Contacts with the one generic email address

[Anonymous]

Hi Everyone,

I was wondering if anyone have face this issue of having multiple contacts using the same email address (generic email address).

My issue is that Marketo is updating these contacts first name, last name... because it recognises the email address (which is used by several persons so it may always change the information).

How would you deal with this issue? Either in SFDC or Marketo.

Thanks for your help.

Kind Regards,

Mathias

[Josh_Hill13]

Yes, this happens especially with Partners not following directions for their registered users.

You can try a few things, but it's hard:

• use jquery to force the Form to reject dupe email on the forms you care about
• ask marketo to turn off deduping (yes, you can)
• force records into SFDC first so they aren't deduped
• if this is a partner form, then be strict on the instructions too. Tell them they will not get credit if they cannot provide correct info.

[Steven_Vanderb3]

To clarify, while it is possible for Marketo Support turn off de-duplication entirely we very strongly recommend against it and it is not considered best practice.  Turning off de-duplication runs the risk of quickly running into your lead database limit (resulting in you either needing to delete records from your database or paying more money to increase your database size once you hit the cap) and flooding your CRM and sales team with numerous duplicates of leads.  It will also be much harder to manage your Smart Campaigns; leads that should qualify for campaigns if they had a singular record may not, and leads that should not qualify if they had a singular record may.

If you have a legitimate need of duplicate records, please consider adding an additional field for de-duplication instead such as Last Name (this would be a viable solution to Mathias' problem, for instance).  A new record would be created if both an email address AND Last Name did not match any existing record in the database in this example.  I wouldn't personally recommend any change to duplication rules without spending a good amount of time reviewing the business cases and technical side effects.  A consultant would be a good resource for this. 

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

And another option is to set up more than one field as your dedupe criteria.  So Marketo uses email address by default, so you could set up first name as the other dedupe criteria, and Marketo would need to check both fields match to append the details to a record, otherwise it would create a new lead with the same email address. The downside of this is that the first name would need to match exactly, so if the same lead used Jon the first time he filled in a form, then Jonathan the second time, it would create two records for the same lead...