Tips for Identifying Bad Data – Generic Email Addresses

Data governance is keeping your Marketo database up-to-date, accurate and useful. Here is how to create a data management campaign to identify generic email addresses in your system.

Why suppress emails to generic email addresses? They are typically tied to a group and not a specific person and if the person who signed up to receive your content leaves the company or changes role your email will no longer reach the desired recipient. Emails to generic addresses might be more likely marked as spam which may impact your sender reputation. Before setting records to Marketing Suspended you may want to review whether the emails are being opened or clicked.

In this example, I am going to create a batch campaign to identify generic email addresses and set them to Marketing Suspended. They will continue to receive operational emails but won’t receive promotional emails. It's optional to set the records to Marketing Suspended.

Smart List

Email Address starts with

accountspayable@

admin@

ap@

billing@

contact@

customerservice@

finance@

help@

helpdesk@

info@

marketing@

noreply@

no-reply@

office@

postmaster@

sales@

security@

support@

system@

webmaster@

Flow

In the flow besides setting the Marketing Suspended field to True, I am going to set a custom field called 'Marketing Suspended Reason' to 'Set Marketing Suspended to True due to generic email address' and all the records to a static list.

Schedule

I am going to set the batch campaign to run in the middle of the night.

If you are looking for more information about data management/health, here is great article by Jeff Coveney on Six Steps to Delete Bad Data.