Preventing duplicate email sends

[Travis_Schwartz]

Our instance of Marketo uses an account number as a unique identifier instead of email address because multiple accounts can use the same email address. 

The challenge is when we send them certain types of emails (birthday seems to be the biggest one). I can limit each person to only be able to run through the campaign once per year... the problem pops up when a member has multiple accounts. Marketo is treating individuals with three account numbers as three separate individuals (which is how the system is set up), but I don't want them to receive three birthday emails.

I was thinking it may be possible to create a smart list of duplicates to use as a suppression list, but how do I ensure they get at least one copy? 

Has anyone else had something like this come up? Is there a solution?

[Darshil_Shah1]

Send Email flow step OOTB has a built in logic to send email to only one person per send email flow step if more than one people with the same email address qualify for a batch campaign (duplicate record with the lowest lead id would be sent email). However, in case of a trigger campaign, people can enter the campaign at different times and people are processed separately as they enter the campaign by the send email flow step (and not de-duplicated to send email to only a single lead in case more than one person exist with same email address in the db).

AFAIK, this anti-spam feature of the send email flow step shouldn’t get compromised by changing the default deduplication field as the Send Email flow step deals with the email address field for sending the emails. You can always test this via a test batch campaign with a send email flow step in it.

[SanfordWhiteman]

This is a premier example of why it’s better to run birthday campaigns as batches!

Can’t see any way to accomplish this with a trigger campaign unless you also involve a webhook.  (The webhook service can ensure that only one person with a given email address can return “OK to send” in a certain period of time. Basically the equivalent of “May run through 1 time per day” but applied across leads.)

[Travis_Schwartz]

I'm fine with switching it over to a batch send. Is there an example of how the programming would be to accomplish this?

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

Every birthday, set a Next Birthday field to the current value + 1 year ({{lead.Next Birthday}} + year) and send the email.

Every day, batch send to people whose Next Birthday is today.

[Travis_Schwartz]

Thanks. I'll update it. The person who set this up has a year-long wait step which I'm not a fan of either.

[Travis_Schwartz]

I was finally getting to this but am running into a bit of a challenge.

I created the new field (date field type) for Next Birthday. What is tripping me up is I don't see how (without a wait step or webhook (beyond my current know-how)) to get that "every birthday" piece. I have the date of birth field, but I can't say "date of birth" is today because that's always a date in the past... 

The only way I am seeing how to possibly achieve it is still with that long wait step to populate the next birthday, and then after that, I can do the +1 year.

Am i missing something, or without using a webhook, am I still looking at a long wait step? It's better than what we currently have because that is at least it would only send once as opposed to multiple per record with the same email address.

[SanfordWhiteman]

We can discuss this later but first I DM’d you about the other thing. 🙂

[SanfordWhiteman]

You’re setting a new field “next birthday” to {{lead.Date of Birth}} + 1 year.

The batch looks for people with “next birthday” = today.