One lead/contact multiple email addresses

[Anonymous]

I just launched a webinar registration email to our current customer list.

Good thing is I got massive amounts of registrations. Bad news is we sent the email to their corporate email address and many registered with their personal email address and since Marketo uses email as the unique identifier, a bunch of new lead records were created.

What do you all do in this situation so both email addresses are kept but data isn't overriden?

1. Do I keep both records and mark something on the lead record that there is an existing contact with a different email address in the database?

2. Do I merge the lead with the contact and keep the corporate email address?

3. Do I merge the lead into the existing contact but and add the personal email address to a custom field? If I take this route and no longer have the personal email address in the standard email address field, how will ReadyTalk map the attednace or no show data?

Thanks in advance for the guidance

[Diederik_Marte4]

I always merge if it's the same person. But I keep the most relevant email address as THE email address (personal business email address. E.g. first.last@company.com). I have a field, which is called älternative email address, which I at least store the alternative email address (e.g. myname@gmail.com). Email addresses like info@company.com or department@company.com should be on the account object and not on the contact object. I hope this helps.

[Anonymous]

This makes sense. As a follow up if I merge the gmail address with the corproate but keep the corporate email, when ReadyTalk tries to sync back attendance or no show, will it know which record to sync to the status too?

[Diederik_Marte4]

I have now experience with readyTalk, but it's quite possible the email address is the unique identifier. But I would just test it.

[Anonymous]

This is definitely one of my pet hates. You can't always stop it happening, but when you ask for email address in the form have the field marked as "work email address" this might help . To add to what the others have said I merge them together if I can be sure they are the same person, however, I would only do this after the sync with ReadyTalk. I don't have any experience with this platform (we use webex) but as Diederik Martens said it is possible that the email address is the unique identifier.

Unfortunately this is quite a manual job and I haven't found a way to automate it yet.