How to temporarily suppress an external list against a single program | Community
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G
gally.articola
Level 3
March 24, 2017
Question

How to temporarily suppress an external list against a single program

  • March 24, 2017
  • 4 replies
  • 7262 views

We have trade agreements with clients to send their eblasts to our audiences. Often the client will provide a list of email addresses they don't want to receive that particular program, which can have upwards of 1 million names. How do we easily suppress these names against our programs without adding them to the database?

With other vendors, they had an area specifically for suppression lists, where the names would not be added to the database but run against the mailing when it was sent.

I'm hoping there's a super simple solution that will work in Marketo!

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4 replies

Dan_Stevens_
Dan_Stevens_
Level 10
March 24, 2017

You'll have no choice but to add them to your DB - if only temporarily.  But be very careful with this - especially for a million names.  Not only can this negatively affect your future deliverability/sender score, but also other customers who share the same Marketo pod as you (assuming you're not using a dedicated IP address).

G
gally.articolaAuthor
Level 3
March 24, 2017

But how do we easily remove the names so they're only added for that single program? This is the challenge we're running into, we don't want to negatively affect our deliverability and don't want to make it a manual process to delete suppression lists. Additionally, we're governing our instance so only a select few have the ability to upload, which further complicates set up.

R
rachel2-2
Level 8
March 24, 2017

For smaller lists, just use an "email address is not..." filter.

You could try hooking up your Marketo to Power BI or a similar platform or export your entire audience once a week (this can take all day but just let it run in the background) and use a tool like MS Access to vlookup on email and exclude those that are already in your system.

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
March 24, 2017

Webhook.

  • Upload list to remote server (could be simple textfile)
  • Call Webhook before send
  • If match found, Remove from Flow

The external list never exists in your database but is used to exclude leads.

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
March 24, 2017

P.S.  By "upload" here I mean literally "copy a dumb file onto a file system" like saving a .TXT file into your Marketo assets. Not an "import" in any sense.

G
gally.articolaAuthor
Level 3
April 5, 2017

So far this answer seems the most doable to my team, but the programmer I'm working with was wondering if you could share an example of an endpoint you're using with a webhook in this manner? He's a bit in the dark as to where this would happen in the process -- for example, is it a flow step in a Smart Campaign?

Grégoire_Miche2
Grégoire_Miche2
Level 10
March 24, 2017

Create a static list, name it whatever you want. for instance "Customer X list"

Then create a smart list with the following filters:

lead was created - constraint: list is Customer X List.

This smart list will five you the leads that where unique to you customer and created when you ran the import.

When the email is sent, delete the members of this smart list, not the members of the list.

I prefer to do this in individual programs, not in the (lead) database. I prepare a program template with all the element above + the email + a smart campaign to send it (or else use an email program type), + another smart campaign to delete the leads, so everything is self contained.

Each time we have to run the operation for a customer, we clone the program template, prepare the email, import the data and have the smart campaign send the email. We name the program by the customer or lead source name and the date.

and of course,  +1 on the comments on the performance of the whole operation if you are in the millions of lines....

-Greg

Brent_Baker1
Brent_Baker1
Level 2
April 11, 2017

We have a customer with a list they want suppressed that is over 95k contacts. We only pay for <60k contacts so there is no way can we import the list so here is what I did.

  1. Export your entire list.
  2. Copy email addresses to a clean excel document from both your list and the suppression list.
  3. Find Duplicates and show with highlight.
  4. Filter by only showing the highlighted records.
  5. Import this list into a static list.

There you go, you have a list to suppress that only contains the contacts that were already in your database.

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
April 11, 2017

This is definitely a good call, Brent, if your Marketo database doesn't allow for leads to be created via any means other than pre-certified list upload. But if forms or any other self-service feature is in use, or any dynamic CRM lead sync...

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