Creating a List in Marketo that does NOT create a contact record

[kenmckown]

I am looking to recreate something in Marketo that was possible in systems like Eloqua. Basically I have a list of 300 email addresses that I want to load into a Custom Data Object, but I do NOT want them to create contact records in Marketo. I want to use this Object to exclude this list of emails from a Smart List in an email send. 

Is this possible in Marketo?

[Darshil_Shah1 · Accepted solution]

You can create a standalone custom object in Marketo that isn't linked with the Person object, but you would not be able to reference records in it in smart lists as they operate at the Person level. W/o a link field, you don't have any linkage/connection for the records you have in custom and Person objects. Also, AFAIK instead of complicating things with CO, you can just use the Email Address filter with is not operator in your Smart List and add those 300 records to it. I don't think you'd really need to create/import those as person records in Marketo. If any of those records get created in Marketo, then this filter would prevent them from qualifying for this smart list asset.

[kenmckown]

This makes sense, I think my issue is this is a complex ask, basically I am pulling in people from a Salesforce campaign, but I want a specific 300 people from that campaign. So loading the list into the Object would be:

Is in Campaign AND in this Object. Assuming I could do the same with Email Address IS the 300 AND in the Campaign.

[Darshil_Shah1]

Hmm, if you have that 300 people handy and can add their emails to the Email Address filter, why reference the Member of Campaign filter in the first place? The result of Member of Campaign AND Email Address filters would result in the same result as just the Email Address filter used alone, of course, given that the campaign members set is a superset of people in the Email Address filter (which it appears to per your description above). However, if there's a possibility that some of the people out of 300 records may not be campaign members, then it makes sense to use both filters in conjunction I believe.

[SanfordWhiteman]

---

@kenmckown wrote:

This makes sense, I think my issue is this is a complex ask, basically I am pulling in people from a Salesforce campaign, but I want a specific 300 people from that campaign. So loading the list into the Object would be

---

It’s best to stop thinking of this as an “object,” as in Marketo that’s not the right feature. In business terms, it’s a collection of email addresses.

If the person has to match Member of SFDC Campaign, then they have to be in Marketo. You can’t keep your collection completely out of the database because only Marketo people can ever match that Smart List filter.

[SanfordWhiteman]

As Darshil mentions, this isn’t what Marketo Custom Objects are for because they’re expected to be connected to People or Companies. They aren’t expected to stand alone because that makes them unusable in Smart Lists.

For completeness I’ll mention that if you create standalone COs they can be queried via API. In theory you could thus call a webhook-compatible service for everyone who’s passed the first level of qualification for a send; that webhook could loop back and perform a REST API lookup and the webhook response could be used as an additional level of qualification. (In no way am I encouraging this, just saying it’s technically possible.)

Another method of consulting lists of email addresses who don’t need to be actual people in Marketo is to upload them as a specially formatted XML file into Design Studio. You can then call this file directly as a webhook to look people up, and it has a very high capacity. But with just 300 people it’s far better to do what Darshil says and just filter the Smart List.

[Thorsten]

---

@SanfordWhiteman wrote:

upload them as a specially formatted XML file into Design Studio. You can then call this file directly as a webhook to look people up

Hi Sanford,

is there any blog post explaining that approach somewhere? Looking to add it to my toolkit, should the need arise 🙂

Regards,

Thorsten