List Building for Holiday Card for Marketo + SFDC Integration

[gmarta]

We have an integration setup between Marketo and SFDC.  We need to send a Holiday card out.  Various sales teams have provided lists of recipients, email addresses, that should get the email.  All of these contacts/emails already exist in SFDC+Marketo database.  What’s the best way to use these to create email lists for the campaigns?

1. Can I upload to Marketo as static lists and match those against the SFDC records?  I’m thinking this would create duplicates.
2. Should I hand the lists to our SFDC admin and have her build the campaigns in SFDC?

Just trying to determine what a normal SOP should look like.  Thanks.

[Jazmine_Moore · Accepted solution]

If you have a 1:1 bi-directional Marketo + SFDC sync, and all of the records are already in both systems, then you could:

1. Retrieve the recipient lists from the stakeholders, ensuring that the email addresses are included.

2. Consolidate the lists into 1 single Excel CSV.  The minimum required column here should be Email Address, as that is the unique identifier

3. Create a Marketo program

4. Sync to a SFDC campaign, or create a related SFDC campaign (depending on your SFDC campaign strategy)

5. Within the Marketo program, create a static list, "Recipients", and upload the recipients into the list.  Marketo will automatically deduplicate using the email address.

6. Reference this static list in your smart campaigns to update program/campaign status, send email, etc.

You will still need to consider the leads' privacy and communication settings.

[gmarta]

Thank you, this is exactly what I was looking for.  That's the solution I was sort of fishing around, but I wasn't sure if it would create dupes.  So by using email address ONLY in the static list there is no confusion within Marketo.  

What if I want to use a first name token?  I assume I still use a static list with email only and Marketo will automatically pull first name from the original record.  In other words, I would NOT have to have first and email in the static list, just email.

[Christiane_Rode · Accepted solution]

Marketo will dedupe on the email address, so provided that the email address already exists in Marketo, it will pull that record into your program and onto your static list -- which includes information on that record (First Name, Company, etc.), provided that information was synced from Salesforce.

More info on Importing People into a List

I would be very cautious on uploading additional information into Marketo (such as first name) if that information may already exist in Salesforce (and thus, Marketo). When you upload a static list, it can overwrite that information, depending on your field or import settings. I would trust your single source of truth (Salesforce) over an uploaded csv, and just be sure to have a good default value in your token. 

[gmarta]

Great points.  Thank you for clarifying!

[SanfordWhiteman]

Note the system Email Address field is emphatically not a unique identifier in Marketo. You can have unlimited people with the same value.

The field is the default lookup key for list imports via the UI, so you will not create new duplicates, but if you have existing duplicates, you cannot use a list import to resolve, merge, or broadcast updates to those duplicates.

So this non-unique lookup key will always find someone, but not necessarily the record you expect. You should also check the Possible Duplicates Smart List.

[gmarta]

That's a great point.  I did a spot check with a few of the email addresses and one of them did have 4 records.  So to your point, I'll have to do a bit of merging of records.