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A
Anonymous
October 27, 2015
Question

Preventing emailing duplicate contacts

  • October 27, 2015
  • 2 replies
  • 3145 views

We have a lot of duplicate contacts in our system. At this time, it is not something we can easily resolve. I always understood, however, that Marketo would only email on person with the same email address. I have recently seen that many contact records with the same email are all receiving the same email. Am I not correct that Marketo filters out duplicate email addreses before launching an email? If so, is there an alternative workflow i can set up?

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2 replies

J
Adobe Employee
JohnCl9Adobe Employee
Adobe Employee
October 27, 2015

Hi Lauren,

Marketo will automatically filter out duplicates on a per flow step basis.  One Send Email flow step in a batch campaign will only ever send the email to an email address one time.  If you have multiple Send Email Flow steps, then it's possible one duplicate could get the email from the first, and the second duplicate could get it from the second, as duplicates do still run through all flow steps.

If the campaign is not a batch campaign, but a trigger, it's possible that any duplicates could trigger the campaign at any time and, depending on the settings, run through it as many times as it is triggered.

You can use a Member Of Smartlist filter with the setting "Not In > Possible Duplicates", but this will filter all leads on that list, and may not allow even a single email to be sent to a an email address on that list.

The best option is to dedupe your leads, and do what you can to prevent new duplicates from being created.  If you have a large number of dupes you can reach out to services@marketo.com for info on the Easy Merge tool they provide.

John

Dan_Stevens_
Dan_Stevens_
Level 10
March 10, 2016

@John Clark​, what happens in this scenario: We have an events program; and a lead registers for that event.  We have a smart campaign that will send a confirmation email to that registrant.  But that registrant has two two lead records in Marketo (we too have a duplicate leads issue on our hands).  Will the confirmation email only be sent to the lead record that registered - or will it be sent to both lead records, as this is a trigger campaign?

Roxann_McGlump1
Roxann_McGlump1
Level 5
March 10, 2016

Hi Dan,

In the situation you describe, only one lead would show the form fillout activity and the email would only be sent out to that lead.  In my testing, when there are duplicate leads, form fillout activities were attributed to the most recently created lead.

A
Anonymous
October 30, 2015

Hi Lauren,

RingLead can help.

If you describe your specific requirements to me, I can certainly offer you some best practice advice.

I bet that when you started your career in marketing you never thought you'd spend so much time as a data janitor.

If you'd like some help, I'm easy to find.

Gregg

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