Massive Clean-Up Project

I don't have specific guidance around best practices for massive deletes, but I was having a conversation with our Marketo rep last week about what types of records count against your database allowance. He confirmed that Marketo has recently implemented a policy where opt-outs, duplicates, and hard bounces DO count.

I believe that all known leads are counted, but to make sure, I would contact your Marketo salesperson, or write to renewals@marketo.com.

All known leads, including bounces and unsubscribes, count against your database total. The only thing that doesn't are anonymous leads.

Thanks everyone! So couple more ?'s

How do I found out the current size of my database?
If I delete in Marketo but the person is still in SFDC, do I run the risk of the person showing up in Marketo again?

1)  To see the size of your lead database, click the "Lead Database" link at the top of your Marketo screen, the pie chart will show you the numbers of known and anonymous leads.

2)  Leads deleted from Marketo but still exist in Salesforce will be re-created in the next SFDC sync if you do not delete them from Salesforce at the same time.

Hey Christina,

I am about to remove a bunch of hard bounces from my database as well. From my understanding, if you delete a lead in Marketo, they will not sync back unless their information in SFDC is update. If it is updated, Marketo will recognize the change in data and sync the lead back.

For my company, we have set up sharing criteria between SFDC and Marketo. One of the criterias is that the lead/contact must have an email address that contains an @ symbol to sync to Marketo. What I am planning to do is export the list of hardbounces from Marketo and then use DataLoader to erase the email addresses out of our SFDC database. After I have completed this, I will remove them from Marketo and they will not sync to Marketo again unless a new email address is update.

Hope this makes sense and helps - and best of luck as you do your updating.

Taylor

Taylor is correct about using the Delete function.

If you want some tips on managing your hard bounces, see http://www.slideshare.net/jdavidhill/marketo-email-reputation-management

Taylor - super helpful. You are not worried the hard bounce is due to Marketo's poor deliverability rankings? Not sure if it would be related at all. I would hate to delete information simply because 1 system cannot get the email through. But this is a great idea.

Tony - am I looking at known for my #? This is WAY over our allotted amount in our contract so now I am even more confused how this works... Our sales manager hasnt responded....

Known Leads are counted toward your contract pricing.
Anonymous are not.

There was another thread where someone thought you might be able to say Unsubscribed or Hard Bounces would not count, but kinda doubtful.

Marketo isn't going to check this out until renewal time, so I wouldn't go out of your way to ask your sales rep.

What I WOULD DO, is follow some of the procedures I suggest to find out how many hard bounces there are and decide on criteria for people to remove from your database entirely. I am always a bit cautious about removing potentially good leads who have unsubscribed from some things. This is because you have a duty under the law to not contact them, so you don't want to inadvertently send them another message if they somehow get into the database again.

Old leads with hard bounces should likely be removed. But you should archive them someplace just in case.