How to manage you non-marketable? deletion?

[Leila_Nigou]

Hello everyone

We currently have 70% of our database which is Marketable. We would like to increase this figure by cleaning the non marketable: invalid (bounced) email addresses and unsubscribed ones. Knowing that we are synchronized with Salesforce

I was thinking :

Remove from Mkto and Salesforce leads that have done very little actions or inactive and have never converted. For contacts, the same but I thought to delete them from Mkto but not from Salesforce, but will they automatically be created again in Mkto because they have been pushed by SF?

Do you have any good practices to share? Alert points?

Thank you in advance for your help on the subject, I read topics on the community but there are divergent opinions on the deletion

Regards,

Leila

[Darrell_Alfons2]

Hi Leila,

This usually happens because you are trying to stay under your Marketo database limit for budgetary reasons.

So you will probably remove unqualified junk leads, invalid emails, and unsubscribes etc.

When you remove them from Marketo, keep them in your CRM and have a system for tagging them so you know why they were removed.

There is a field that prevents them from syncing back, for example mine is "Marketing Verified Email". Make sure you uncheck that box when you remove them from Marketo.

[Kevin_McMahon1]

They will not sync back to Marketo as part of the regular sync cycle. They will only sync back if the person is updated in SFDC correct?

[Brittney_Zeller]

Hi Leila,

I actually did this recently and below is the steps I took:

Leads:

Removed invalid email addresses

Disqualified leads (dependent on the reason)

Leads with empty email addresses

No Activity in the past 2 years

Now Contacts are trickier because Marketing does not own the Contacts, Sales does.  Therefore, I sent the invalid email addresses to our Sales team to clean-up or inform me to delete (if retired or old contact).

I know it sounds easy to just delete the unsubscribed leads, but I would probably keep them in your database because you could have the issue of them being populated back into your database and receiving emails when they previously unsubscribed.

Additionally, I would check with you SFDC Admin on the syncing. My Marketo and SFDC instances are set-up to mirror each other.  SFDC will automatically push any new person into Marketo and I created a campaign in Marketo to remove any person from Marketo if they are removed from SFDC.

I hope this helps!

-Brittney

[Kevin_McMahon1]

Can you further explain what you mean by "disqualified leads?" We are actually right on the borderline of our Marketo database limit so would love some more insight on this.

[Brittney_Zeller]

Hi Kevin,

This falls under our lead status in SFDC.  Below are the lead statuses we use:

• Open
• Working
• Qualified
• Not Ready
• Disqualified

We ask our sales reps to enter a reason why they are disqualified from a drop-down list.  If someone is disqualified, it usually means they are a competitor, not looking for our type of product, etc.  Usually someone who will never be a potential buyer.  Sometimes we receive spam inquiries that flood our database and they are tagged "Disqualified" as well.  I will check these once a quarter and delete the appropriate ones.

[SanfordWhiteman]

I know it sounds easy to just delete the unsubscribed leads, but I would probably keep them in your database because you could have the issue of them being populated back into your database and receiving emails when they previously unsubscribed.

Actually, if you're referring to the system Unsubscribed field, this is persisted even if the lead is (seemingly) completely purged. This is Marketo's "Durable Unsubscribe" feature. The lead (identified by email address) will be assumed to be unsubscribed if they are added again.

If your subscription/unsubscription process is dependent on custom fields, then this data isn't saved when the lead is deleted. However, I don't agree that they should never be removed. If you know someone doesn't want to be contacted via any of the mechanisms Marketo offers, and they have been in this state for, say, a year, what you really need is an offboarding process. As I mentioned in another thread today, offboarding people to a Google Sheet before deleting them allows you to restore their field values (via webhook) if they're re-added in the future.

[Brittney_Zeller]

Thanks Sanford! I did not know Marketo had that feature.  Good to know!

[Anonymous]

I also want to remove the invalid emails from DB. Please share the process.

Thanks,

[Betsy_Landon1]

I use a "Sync to Marketo" checkbox field on the Leads and Contacts objects, respectively.  Salesforce is the master of Marketo for determining which records will be synched. Marketo Support had to do something on the back end to use this controlling field. I have Smart Campaigns in place to delete records from Marketo on a monthly basis.  Marketo unchecks the box so it will sync back to SF before the record is deleted in Marketo.