New leads being created by unsubscribes from email variation (eg: @.com @.ca)

[stephdemandgen]

I'm having this issue where new records are created when people submit an unsubscribe form. I noticed this in Salesforce as leads coming in with unknown first name and last name.

It seems like people are entering different email addresses in the unsubscribe form than what we have in our system for example the existing record in Salesforce is first.last@mail.com  but they input first.last@mail.ca in the unsubscribe form.

What should I do to 1) clean up the data and 2) prevent this from happening in the future?

Thanks!

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

This has been discussed a bunch of times.

If you don’t want someone to update the pre-filled email address, simply mark that <input> as readonly or make it hidden.

See

Prevent your Unsubscribe form from creating new leads

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

As for cleaning up the data:

The problem is wider than you’re making it out to be, because every new lead created via the Unsubscribe form isn’t gonna be the same as an old lead with a different TLD. Those are just the easiest ones to catch.

In any case, you can find out who the original person was by looking at the details of the Filled Out Form activity. In there, you’ll see the raw mktoReferrer value, like

https://pages.example.com/UnsubscribePage.html?mkt_unsubscribe=1&mkt_tok=MDk2LUJRQS03MDQAAAGPlhjeUIf_1WVTA9wQTcL4tG2F52PYm6MEk5bkYHdgtVzC49HiCstRdJ1SzX0wHWVNB-VZylyzdP1g

If you open that page in an Incognito window, you’ll see the original pre-filled info.