Preventing emailing duplicate contacts

[Anonymous]

We have a lot of duplicate contacts in our system. At this time, it is not something we can easily resolve. I always understood, however, that Marketo would only email on person with the same email address. I have recently seen that many contact records with the same email are all receiving the same email. Am I not correct that Marketo filters out duplicate email addreses before launching an email? If so, is there an alternative workflow i can set up?

[John_Clark1]

Hi Lauren,

Marketo will automatically filter out duplicates on a per flow step basis.  One Send Email flow step in a batch campaign will only ever send the email to an email address one time.  If you have multiple Send Email Flow steps, then it's possible one duplicate could get the email from the first, and the second duplicate could get it from the second, as duplicates do still run through all flow steps.

If the campaign is not a batch campaign, but a trigger, it's possible that any duplicates could trigger the campaign at any time and, depending on the settings, run through it as many times as it is triggered.

You can use a Member Of Smartlist filter with the setting "Not In > Possible Duplicates", but this will filter all leads on that list, and may not allow even a single email to be sent to a an email address on that list.

The best option is to dedupe your leads, and do what you can to prevent new duplicates from being created.  If you have a large number of dupes you can reach out to services@marketo.com for info on the Easy Merge tool they provide.

John

[Dan_Stevens_]

John Clark​, what happens in this scenario: We have an events program; and a lead registers for that event.  We have a smart campaign that will send a confirmation email to that registrant.  But that registrant has two two lead records in Marketo (we too have a duplicate leads issue on our hands).  Will the confirmation email only be sent to the lead record that registered - or will it be sent to both lead records, as this is a trigger campaign?

[Roxann_McGlump1]

Hi Dan,

In the situation you describe, only one lead would show the form fillout activity and the email would only be sent out to that lead.  In my testing, when there are duplicate leads, form fillout activities were attributed to the most recently created lead.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Great - that's what I thought.  I know Marketo treats certain situations differently when it comes to updating, validating and sending against duplicate leads - sometimes it's "created" data; other times, it's "most recently updated".

[Roxann_McGlump1]

Hi Dan,

Given the nature of my testing (a bunch of newly created leads) the most recently created would also be the most recently updated, so you might want to do some testing on your own to determine if the create date or the update date is the determining factor.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Yeah, the one use-case I'm referring to is our purposeful duplicates workflows that we have in our environment.  All existing contacts in CRM and any new contact (once they convert to closed-won / closed-lost status) are intentionally duplicated in a Duplicate lead partition (hidden from all other partitions) and a duplicate lead is then created and routed to the appropriate country lead partition (we have 23 of them) - so that a fresh lead can proceed once again in our lead lifecycle workflows (as we often market/sell to existing customers).

In this case, the lead was created more recently than the lead (contact) in the Duplicate partition - and will be used to compare against activity like a list import.  Frequently, we'll get errors when importing lists that the import failed due to "lead exists in another partition".  This will happen when some recent activity took place on that contact record in CRM (data update, converted/added to opportunity, etc.) - and now Marketo considers the lead in the Duplicates partition as the most recent record - even though that country's lead partition can't see it. 

[Anonymous]

Hi Lauren,

RingLead can help.

If you describe your specific requirements to me, I can certainly offer you some best practice advice.

I bet that when you started your career in marketing you never thought you'd spend so much time as a data janitor.

If you'd like some help, I'm easy to find.

Gregg