Level 3

Question

Database Cleanup - multiple emails for same lead

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
November 13, 2018
4 replies
5901 views

Hello,

We have an issue where a lead will already be in our system with a work email but either through form fills or something else, a second lead record will be created with their personal email (sometimes more than once with typos). This creates duplicates in our CRM (not sure it makes a difference, but we use NetSuite) and the sales team gets annoyed. Is there a quick way to "merge" these into one record? Perhaps set their personal emails as an Alt Email? Does anyone else have the same issue, and what would you recommend for handling it?

Thank You!

Marketo

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K

karanhari-1

Level 7

Hi @Kana Lai,

If the above case that you mentioned is a regular occurrence, Then in my Opinion, the best option here would be to use the Marketo form prefill option. A custom field can be created by the name of "Alternate Email" and this field can be used to automatically populate (Using visibility rules or custom JS Scripts) in case the visiting lead already exists in the database. But again, it depends if you are using Marketo landing pages to host the forms. In case you are using non marketo Landing pages to host the form, then custom Javascripts would be necessary. This article could help - http://developers.marketo.com/blog/external-page-prefill/ .

Best Always,

Karan Hari

SanfordWhiteman

Level 10

Pre-Fill doesn't have anything to do w/the common case in which someone submits the form using a secondary email address.

And in a currently anonymous session, Pre-Fill doesn't even look the person up in the database until after the form submits. So I'm not sure what you're getting at here vis-a-vis the problem.

This article could help - developers.marketo.com/blog/external-page-prefill/ .

You should never use that method. It has an inherent DoS vulnerability against both itself and all your other API integrations.

K

karanhari-1

Level 7

I Understand that "Pre-Fill doesn't have anything to do w/the common case in which someone submits the form using a secondary email address.". The scenario is not exactly clear here. The example that I am referring to is a different case.

Say there is a case where a person (Pre existing in the database) receives a second email with a link to a Marketo Landing page, where the Marketo form is embeded, are you saying that the form will not prefill with the information (Including the email address) that is already there in the data base? or is it not possible to prefill the details of an existing lead, in such a scenario?

Given the above situation, In case a non-Marketo LP is used, where a Marketo form is used, that when I recommended the above article . But I certainly agree that there could be better ways to develop a better JD that whats mentioned in the article.

Best Always,

Karan Hari

Grant_Booth

Level 9

I would be very cautious about any change trying to get rid of such duplicates, because none of the marketing automation systems are set up to do it, in particular regarding unsubscribe statuses. Marketo is set up to use the Email Address as an identifier to make a create vs. update decision. The system's Unsubscribe (as well as marketing suspended, black-listed, and email invalid) is tracked at the lead level, not the email level. If there were a secondary email field, for example, you'd also have to track which email address they are opting in to. How would you determine if they're giving you consent to process their data in compliance with GDPR? Etc. And Marketo is only set up to send emails to a lead's standard Email Address field, not any other custom field. If there were a separate "Email Address" object with it's own fields of unsubscribed, opt-in, etc., that gets associated with the lead, it would be a different story.
However, in my opinion any attempt to create a secondary email address field, whether or not its possible is going to be a bad idea. If you don't end up severely regretting the decision yourself, whoever inherits your Marketo instance will be cursing your name. Anything you do in this direction will simply be going against the grain of how Marketo was designed. It would probably break frequently, and Marketo Support would be unable to help you.
My recommendation would be to look for a CRM process/plugin that can use logic to match a person with pre-existing records based on name, company, etc., and then route them to the same Sales rep and link to the matched existing record via a lookup field.

K

Kana_LaiAuthor

Level 3

Would you happen to know of one you can recommend? Marketo referred us to Vertify during implementation and they weren't able to solve this issue in particular.

F

falvares

Adobe Employee

Hi Kana,

You could leverage Demand Tools. I know a customer who has used this tool to match records that are potential duplicates and flag this with their sales team to get them to confirm and merge.

Hope this helps

Floyd

Kevin_Keefe

Level 2

Hi Kana,

We are in the same situation, where we also use Marketo with NetSuite and get vendor provided lists of names.

If you're working with Vertify (first of all that sucks cause they suck) but we are in the exact same situation.

Vertify is going to connect the data between NS and Marketo and the way we manage dupes, while it is manual, works well for us.

Once you discover a dupe, we merge records in NS but have the Marketo record in question pulled up for reference. Then we just make sure that we merge the right record so that what stays in NetSuite is clean. Oversimplified maybe based on what people are replying above, but that works for us.

Roland_Vasquez

Level 1

Hi everyone,

Has anyone used Marketo's additional service called "Automerge" for things like this?

Thanks.

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