How can we effectively replace email addresses (personal email to org email)?

[Michelle_lc]

Hello - I am hoping someone here can provide some advice on an issue we are having.

Example of issue: Our team is currently running LinkedIn campaigns. Leads from these campaigns sometimes provide their personal email address instead of an organizational email address. In our business, we require an organizational email to demo and/or purchase our products. Therefore, anyone who completed a LinkedIn form may already be in our system with their organizational email address. When they submit, we have the issue of having duplicate records in Marketo (one personal, one email). Our marketing would then get directed to their personal email address, which we don't want.

I guess to resolve this, a previous employee years ago created a workflow where leads are notified via email to submit their organizational email address. The form asks for 1) their previous personal email address and 2) asks for their new organizational email address. There are issues with that alone, but regardless, I tested this out. The flow is set up to replace their current email address with the alternate email addresses they included in the form:

1. Change data value: email address -> {{lead.Alternate Email}}

When I tested it with my own email addresses, my personal email disappeared and I was able to locate my new organizational email... except that none of the data from my personal email carried over and was wiped out as if the record never existed. This isn't ideal, obviously.  So

Question: Is there an automated method in Marketo to have a lead submit a new email address and then replace their previous one? We realize there are additional data-cleansing tools that would help resolve this issue via CRM, but we do not sync these particular leads to Salesforce so they live exclusively in Marketo.

Any feedback would be helpful. Thank you!

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

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When I tested it with my own email addresses, my personal email disappeared and I was able to locate my new organizational email... except that none of the data from my personal email carried over and was wiped out as if the record never existed.

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There’s no reason for that to happen. The Flow step Change Data Value — which is the correct method — does not create a new lead.

Now, you may have some CRM-related logic that ends up creating a new lead in addition to the existing lead, because it doesn’t accept the change of address or something like that. Or maybe the CRM is even totally punitive and deletes the original lead due to some internal dupe detection. But Marketo will never, ever do that on its own!

[SanfordWhiteman]

@Michelle_lc please return to your thread and check replies.

[Michelle_lc]

Thank you for your reply!

You are correct about a Marketo flow that purged the record, as it was Friday and we had some scheduled for that day by coincidence. However, it was purged possibly because certain details in the record were cleared (the existing record had been there for years). Now working with Marketo to help me identify why information was eliminated from the record in the data value change process. Thank you again for your advice.

[SanfordWhiteman]

OK, but again Change Data Value on the field Email Address won’t clear anything else. Unless you deliberately created another trigger listening for Data Value Changed, of course. But that’s a separate issue.