Will deleting leads affect program metrics?

[Anonymous]

I have a list of people that I have sent a one-time thank you email  to and am not allowed to keep them in my database for further marketing. Ideally I would like to delete them out of Marketo (and SFDC as well) so that they are not accidently marketed to in the future. I considered putting them in our global exclusion list, but I worry that at some point one of these people on my list will opt-in to marketing emails and then they will already be in the global exclusion list and thus not receive our emails that they wanted.

If I do delete these leads out of Marketo, will Marketo still keep the data that I obtained from that one-time thank you email within that email's program and analytics report? 

[Anonymous]

Danielle - Once you delete the leads from Marketo, you will lose the analytics, metrics and the activity log on them. Have you considered setting the "Marketing Suspended" flag on these leads to true, so you do not market to them, or even black listing them, if needed. You could further set some kind of a trigger campaign wherein if they did request content, like white papers, case studies etc, you can reset the "Marketing Suspended" flag to be False, so they continue receive subsequent Marketing content.

 

[Cecile_Maindron]

it seems that for some reports, the metrics remain the same see:

"The metrics in the Email Performance report includes the activity of all leads including those that have been deleted, which may cause a mismatch with the number of leads a Smart List returns. Adding a filter "Email is not empty" to the Smart List tab in the report will filter out deleted leads."


http://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000KypP&src=