Data Appending Best Practices

[Anonymous]

We are planning to enhance our existing data with additional/missing information from a 3rd party vendor such as missing email address, phone, etc. They will return the data back to us which we will import back into the database.

Does anyone have any recommendations/best practices on how we should be exporting and importing the data? For example, should we export from Marketo and use the ID as the unique identifier because we may have duplicate email addresses for the same record in Marketo or some people may not have an email address at all =P

[Anonymous]

When you export from Marketo be sure to include the ID as it is a perfect unique identifier.  Be sure that you have the Block Field Updates set appropriately for each field that you will import depending on whether you want only blank fields updated or all fields updated when you import the new data.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the quick response Elliott! How would you use the Marketo ID to re-import back into Marketo? Isn't the unique identifier the email address since Marketo de-dups off of that and not the ID?

[Anonymous]

Hi Michelle. You're correct - email address is the only unique identifier you can use when importing the leads back to Marketo. Do you use SalesForce.com? If you export your data from there and include the SFDC ID, you can re-import using the Data Loader and match to the SFDC IDs.

[Anonymous]

Hi Delinda! Yes, I was thinking of using salesforce, but wanted to know if there was something in Marketo we can do instead.

[Anonymous]

Delinda's totally right and I was totally wrong.  I forgot that you can't use the Marketo ID to match on import - only the email address.  In fact, you may want to vote for the Use the Marketo ID as an identifier on Upload Idea.