Remove Duplicate Emails in Same Smart Campaign

[James_Walsh]

Hello,

We have a lead nurture Smart Campaign set up where if someone submits a form on our website they get enrolled. The problem is people submit the form multiple times with the same email address. Each time they submit the form a different record is created in SFDC and Marketo. Each of these contacts will get enrolled into the Smart Campaign because they have different Marketo IDs but the same email address.

Is there a way for me to have records with the same email address removed from the flow? Or deduped/merged so that they would only enroll in this campaign once?

Thanks,

Jim

[SanfordWhiteman]

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We have a lead nurture Smart Campaign set up where if someone submits a form on our website they get enrolled. The problem is people submit the form multiple times with the same email address. Each time they submit the form a different record is created in SFDC and Marketo.

This isn't standard behavior, so let's start why that's happenning in the first place. What kind of form is this?

A Marketo form will dedupe on Email Address (unless you have a custom compound key set up, which you'd presumably know about).

[James_Walsh]

Hi Sanford. Thanks for the reply. It is not a Marketo form. The form syncs with our Salesforce and then gets passed over to Marketo so we have duplicate leads in Marketo as well as Salesforce.

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

Seems like a suboptimal setup. If you want only one lead in Marketo, then only one of the leads should be allowed to be visible to Marketo. Otherwise you're continually chasing down whether the same human engaged in different parts of your db.

In any case, you can't do a cross-check like this using built-in features. You can certainly use a webhook to assist — the webhook-compatible service can maintain a counter of already-seen addresses in a program, and only let the ones in that are net-new-to-program.

Note: Marketo supplies a duplicate filter which can prevent all  records within every set of duplicates from performing a certain action. But it can't do a "all but one"  type of logic, AFAIK.

[Michele_Prather]

Agree, with the other contributor here that it is sub optimal to allow for duplicates. Rather consider a custom object to store each of these 'lead' submissions on an individuals contact record.

Think of structuring your data as John Smith submitted a form 5x and the custom object contains the lead submission information at that level vs. each time John submits an email I'm going to create a new John.

John Smith 1, John Smith 2, John Smith 3, John Smith 4, John Smith 5

Allowing duplicates also causes may other digital behavior activity gaps and it's nearly impossible to piece together multiple contact records (of the same person) to understand what they've done in all channels so you can best respond with a relevant communication.