How to delete Inactive leads from database? Leads who have never opened an email from us

[Anonymous]

We are looking to purge our system of any leads who have never ever opened an email from us and who aren't registered users on our site. (For our registered users, we are automatically put into a SFDC campaign called "User Registration").  I've built a smart list using the filters "Not In Member of SFDC campaign = User Registration" , "Was Sent Email = Any / On or Before = Today" and "Not Opened Email = Any / On or Before = Today" and have come up with almost 30k leads. I double checked some lead records and the majority all look good. However, I double checked one particular email on the smartlist and found they are associated with 2 records in SFDC. The 1st record had zero activity while the 2nd record had opened/clicked emails and is apart of the SFDC campaign = User Registration. Can I assume that if I delete the leads in this smartlist, Marketo will only delete the 1st record with no activity and keep the 2nd record who is a registered user? Has anyone else tried anything like this? We would obviously export the Inactive smartlist and save it just to have on file.

[Josh_Hill13]

Are those 2 records in the Inactive smart list?

Perhaps you can exclude that specific email or remove the Was Sent Email filter.

Another way to look at inactives is by time period or by other activities using ANY or AND (depending on your preference)

NOT WAS SENT EMAIL
NOT Visited Website
Not filled out form
Not Opened Email
Not Clicked in Email
Not Clicked in Sales Email
Not Opened Sales Email

etc.

I'd like to know the count you get if you do just
NOT WAS Opened Email IS ANY before "Today"
AND
Not Member of SFDC Campaign IS "Registered Users"

[Anonymous]

Only the 1st record is in the Inactive smart list. If i take out the "Was Sent Email" filter then the number shoots up to 35K. I would think we'd want to keep the "Was Sent Email IS ANY" so we know the list contains everyone who's ever received an email from us. And I would also think including Not Clicked Email is a little repetitive becasue they'd have to open the email first before clicking- right?

[Anonymous]

Distinction between open and click:

An "open" is someone who opens an email and loads an image in the email.  Increasingly, email browsers (such as Google Apps) disable images by default.  If the user doesn't choose to load images, they can click a link in your email without opening it.

Resolving the two records

If you have two records matching an email address, I'd advise you to clean up your duplicates before purging your database.  Check your smart list "Possible Duplicates" to get a count.  Marketo offers a service to deduplicate, or you can purchase a tool such as RingLead to handle it from the Salesforce side.

[Anonymous]

To delete leads from the marketo database, I assume you would use the flow "Delete Lead" > "True", however after more than an hour from having completing this campaign, all of these leads remain in our database. 

What's the deal-lee-oh?

[Anonymous]

Cary are these leads still in your CRM database or Marketo database?  

Marketo delete:
You may want to check the Campaign Queue to see if its still in the process of deleting.

SFDC Delete:
This can take longer are you're at the mercy of the API and any limits there.  If I understand it correctly, you'll be deleting the leads as well as their membership in SFDC Campaigns, so if a lead is in two campaigns you actually have to wait for at least three delete actions.

[Anonymous]

@Steven, many thanks for the note. It turns out that it's an issue with our recent email migration having broken the link between Salesforce and Marketo. After going back and looking through the results of the campaign, I noticed that all lead deletions had failed, and figured out that we weren't able to remove these without Marketo first removing them from SFDC. 

Working on patching everything right now, and hoping that will work everything out. 

Thanks again man,
Cary