Quickly clean retirement/email address change autoreplies

[stephdemandgen]

My company sends out nurture emails on a weekly basis and we see a fair amount of autoreplies that say an individual has retired or left the company. Is there a way to automate cleaning up these leads (ie mark as dead or delete)? Open to third-party solutions if nothing is native to Marketo to do this.

[mfoulke · Accepted solution]

Hi there!

There are a few ways that you can do this!

• Drift email is an incredible product that is extremely easy to set up and maintain. I've used it a few times and have been impressed with the company and how they integrate with Marketo easily. I can't speak too much to other email management companies, but I will vouch for that one. I would love to hear what other folks are using though!
  • They can help identify what the automated email is (unsubscribe, out of office, left company) and do different things with the record in Marketo.
  • This is really useful for database management and data hygiene
  • A quick run down: 
    • it essentially allows you to set up an email address that is monitored by drift email. Whenever a response is captured by this "Drift email" you set up rules to tell Drift how to handle the reply. For example, you could look for responses with unsubscribe and set up a program in Marketo to unsubscribe the contact with 'x' reasoning when the drift email picks it up or run them through your email compliance program with specific reasons.
    • You can also have people added to certain lists or connect to campaigns and send auto-replies for certain responses. 
• Manual maintenance without a third part - data standardization/email compliance program is going to be really key and having an inbox dedicated to your emails to be able to filter through. This would require a setup in your email platform to filter for certain responses to be able to filter through human vs. non-human responses. Examples:
  • folder for unsubscribe
  • folder for out of office
  • folder left company
  • based on those folders you could manage the corresponding email addresses in Marketo based on the response. I.e. updated the emails captured by the left company to unsubscribe them and process them through your email compliance program for certain reasons. It will be important to have the below to capture why/when their records were updated: 
    • have specific reason values
    • timestamps

Thanks!

Meredith

[SanfordWhiteman]

Meredith lays out the alternatives well. You can also build your own mail processor if you have an IT team willing to take it on.

To be clear, the reason Marketo (Marketo Engage, that is) could not do this for you is very simple: the replies you’re seeing in your inbox @example.com are not going to Marketo! Autoresponders are actually all supposed to go to the envelope sender, that is, back to Marketo... if only the SMTP standard were obeyed. Unfortunately, the standard is disregarded in reality and messages go back to the presumably human From: address.