New leads over-writing leads - how to stop that?

[Anonymous]

Hi there!

We're currently working on forms that our Door-to-door folks can use on iPads as they door-knock.

This is an example of one such form:

http://pages.directenergysolar.com/827491

What we encounter with Door-to-Door efforts is people are hesitant to give their email address. In testing, we've found that including a generic "noemail@gmail.com" or something similar updates an existing lead with that same test email address, instead of creating a new one.

Is there a way around that?

We also tried making the email field not required and running tests that way too, but the same thing seems to be happening. New leads are not created - it's just updating existing leads.

Has anyone encountered this and if so, have you found a solution?

Thanks!

[Jim_Thao7]

You want custom deduping which allows you to purposefully create duplicates based on another field + email address.  You'll need to contact support for this I believe.

[SanfordWhiteman]

You want custom deduping which allows you to purposefully create duplicates based on another field + email address.

Not really, this is just a matter of creating a lead with a unique email address. You definitely don't want to change the whole database schema around this.

Jen, just add this Forms 2.0 JS to the page:

MktoForms2.whenReady(function(form){ 
  form.onSubmit(function(form){
    form.getValues().Email || form.setValues({ 
      Email : 'Unknown-' + new Date().getTime() + Math.random().toString().substring(2)
    }); 
  });
});

If the lead doesn't provide an email, a random one is generated for them.

[Josh_Hill13]

Make sure this is a standardized naming so you know that this group of emails came from a certain place and aren't just junk.

[SanfordWhiteman]

True, this would be on the kiosk form that the reps bring around and I wouldn't do it on every form!

[Grégoire_Miche2]

You probably want to make the page a non tracked one as well. see here: Non-trackable landing page is still identifying me

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Great suggestions everyone. I'm going to give them a try. Thanks!

[Anonymous]

FYI, Sanford, the script you provided works perfect. I only made one change that the end b/c the lead wasn't syncing to SF due to an invalid email syntax.

form.getValues().Email || form.setValues({  

         Email : 'None' + Math.random().toString().substring(2) + '@noemail.com' 

        });

[SanfordWhiteman]

Makes sense, but you should really use a non-public (but syntactically correct) domain in that case.

noemail.com is in fact a existing domain that can receive mail:

noemail.com.            914     IN      MX      0 mail.b-io.co.
mail.b-io.co.           188     IN      A       198.133.159.136
mail.b-io.co.           188     IN      A       198.133.159.123
mail.b-io.co.           188     IN      A       198.133.159.119

In contrast, all hostnames under the .invalid TLD, like email.invalid or address.invalid, are domains that must not ever exist per the global standard RFC 6761. Thus you never need to worry that they will be sent your marketing or sales emails by accident (and you don't need to exclude them from SLs).

[SanfordWhiteman]

Felt this earned an extended take on my blog: Be smart about “dummy” email addresses.