Best way to remove "junk" leads

[Anonymous]

I recently took a look at how may leads we have in our system and came to find out it is over 70,000. This was very surprising as there is no way we should have even more than 50,000. I'm going to assume that there must be a lot of duplicate/junk/test leads that should be removed. Without going through each lead individually and figuring out which to remove and which to keep (which would take forever!), does anyone have a better approach that they have used? My inital thought was to create a smart campaign that will remove all leads that have "test" as the company name or first name...something like that? Any ideas??

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Here's a great KB article that shows how to find junk leads: http://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000KytICAS 

[Anonymous]

Thank you for sharing the article!

[Anonymous]

I just wanted to provide more clarification on this.

1. Filter for junk leads according to filters that you declare are important.  This is in reference to the article above (http://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000KytICAS ).  Some of the common filters I see marketers use are:
- Email Bounced
- Email Invalid
- Not Data Value Changed (for a specific data value that you declare is important to you, such as Lead Score)
- Lack of Activity (in conjunction with other filters such as Not Opened Email, Not Clicked Link in Email, Not Visited Web Page)

2. Duplicates - Merge duplicate leads: http://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000KytMCAS

[Anonymous]

Thank you JT - very very helpful!!

[Anonymous]

We executed a five-step nurture campaign over 10 weeks to a list of contacts we had in Marketo where we had little more than email address for the contact. Each of the five steps encouraged the contact to take some action; register for a drawing, vote in a poll, request more information, update their subscription. If the contact had no interaction with us after the 10 weeks were up, they were automatically deleted. Two thirds of the list we started out with were deleted at the end, but the remaining third we now have enough data on that most of them are placed in the proper nurture streams to continue to qualify them for potential purchase. One of them ended up becoming a Marketing Qualified Lead. Well worth it to clean out the database while qualifying at the same time.