Make sure 1 email address gets 1 email

[Vlada_Prasolova]

I have a rather complicated case here and i'm at a loss how best to approach it
i have lots of duplicates in my customer database due to our custom CRM architechture
i know the best solution is to merge customers but that's not an option or i've done it already

i have email campaign i want to send to 2 groups of customers so if a customer had already received Email1 he should not receieve email 2
and i have several leads with duplicate emails, like

John 1 (from list 1) with email 12345@1234.com

and John 2 (from list 2) but with the same email as my John 1 has 12345@1234.com

what is the best way to ensure that 12345@1234.com receives only 1 email - the first one?

i though adding a filter "was not sent email" to the second blast would do the trick but it appears it's not

[Anonymous]

...How about "is not" a member fo the other Smart Campaign?

[Anonymous]

Wait...since these are dupes you will need a different approach...liklely related to is a member of "possible duplicates"

try this suppression:

-is a member of possible duplicates
-was sent email one

[Anonymous]

Hi Vlada,

The problem you're having is the there are 2 separate records in Marketo that have the same email address. So it you add record 1 with email address John 1 12345@1234.com to Email 1, and then do "not was sent email" or something to exclude him from Email 2, it can still pick up the second record John 2 since Marketo doesn't see it as a dupe.

If you feel like going super manual after you send email 1, you could copy all the email addresses that were sent the email and create a smartlist using the email address as the screening factor.

But the hideous nightmare of doing that over and over manually pretty much defeats the whole "automation" piece.

ReachForce (my company, watch out, here comes the shameless plug) does free email quality assessments so you can at least get a sense of your duplication level and other email quality issues, and a lot of Marketo users take advantage cause, this is a problem for a lot of us.

[Josh_Hill13]

If the original smart campaign has both leads qualify, it will (should) only send 1 email to that address because Marketo claims to have a deduping process during the actual run.

But that won't stop the lead that was ultimately excluded from qualifying for the next run.

So test Mary and Mark's ideas with some test dupes to make sure that works.

[Vlada_Prasolova]

Thanks!
suppressing the "member of possible dublicates" kind of works, but it also excludes those who are duplicates just inside the list 2 to whom i intend sending email2

i quess i'd have to choose what is more important - avoid sending 2 emails to 1 address and decreasing the # of recipients who are qualified, or allowing this happen and risk complaints

i've searched entire Marketo knowledge base for the last couple of days and it seems there is no adequate solution for such kind of problem

[Anonymous]

Hi Vlada, 

If you have access to coders, you might be able to use a webhook and the API to choose 1 record and place it into the campaign.  

• Make a Smart Campaign where the Flow step is to call a webhook- some custom code finds out if there's more than 1 record in the database. Then chooses a record and requests the desired customer campaign.
• Custom code then sets a custom field to "Customer Campaign - Email 1" on all dup records so that they can be excluded. 
• Use the 2nd webhook after each email in the campaign for filtering purposes 

*With some planning, the script could be pretty modular.  If you have 100s of thousands of records it may not be the best option. This is just a quick idea, hope it helps!