9 Ways to Reduce Bad Data in Marketo

The Marketo marketing automation platform’s objective is to automate almost every aspect of digital marketing, but primarily the communication throughout every customer’s lifecycle. Marketo, however, needs to be utilized in the right way to improve marketing and sales. Due to the art of the possible, and the complications that come with it, it gets difficult for marketers to make the most of Marketo.

One of the biggest challenges that Marketo admins often face when trying to automate communication with customers is to reduce the massive amount of data that accumulates in your database. Data including duplicates, non-standardized values, incomplete fields, and inaccurate data, if not sorted, can disrupt your marketing campaigns. Here are nine steps that you need to follow to reduce bad data in Marketo:

Purge records with no email addresses

To clean your Marketo data, you need to create a smart list by identifying records with no email addresses as records with no email address have little value in Marketo. You should remove these records from Marketo, put them in your CRM, and contact Marketo support to create a sync filter that prevents records without an email address from syncing to Marketo. You can also use Salesforce and other systems to control data synced to Marketo.

Separate all the hard bounce emails

Marketo has an email Invalid field to identify records where their email format is not correct. Moreover, if the email is hard-bounce, it receives a five-digit bounce code signaling that the email is no longer valid and why. You will need to create a smart campaign to identify the records that have hard bounced using the Marketo Email Invalid field (true/false) to set all the hard bounce emails to true. If you want to prevent these records from being synced back into Marketo, you may need to request Marketo support to create a more sophisticated sync filter.

Identify spam traps with email validation provider

On noticing any spam trap created from any email address, the ISP reports it as a hard-bounce. This negatively affects your email deliverability. To avoid being flagged as a spammer, you need to use an email validation provider to identify spam traps and invalid emails. Create a smart campaign that sets the Email Invalid field to true when such situations arise. Email validation vendors can also help predict if an email will be opened by active addresses or not. If an active email address has not engaged with a single message over a long time, a lead scoring process can alert you. This will help you filter email addresses that could become inactive and have a possibility of being recycled into future spam traps.

Eliminate those who are no longer engaged with your client company

If you are a B2B marketer, your database is likely to be full of email addresses of employees working with your prospect or customer accounts. Often, such email addresses become invalid as employees discontinue their role with their company. To find and remove these leads, you need to create a checkbox field in your CRM for sales reps to select when they find that someone is no longer at the company. Then, you can filter and/or remove these records. You can also create a smart list that selects records that have not been engaged in a long time so that you can send a “wake up” email and remove any records that do not respond.

Remove unsubscribed leads

If someone has unsubscribed from your emails, that means they are not interested in your marketing communications anymore. You can use the Marketo system smart list for unsubscribed people to either remove them from Marketo or continue to monitor their page visits to your website and other digital activity. Simultaneously, you may even want to create a smart campaign that will change their unsubscribed field value to ‘false’ when reconsenting through another form.

Create a Spam Bounced Count score field in Marketo

You can create a smart list that records every spam bounce. On noticing a soft bounce more than a couple of times in a row, you may want to remove them from your Marketo list. This will help you maintain good deliverability and engagement results on your campaigns.

Establish behavioral lead scores

If you have set up behavioral lead scoring, you can check to see if your records are negative or zero. You can also record leads who engaged with your brand years ago but with scores that have fallen off over the years. You can keep that data separate or use it for re-engagement.

Create a smart list that selects records of page visits in the past 90 days

Similar to behavioral scoring, you can create a smart campaign that sets records with page visits in the past 90 days at the start of each quarter. Remember, Marketo does not track website visits after 90 days but, you can create Interesting Moments to include in your inactivity smart list.

Remove duplicate Marketo data

Duplicated data can create issues in the system’s speed, lead to inaccurate communication, sales conflicts, and increase storage costs due to contact overlap in the records. It is essential to remove duplicate data in Marketo.

Following these nine steps will help you remove bad data from Marketo and reduce storage. This will not only reduce your storage cost but will also speed up your Marketo instance. Moreover, this will increase the Marketo platform’s efficiency and help you keep an accurate record of every campaign and audience member. Once you are done cleaning your Marketo data, you can more effectively analyze it to identify ideal customer profiles and rebuild clean data sets that match your account. Marketo can be a significant asset for your business if you can successfully remove unwanted data.