Do you delete invalid email addresses?

[Anonymous]

I can't think of a good reason I'm hanging onto these. I'd like to keep the lead records, but change the email address to NULL. Is there any downside to this?

[Michelle_Tizian]

We set up a rule in our marketing department that if new leads come from LInkedIn, Google Adwords or other promotional programs, if they don't have a valid email address.  I delete in Marketo.  If it's a lead that does have a complete address, but is missing an email address but has phone number, we try to get the email and verify address.  If a direct mail item is sent to them and it comes back to us, we delete the lead from SFDC and Marketo.  

If it's a contact, and the person's email address has become invalid, our list developer tries to get a replacement email.  If it's not available, remove the email address in SFDC.  

[Anonymous]

It seems like lots of people have issues with this. I am also curious how to handle this. We are looking to do exactly what Delinda is trying to do. This is an older post, so I'm curious if anyone has come up with a solution. We don't want to delete the lead just make the email address NULL. We have recieved a ton of  "domain name does not exist" errors and wanted to be able to alert our salespeople so that they can clean them up or enter new ones.

[Michelle_Tizian]

Delinda has a good point above.  We can't delete a lead in Marketo that has other valid information because some of our programs are integrated.  So our sales have a chance to contact them and validate their email. 

[Anonymous]

But deleting the entire lead record could affect program reports. You're okay with that? What if they have a valid phone number?

[Anonymous]

We simultaneously delete records with invalid email addresses from Marketo and SFDC about once a month. I only delete those records that are LEADS in SFDC, not Contacts.

[Anonymous]

subscribing

[Michelle_Tizian]

I'm definitely subscribing to this.  We're struggling with this too.  

[Anonymous]

So what's the downside to deleting Marketo's "Primary Key?" My reason for wanting to blank out the email address is so that:

1. These names do not show up on lead/contact reports for someone who is running an email target list and forgets to filter out "Email invalid is True"
2. Sales reps don't try to email those leads/contacts using MSI - not realizing the email address is invalid. There's no great indicator for bounce backs through MSI so I'd rather them not try to email those names in the first place.

[Anonymous]

Yes, Jep. Forgot to also mention we have a recurring batch campaign that deletes leads with no email address. Curious - does this seem like overkill on our instance? It just seems with the size of our database, there's some serious lag in performance, which has prompted us to delete records without email addresses. Or atleast the few Marketo people I've spoken with have told me it's attributed to the size of our database.

[Jep_Castelein2]

@ Jessie: just note that if you delete records in Marketo but not in SFDC, they will flow back into Marketo whenever the record is updated in SFDC. Unless you set up criteria-based sharing rules in SFDC that hide those records from Marketo. 

Jep

[Anonymous]

We've already deleted records that don't have email addresses. Only difference is that they remain leads in SFDC, as our two databases are not entirely synced. We also created a trigger that would sync them back to Marketo if the email address is updated. It's just difficult to know when it's finally time to purge records we can't reach because of insufficient data.

[Jep_Castelein2]

By deleting the email address you are deleting the primary key in the Marketo database, so generally I wouldn't recommend that. I agree that leads with invalid email addresses are generally not very useful, but not sure why you would blank out the email address. 

Jep

[Anonymous]

Subscribing.

I've been going through a ton of database maintenance steps - would like to know how to reduce the size of our exclusions segment, if possible.