​ and welcome to Marketo - we're so happy to have you in the Marketing Nation!

I can think of one scenario where this would happen:

1. A lead is created via list import, then sent the test email by adding them to the list - so far so good!

2. Then another lead is created manually (add new lead or person button)

3. A new list is imported which contains that email address.

What would happen here is that the manually created lead would not automatically deduplicate and you would end up with 2 leads having the same email address.

When choosing between 2 leads to update via list import (when you imported the list again for example) Marketo would choose the latest updated one. So in this case the lead created manually.

It's a far out scenario for sure so if this doesn't cover your situation (you can check by looking at the activity log and checking the first activities for the leads, the "lead is created". One should say list import and one won't), then please do open a case with support who will gladly look after you and help you make sense of it!

[Josh_Hill13]

Basically each lead, even if it is a dupe, is considered separately for the Qualification Rules if they are run at separate times as you ran them.

[Anonymous]

Josh, could you explain further, I am not understanding what you are saying. Thanks!

[Anonymous]

Hi Louiza,

I actually added both version manually via the add new person option. I'll try uploading via a list and test again.

[Anonymous]

Hello Caroline Moore​!

That explains Adding them manually will not deduplicate. Work with the list import and that should do the trick

Remember, importing a lead in a list will create it, so there's no need for you to do additional manual work.