Content programs and duplicate leads

[Anonymous]

Here's a challenge!

BACKGROUND: I have created complex programs for each whitepaper we have. This program contains a teaser email, delivery email, landing pages, triggers, and more. The emails and pages are build using program tokens (subject line, title, body text, and so on). This makes it easy to change stuff.

CHALLENGE: I have a request campaign trigger in each program. This enables a marketer to quickly create a smartlist and add a request campaign in the flow to send a whitepaper to his pipeline. However each lead is seperately added to the campaign. Resulting in duplicate leads with the same email address receiving the mailing multiple times. Not requesting the program, but using the email assets from the program directly poses another problem as the tokens are not recognized anymore.

SOLUTION: Obiously making sure we clean our database and remove/merge duplicate leads. But is there an other way we can solve it?

[Anonymous]

Hi Diederik,

Are you aware that when you have duplicates in Marketo, even if you have 4 or 10 records with the same email address, Marketo will only send one email to that email address, not 4 or 10. However if one of those leads has a value such as unsubscribed - even if the remainder do not - that lead will not receive any email.

To ensure a lead does not get the same email twice, you could always use the filter 'Not Was Sent Email' and list that email. 

In your schedule tab ensuring that it is set to 'Lead can only flow through once' will ensure that can not be added a second time to that program. 

These are all safety mechanisms to make sure a lead does not receive the same email twice. Or have I misunderstood the problem?

Thanks,
Kat

[Anonymous]

Hi Kat,

I know these precautions are there, but if I create a smartlist with the filter "Email Address IS diederik.martens@quintiq.com" I get 5 duplicates (due to testing). If the flow is Request Campaign. Each record will be added to the program (5 unique members). The email in the program will be send 5 times to the same mail address.

[Anonymous]

Hi Diederik,  I'm testing this and I find the duplicate leads both run through the same smart campaign, with the setting to run once, but only one email is sent.  Have you tried requesting the campaign for all five records?  I might be missing something in my approach.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

I suspect that Steven is testing this differently...

Diederik is pushing the 5 separate lead records with the identical email through a trigger campaign individually - so each record will be sent email (assuming not unsubscribed) and there will be 5 copies of the email sent. If it is a batch campaign that is sending out the email, then Marketo's send email flow step will see that the same email address is referenced multiple times and will only send the email once. That's a key difference between a triggered campaign and a batch campaign. So, if you can use batch campaigns and send all the emails at once, you can avoid receiving duplicate emails. Otherwise, there is no way around this problem - each of these records stands alone and will be looked at separately by the Marketo campaign limits (ie run once).

Unsubscribed is handled a bit differently. When an email address is Unsubscribed, Marketo has a system function that  looks for all records with that email address and sets Unsubscribed is true for all of them. That way you can be sure if you have duplicates that you are in compliance with CAN-SPAM and other laws.

This is one reason that duplicates and Marketo really do not work well together.... you really do want to clean you database and de-dup the records!

[Anonymous]

The programs (campaigns) are requestable via other campaigns or sales insight. So no batch campaigns I'm afraid. I'll start de-duping then 😉