Invalid Email addresses

[Anonymous]

Hello:

What is the best way to get rid of invalid email addresses without deleting the lead?

[Anonymous]

Hi Erin,

When you say get rid of without deleting what do you want to happen?

Rgs,
Cathal

[Anonymous]

Sometimes I will go through a list of prospects/clients and gather the email addresses that we have in our CRM and will infer someones address by other emails in their company, sometimes these will work sometimes they wont. Does Marketo store invalid email addresses, if so I want to clean them out of the system, but still keep the lead in tact?  Does that help?  We would like to keep our CRM and lead database as clean as possible.

[Anonymous]

Marketo flags invalid email addresses with the Email Invalid field.  You can delete the lead record from your CRM and the Marketo lead record will not be deleted if that is what you want, but be sure that you do not ever add those Marketo leads to a program or a smart campaign that will execute one of the Salesforce flow actions against it or it will be added back to Salesforce as a new Lead.

Am I understanding your question?

[Anonymous]

I dont want to delete the lead record.  It may still be a valid lead but we just may not have their correct email address.  is there a smart campaign I can run against leads with invalid email adresseses to make the value blank instead of keeping an invalid  email address?  

[Anonymous]

OK - we have the same thing occur occasionally.  Unfortunately if you delete the email address, you lose the synch between Marketo and your CRM.  So you have to leave the bad email address, but we moved the Email Invalid field right next to it in the CRM user interface, so those users will see that it is bogus. 

[Anonymous]

Hi Elliot.  

We dont have that field in our SalesForce CRM.  If we were to have the field created would marketo recoginze it and put whether or not an email is invaild?  

Is there anyway you could explain a little bit more regarding invalid email addresses.  For example, if we upload a list into Marketo and it contains leads with invalid email addresses, will they be synced to SalesForce anyways?  I cant seem to find any articles that explain what happens to invalid email addresses. 

Sorry if the questions are a silly, I am really trying to wrap my head around this.


Thanks.

[Anonymous]

We added a custom Email Invalid field to SFDC that is synched with the Marketo Email Invalid field.

The Marketo Email Invalid field is automatically set to "True" (i.e. checked) by Marketo when an email address has a hard bounce.  When you upload new leads to Marketo and some have an invalid email address, Marketo won't automatically update its Email Invalid field until you send an email to that address that results in a hard bounce.  However, if you know before you upload the leads to Marketo that the email address is invalid, you can add a column with the Email Invalid heading and add the value "true" in that cell for each lead with a invalid email address.  But why would you import a lead with a bad email address?

[Anonymous]

Hi Elliot.  Thanks for the information.  With regard to why invalid emails may get added, Sometimes I will go through a list of prospects/clients and gather the email addresses that we have in our CRM and will infer someones email address by other emails in their company, sometimes these will work sometimes they wont.  I wont know if the email is invalid until it hard bounces.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

There is a way to check the validity of email addresses before you add them to Marketo and you don't have to send an email using SMTP calls to the recipient's email server.  If you have a lot of these, you can submit them to a paid service like StrikeIron and they will tell you which are invalid.  If you only need to do a few occasionally, you can use a free service like one of the following.

• http://verify-email.org/
• http://my-addr.com/free-email-verification-tool/verify-email-address/reverse-email-lookup/verify_ema...
• http://mailtester.com/testmail.php
• http://tools.email-checker.com/