Is Lead Merging the Answer to my Problem?

[Kevin_McMahon1]

Hi,

There have been cases where a lead has 2 emails in the system and is unsubscribing from one, but doesn't realize the other email is still opted in. Normally, they would see it's sent to a different domain and unsubscribe from both, however, they must have rule set up to automatically forward the email to the unsubscribed domain. So to the person, it appears our unsubscribe is broke, when in fact they just don't realize they have a forwarding rule in place.

When I look at the activity log, Marketo sees the email as delivering to the opted-in email address, but when the person replies to the email to angrily say they've unsubscribed 10 times, it's always from the email address they have actually unsubscribed from (hence why I assume they have an inbox forwarding rule in place). Any suggestions? I would think this would be extremely rare, but it seems to actually be happening to us quite often.

We are working on doing some lead merging which might help, but these are different email addresses so it makes it tough to recognize it until the lead complains and I search to find their second email address in our database.

Thanks,

Kevin

[Josh_Hill13]

This is a known issue. It's kinda their fault.

if I am

josh@company.com in the database

then change my naming scheme to

josh.hill@company.com

Marketo treats those as unique, as would any system. So if I then unsubscribe josh.hill@company.com, the josh@company.com isn't unsubscribed.

Yes, deduplication will reduce this and there are tools and processes you can use.

[Casey_Henry]

1. Do you have the unsubscribe landing page and/or your email footer configured to show the email address they are unsubscribing? {{lead.email... ;} You could even give them an alternate email field so they can tell you another email they would like to unsubscribe as well (requires #2)

2. Does your sales team have an Alternate Email field on lead/contact records? While this doesn't solve the problem of duplicates, it can help prevent peeved unsubscribers if you have a large database.

Run a monthly export of new unsubscribed leads with the anonymous IP*, primary and secondary email fields included, then run a smart campaign to unsubscribe all matches on any of the above field values (lots of ORs). We have some terrible issues with intentional duplicates (by support, our client portal and sales) and while time consuming, this helps us stay out of the worst of it. If you have DemandTools or any other tool that will let you match on field values, that can speed it up. Recommend running the whole database of unsubs twice a year.

*anonymous IP obviously has limitations - applicability depends on the scope of the problem and your audience