Tradeshow lead list without email - ideas for enhancing/appending?

[Anonymous]

We often get lists from tradeshows of the attendees, and want to be able to contact these people. The lists generally have name, title, company - but no contact information. Often, we have some percentage of these people in our Marketo leads database already.

We know we can upload the tradeshow list into Marketo, but as the tradeshow list doesn't have email addresses, Marketo doesn't automatically deduplicate. So we would end up with duplicate leads of people we do have contact info for, net-new leads without email addresses that need to be appended with that info, and existing leads who are going to tradeshow but aren't on tradeshow list for targeted emails, etc.

What are the best ways to:

1) cross-match these lists to figure out which people on the tradeshow list are already in Marketo and deduplicate that segment of people

and

2) as we get contact info from other sources for the net-new folks, update those records? Ideally at scale - I know we can use "merge people" at an individual level, but what if any options for doing that automatically/for larger numbers are out there?

Marketo Nation, any ideas/advice??

[Robb_Barrett]

You really don't want to have blank email addresses in Marketo, it can cause all sorts of problems since it dedupes on Email address.

The best thing to do is to look on the websites and see if you can find the people's contact information. If the show isn't providing it then the person hasn't given permission to email them.

[ChristinaZuniga]

I often get lists like these from the event coordinators, where they share the general names of all attendees but not how to contact them.

I have either an entry level person or an intern do a VLOOKUP in excel based on name and company name to try to identify if they're already in the system. I find that concatenating the name and company name works pretty well as a match key. This is manual and not scalable, so we only do this for really important tradeshows. Then I can identify people who went to the event and are already in my database and if they're opted in I sent them a follow up from the event (but more generic than my usual follow up, since they weren't scanned at my booth).

[Josh_Hill13]

These ideas are good.

You can also purchase enrichment services and phone call verification at scale. BUT, do you really want to do that with people who did not interact with your booth? Is there a better way to get in front of them than just spamming them?

[Anonymous]

Appreciate the insights, everyone. Quick point to clarify given concerns about whether or not people are expecting to hear from us: primary goal is to figure out who we already have in our database, not merely put new people in.

We have two data sets: 1) Dataset A, which is our Marketo Leads DB and contains leads w/ email addresses and 2) Dataset B, which is a list of people going to a tradeshow. Some of those people are on both lists - so bth they are known leads with whom we have established relationships AND they are going to a particular tradeshow.

What we're struggling to do, however, is cross-match the datasets to figure out which people we already know are going to the show, because the tradeshow list - Dataset B - does not include email addresses. So we can't just pop that list into Marketo and rely on Marketo to deduplicate by email address because only 1 of the 2 datasets has email addresses associated with contacts.

It sounds like we will have to undertake some kind of manual, pre-upload data cleanse as Christina has outlined in order to append email addresses to the tradeshow list FIRST before we import into Marketo, so that Marketo can then deduplicate (aka match the two lists...). Christina Zuniga, thanks for the reminder/tip about concatenating name+company to get more accurate matches.

That said, I am very much interested in hearing if anyone has identified a less manual process. For example, I know I could build a smart list of everyone with duplicate full names...but I have no idea how to use that smart list of dupes to then merge the new record without an email address with the existing record that does have one, other than to manually go through and use "merge people."

Thanks again for the ideas!

[SanfordWhiteman]

1. Create a new string field that is your presumed compound dedupe key (= key formed from multiple values).
2. Populate this field using a Change Data Value step and a concatenated list of tokens, using a reserved character to separate them (say, two pipe characters ||).
3. Create the same field in your CSV.
4. Upload the list using the Import API (not the UI) and set the dedupe key to be the custom concatenated field. This will merge based on that field.
5. If your key may misidentify people, make sure you track how you decided they had attended the event (i.e. give them a "soft" attended status of some kind) so you can look at this later.