Best Practice/Suggestions for Handling duplicate leads

[James_Glavin]

Hi all,

We have a situation with duplicate leads which is causing me a headache. I was hoping someone might have experienced something similar and could offer some words of wisdom!

We run a series of networking events for our customers and we're finding that a lot of people are registering for these events (via a Marketo form) using a different email address from the one we have for them in Marketo/CRM (Dynamics). Often we have a work email address for them, but they're registering for an event using a personal email address instead. This is causing a duplicate lead to be created. We've enabled form pre-fill, but still some leads are choosing to use a different email address.

We could potentially merge the leads in our CRM/delete the dupe and start using the new email address they've provided, but we're not 100% sure that just because a lead uses a personal email address to register for a social event/evening drinks reception, that they want to start receiving all emails from us to this address. Similarly if they register for the event using their (say) gmail address, it feels wrong to ignore this email address and send all details of the event to the existing work email address we have for them.

An ideal solution would be to merge the leads and keep both email addresses, and be able to determine what type of communication goes to Email Address 1 versus Email Address 2, but I'm sure that's not an option with Marketo.

Does anyone have any genius ideas? Is there any way to 'force' people to use the email address we have for them in Marketo? Or am I just going to have to decide on a 'least worst' option?! I'd love to hear how you handle this sort of situation.

Thanks,

James

[John_Clark1]

Hi James,

There isn't currently a way for a lead record to have two email addresses and be able to switch between the two, but I understand how that would be convenient in this situation.  It's also not possible to force leads to use an email address already in the database that might pre-fill in the form.

The suggestions I can offer are

1. Label the Email Address field on your form something like "Work Email" or "Professional Email Address"

2. You could keep separate lists for email sends that you deem to be more personal or professional.  Basically you would have a smart campaign adding leads to a "Personal Email" list if their addresses have domain like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.,  or adding them to a "Professional Email" list if they don't have those or if they have specific domains you want to target.  You could then use these as exclusion lists depending on the type of email you're sending.

Let me know if either of those might help.

John

[James_Glavin]

Thanks John - I think those are good suggestions and I'll give them some thought. Thanks for taking the time to respond!

[Grant_Booth]

Hi James,

We also have a post from our developers' blog which explains how to validate against personal email address domains:

http://developers.marketo.com/blog/restrict-free-email-domains-on-form-fill-out/

Keep in mind that as a developers' solution, it's outside the scope of Support and we can't help you implement it or troubleshoot it, however.

Grant

[James_Glavin]

Thanks Grant - I'm not sure we want to go down the route of preventing people from using personal email addresses, but it's certainly good to know it's an option.

[Jamie-Carey]

Are you using form prefill? If they are already a lead and are cookied in the browser, then their email address would prefill and they would be less likely to change it (because effort) and they'd just fill the remaining blank fields and submit.

[James_Glavin]

Hi Jamie,

We are using form prefill (which has reduced the issue from when this wasn't previously enabled), but we are still getting known leads using different email addresses. I have a feeling there's no real fix for this and we'll just have to manage the dupes.

Thanks,

James

[Anonymous]

Hi James,

    I think John's suggestion is really good. You may need to separated these email leads into two different groups.

   In addition, I think you can try TIBCO Clarity for free. It has deep integration with Marketo

   https://clarity.cloud.tibco.com/landing/index.html

  You can easy use Clarity to facet your lead and separate them into two different lists. You can also use it find and remove duplications.

Then you can directly update your data in Marketo.

   One thing nice about Clarity is that once you build your own receipt, you can reuse it to your new data. I think it may be really helpful for you since you always has some new leads coming.