Field Cleanup: Removing Field Reference from a Sent Email Program

[michelle-WO]

For various reasons, sometimes fields need to be cleaned up/hidden within Marketo. This requires removing field references first, which ensures the field is not in use prior to hiding from the Maketo UI.

However, when a field is in use in the Smart List of an Email program AND that Email program has been sent, there appears to be no way to remove the field from the Smart List. 

Of course, one can obviously delete the email program altogether, but this results in loss of any metrics, the email asset itself, etc.

I have engaged with Support, but meanwhile, I'm curious if anyone else ever dealt with this before. 

[Darshil_Shah1]

I bet a lot of users are waiting for the day Marketo lets hiding a field without users having to remove all the references from the archived/completed email send  programs/assets. There's a similar idea here on the community-ideas board if you'd like to upvote.

[Christiane_Rode]

You used to be able to remove field references (I believe as recently as late 2020); however, as you have noticed, they made an update. 

I dealt with something similar recently, and I believe, at this point in time, Support is the only one who can remove the field reference from a sent program.

[michelle-WO · Accepted solution]

It does not actually even appear that Support can or will remove these references either. I was told that we ought to enlist Marketo professional services to complete this cleanup because support does not have the tools to do this (though I'm not sure what Marketo PS has that's different from support). I was also told that engineering might be able to force remove these field references, but that this may lead to more corruption, and I would need to provide a strong business case for them to even consider.

So, it sounds like there really is no workable option at this time.

[Darshil_Shah1]

I agree with you, @michelle-WO ! We had a similar experience dealing with the support for one of our clients a few weeks back on one of the larger clean-up projects. They used to assist with such queries earlier, but it isn't the case now unless we sign up for their professional services.

[Erica_Harris2]

Yep.  Support are not much use for anything remotely technical any more.  And the charges for Professional Services are outrageous.  This should not be a use case for paid service anyway, it should be a basic function provided by the product.  When it doesn't work as it should, why should the customer pay to get a one-off fix?