Can Marketo handle duplicate email addresses for different people?

[Sarah_Samuels]

Hi all.  We have a database which includes family members who are using the same email address.

A few questions:

1. Can marketo cope with imported data for the same email address but with eg 3 different names?

2. Can marketo send separate emails to each record, e.g. the 3 different people at the same email address?

This doesn't impact us so much with newsletter comms, but for things like sending out unique discount codes it poses a problem as only one person is receiving their code.

thanks

Sarah

[SanfordWhiteman]

Marketo, as a database, ​fully supports multiple records with the same Email Address. Email Address is not a unique identifier.

However, that is not the whole story because Email Address is still the only ​lookup key ​for most UI-based (as opposed to API-based) operations. Standard list imports, for example, will locate the target lead by its email address. (In contrast, API-based imports can be set to lookup on another key, like the built-in Lead ID or even a custom string field.) And a list import with 3 rows referring to a single email address will ​only ​ever update a single lead, continually updating its values. This post will shed more light on the logic.

Your example of sending separate emails is actually slightly different from the unique key vs. lookup key decision. It's principally to stop you from looking like a spammer. Marketo will only send to one email address per Send Email step. If you want to send to multiple qualified leads with the same address, then instead of calling Send Email directly, you can trigger a Request Campaign ​on another campaign that in turn uses ​Send Email. Such individual ​Request Campaigns ​can send to multiple leads that happen to have the same email address, since there is no batching-and-deduping.

[Anonymous]

Hi Sanford Whiteman​ I found your suggestion of using Request Campaign really interesting. How would you manage personalization in this case? Use case I was thinking of is something like householding - where one family uses the same email address. I'm thinking you'd add filters and use custom fields, or would you pre-segment groups (e.g. mother, father, children based on age) using lists?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Yep, having a Segmentation based on HouseholdRoleType is useful. One of my clients manages shared credit cards this way. You might be unlikely to send the same core email to kids (if email variants are wildly divergent, segments end up just being confusing) but you have the flexibility.

[Ken_Ungaro]

Sanford,

I've just inherited an instance of Marketo at my company and ran the standard "Possible Duplicates" query and I'm finding MULTIPLE people and companies using a 123@aol.com email address.  We are integrated with Salesforce so I was wondering if THAT is how this could be happening?  What say you?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Certainly SFDC integration can readily create leads/contacts with the same email address, yes.

[Adam_Seften]

@SanfordWhiteman Do you have any material that can be shared on the API based imports with multiple keys? We have an API set up with between our CRM and Marketo, but we're still only updating records based on email address. We push a number of other custom fields to Marketo, but these are constantly being changed due to the dupe email address. As you know, this causes major issues for personalization as well as reporting on results properly on an individual basis within our CRM. If we were able to layer on additional keys within the API to update the correct record, it would solve a major headache. 

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Truly using multiple dedupe keys isn't possible.

But you can use a single custom String field that is a concatenation of other fields and dedupe on that.  Make sure to avoid delimiter collisions, for example by using the Unicode unit separator character between components.

[Raquelbroad]

Hello,

I have a slightly complicated scenario. We want to send several dynamic campaigns at the same time, uploading a single contact file to the database where we indicate the TAG (the campaign to send), the contacts and the dynamic fields.

The problem is that the contacts can be within several of the campaigns, so the contact can be duplicated several times, so it only receives the first campaign where the contact appears and the rest do not.

I have tried with all the resources that you comment, but I have not been able to advance . The ideal scenario:

A single database, with several campaigns, contacts and dynamic fields. We want to execute campaigns that call that database (only one) and, depending on the TAG, the respective campaign is sent to the contact on the same line with their respective dynamic fields. Not possibility for appi connection... 

The file is: 

Tag: Campaign 1 (Local string 10) / Contact / Dynamic Campaign 1  / Dynamic Campaign 2

Tag: Campaign 2 (Local string 10) / Contact / Dynamic Campaign 1 / Dynamic Campaign 2

Thanks in advanced!

How can I solve the problem of repeating contacts? Thank you very much in advance.

[SanfordWhiteman]

As this this thread is very old, I recommend starting a new one for your question. You can link back here to show you've already done some research!