Database limitations

[Anonymous]

Hey Marketeers,

I have a little problem that I was hoping a member of the community could relate to and give some advice.

I have a strict budget cap which means we are not able to expand our database beyond the 10k members that comes out of the box.

As a result, it means that I am frequently importing leads, emailing them and then moving them back out of the system again. This process works, but of course means that we are limited in our tracking, reporting and also run the risk of sending the same email more than once (should a lead meet certain criteria for import again).

Does anyone out there have a solution for working within the 10k while retaining data? Alternatively, do you have any clear and strong arguments that I could take to those who control our budgets to increase our cap?

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

[Frank_Breen2]

My first question would be are all 10,000 People good and working, i.e. do you have any bad data or unmarketable People in there that could be removed to reduce your DB size. Things I'd start with are:

• People with no email address and have no activity (ie make sure Sales didn't create them on purpose)
• Invalid Email Addresses
• Unsubscribers with no activity or unsubscribers that won't be reengaging (a great feature of Marketo that if you delete an unsubscribed person, then re add them later, Marketo will automatically unsubscribe them again)

I would suggest you run smart lists to see what data you have here, then take steps to remove possibly. I've yet to see a Marketo instance that doesn't have bad data in it, cleaning that will reduce your DB. I can deep dive more if required to give other examples of finding bad data.

[Darrell_Alfons2]

Frank has great points.

Just to throw in my two cents, your CRM can store a lot of data that could be helpful for you since you are not storing all your records in Marketo.

So of course you'll have fields like email opt-out, hard bounce, email invalid. But you can also have fields like inactive, never engaged, former customer, disqualified, closed/lost, all things that will always be stored so you can review the entire database and determine which leads you want to be part of the marketable 10K.

[Josh_Hill13]

In addition to the above, there are several threads on data management and deleting leads. Please do a search for them and review.

this may help

http://developers.marketo.com/blog/how-to-clean-your-marketo-database/

[Anonymous]

How do you check your database limits? I haven't found a clear answer to how.

[Darrell_Alfons2]

Jonathan Yu​ Go to lead database and click on all leads, it is a system smart list on the left, wait for it to calculate, number will appear bottom right

[Frank_Breen2]

Jonathan Yu​, if you want to check how many people you are allowed in your Marketo subscription, you're best chatting with your Marketo Account Rep, they will have the clear number. Using Darell's method is the place you go to monitor DB size.

[Darrell_Alfons2]

Frank Breen​ good call, brain fuzz on that one. I was thinking about the way I check database limits, and I usually have our instance at limit, so thanks for catching my mistake.