Workflow for Removing Hard Bounces (Marketo-Salesforce)

[Ande_Kempf4]

If we want to remove contacts with hard bounces from Marketo but want them to stay in Salesforce, would we do the following to keep them from syncing back from SF to Marketo?

Create “Hard Bounce” checkbox field on SF contact record.

Run smart campaign in Marketo to mark  the Hard Bounce field true on all records in Marketo that have a hard bounce.

Update sharing setting for Marketo Sync user to not be able to see contacts with Hard Bounce checkbox as true.

Delete hard bounces from Marketo.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

I believe all you have to do is to run a workflow in Marketo to delete a lead in Marketo if it hard bounces. They should not sync back down from Salesforce after they've been deleted in Marketo.

[Kristen_Malkov1]

Charlie is right--as long as you don't have "remove from SFDC" set to true, you don't need to do the workflow you outlined. However, it might be good to let the rep in SFDC know (with your check box, or an MSI interesting moment etc) that the email address has bounced/is invalid in the off chance they complain about not receiving emails.

[Ande_Kempf4]

Thanks Kristen Carmean & Charlie Liang​ for your responses.  How we would stop Salesforce from syncing the removed hard bounces back into Marketo?

[Kristen_Malkov1]

Once you delete it from Marketo once, it shouldn't sync back over.  Have you seen this happening?

[Anonymous]

the deleted leads will sync back to Marketo if they are updated in Salesforce (any kind of change/data update). Marketo support told me this is normal.

[Jeff_Smith3]

Kristen Malkovich​, I once removed a bunch of records from Marketo (but kept them in SFDC), and then when a large-scale SFDC update occurred it synced all the records back to SFDC. This was a huge headache because a number of those got routed to sales as if they were qualified, but of course were not. We had to implement a "Deleted from Marketo" field so this wouldn't happen again. The flow is now (1) Change "deleted from Marketo" to true, (2) Add to SFDC campaign that we use exclusively for data purging, and (3) Delete from Marketo (but not SFDC). Noopur Mhapankar​ you are right, and hopefully others realize this before they make the same mistake we did.

So if you're going to remove hard bounces from your instance, make sure you create a similar workflow and notify your SFDC admin to set those rules so records don't sync back.

[Mike_Reynolds2]

Ande Kempf​ You should also check out this doc: Maintaining a Directory of Leads Bouncing Emails

It'll let you keep an eye on all leads bouncing emails. Some leads can get successful deliveries after having a bounce previously (under certain circumstances), so this doc also shows how to ID those leads and automatically pull them out of that directory list if they do get a successful delivery again later.