Change Email Address unique identifier to Mobile Number

[neelambakre]

Hi All,

Hope you all are doing great.

I'm unfamiliar with the Marketo tool, but from what I gather, it typically utilizes email addresses as a unique identifier for imported data within its system. Is it possible to use "Mobile Number" as a unique ID in place of Email address ?  Because there are possibilities that we could have multiple profiles sharing same email address but having different mobile numbers, resulting in multiple records in the database; however, when we import such lists, these records will get automatically deduplicated and only the first record on the list import will get saved to our database.

Kindly help on this.

Thanks & Regards,

Neelam B.

[nhabischWings]

⚠️ This post was edited for accuracy.

Hello!

I believe Email Address is the default and cannot be changed (EDIT: it’s true that for list imports via the UI the default lookup field is Email, but this is not true of imports via the API).

But you can add secondary de-duplication key (in your case, Mobile Number) by requesting that through Marketo Support.

Basically then the system will look at the Email Address and if it matches, will look to see if that Mobile Number is the same. In cases where it is not, a new Lead will be created.

Note as someone who's been in this situation, it will create some headache for your database and potential emails as Batch Campaigns only send to 1 email so even if you have duplicates that meet the criteria, only one of those will get the email (and it may not be the one you want). So be wary of this.

 EDIT:

[Darshil_Shah1 · Accepted solution]

To be clear, the Email Address isn't the Unique Identifier in Marketo, it's the default de-duplication key for lead creation/updated via certain sources (not all). FYR - The lead id is the system-managed unique key in Marketo and all the person records in Marketo are guaranteed to have a unique lead id. Having said that, custom settings exist so that some functions use the email address + one other field as the dedupe key instead, you'd need to request the Support to configure that for your subscription as it isn't something you could do within the UI as an end user. In case a single person could have more than one contact number, you can store each in a custom field (e.g., Work Phone, Home Phone, Cell Phone, etc.). Alternatively, if you want to create/update records based on Email + Mobile number as the compound de-duplication key, you could have support update your default de-dupe rule. Working with duplicates is a bit tricky and you shouldn't get into it if you're just starting out with Marketo and aren't very sure.

[SanfordWhiteman]

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I'm unfamiliar with the Marketo tool, but from what I gather, it typically utilizes email addresses as a unique identifier for imported data within its system.

As Darshil notes, the system Email Address field is not a unique identifier. Quite the contrary: you can have unlimited people with the same Email Address value.

It’s true that Email Address is used as the default lookup key when uploading lists via the Marketo UI. But this is not the case if you use the Bulk Import API. In the latter case, you can use the person ID (for precise targeting), the email, or any custom field. You can’t use the system Mobile Phone — since it’s not custom — but what we’ve done is mirror the Mobile Phone to another custom field Mobile Phone Lookup using an always-on Smart Campaign, then use the custom field for imports.

You could also have a more generic custom field Compound Lead Identifier, kept up-to-date using trigger campaigns. This could include multiple fields (although you must be careful to avoid delimiter collisions).