Uploading People/Leads to Marketo

Marisa,

Please move this discussion to Products​ as it is Marketo-specific.

The implications in terms of the process of importing people into Marketo? Or are you referring to the implication of importing purchased lists of data into Marketo?

@Marisa Mallon​ - In terms of the process, it can have various implications - e.g. if you have a triggered campaign reacting to new leads created, it will process your leads, or if you have some of the leads already present in Marketo, it will overwrite the data on the records(leads/persons) if the data is different.

@Marisa Mallon​

They won't be replaced, but will be updated with the new data. If you import a same lead which already exists in Marketo, it will be merged. Could you elaborate Marketo recognizing leads organically?

For tracking unique activities, you may want to use interesting moments, or use a Multi Touch Attribution Setup​

Hope this helps!

Balkar

I hate uploading leads. We do it all the time with tradeshow and content syndication leads, but you have to be soooo careful. The person doing it has to follow a checklist and be very detail-oriented. You absolutely have to to double-check that you're matching the proper CSV fields to Marketo fields.

Other considerations: You need to make sure that all the required fields are there (both for SFDC sync and whatever your other field needs are), especially Lead Source. You need to make sure all the field values are normalized (whereas if they were filling out a form, you could restrict field values to a picklist). You have to make sure the field values match the field requirements (i.e. email addresses are properly formatted—if they were coming in via form, the form would catch that).

If you're importing to an engagement program, its important to note they automatically become members and added to streams, I didn't know about this functionality and ran into some issues with it. I posted a question about it awhile ago here.

When importing make sure you understand each field and what it maps to. If there are fields whose values should remain unchanged then it's possible to set fields up this way in Admin > Field Management section (screenshot is below).

Also, if you have a list that contains a lot of special characters such as those commonly found on international distribution lists, make sure that you import in Unicode Text format; here is a link to another thread that covers this topic: Special Characters - é è ç à ï ä

Lastly, this point might be a little obvious but if it's a new email address then a new record will be created, which will grow the size of your database. If you are importing thousands of new people then your database will grow, and Marketo charges you based on the size of your database.

-Tom