How do I get rid of special characters after they are in Marketo?

[Anonymous]

Someone imported a list where every field separator seems to have turned into a special character. It displays as a diamond with a question mark in it.

These special characters are preventing the leads from syncing to Salesforce because the email address is invalid.

Can someone recommend a way to get rid of these characters from these leads?

Thanks!

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Sharon,

Redo the import, checking that the source file is converted to UTF-8 encoding before doing it. It will update the fields with correct values.

-Greg

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Second thoughts :

• if some email addresses have a wrong character, it would be meaning they already had an extended character such as ç, è, ï or any other in the import file, so they would be invalid anyway. Check the import file on this.
• If the emails were wrong in the first import, then reimporting corrected emails will not correct the bad data, it will create new leads, as email addresses will be different. In this case, it means you will have to delete the leads from the previous import and reimport them again.

-Greg

[Abaran]

Hi Gregoire

It was nice to meeting you in Vegas. Sorry we did not get a chance to talk much.

Can you provide some more details on how you fix those issues? When I upload a list in Marketo, I first open it in notepad then save it in UTF-8 encoding. However, email addresses with extended characters keep those in. Does it mean they will be see as invalid? is there a tool to change the extended character to the proper one so upload in Marketo?

If not, what do you do to ensure you never have invalid characters before loading data into Marketo?

Thanks

Axel

[Anonymous]

Hi Axel,

  I found an answer I found in another post a while back (sorry I don't remember whose). In Excel save the file you want to import as a unicode .txt file instead of saving it as a .csv   This has worked great for us.

Good luck!

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Axel,

You will find an idea to vote an the workaround in the comments here:

-Greg

[Abaran]

Thanks Gregoire. I voted for the suggestion.

What can i do in the meantime?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Look in the comments of the idea, Dan asked a similar question.

Short story:

• if the email address is wrong, it's tricky, as you cannot fix it through a direct import. You will have to use a dummy email field and a smart campaign to update the emails
• If the email address is correct, but other fields need to be corrected, just reimport with the corrected data. Marketo will match the email address and update the other fields (unless one of them is blocked on update)

-Greg

[Geoff_Krajeski1]

Are extended characters even legal as email address characters? 

I would think not!

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Geoff,

I think you are right, but if you made an encoding mistake, you still may have errors there.

-Greg