5 Cool Tricks to Keep Marketo Data Clean & Spotless

“How do I clean duplicate records out of my Marketo database?”

“Is there any way to maintain Marketo database immaculate and perfect condition for campaigns?”

Do these types of Marketo questions cloud your mind and hinder your marketing efforts? Some of our clients come seeking solutions and best practices on how to keep their Marketo database cleared of duplicate records and other issues. There are super cool ways to prevent duplicate data and other data management errors to impede the performance of your marketing automation campaign.

There are many possible methods for you to try Marketo data cleanse. You should know how badly this duplicate data problem can affect your Marketo campaigns.

How badly does duplicate data hurt your Marketo campaign?

In most instances, duplicate records pop up in from diverse sources such as, through manual data entry attempts, list imports or any other manual activities of data entry or issues such as –

Erroneous lead scoring activities: one of the worst cases of duplicate data is from an incorrect lead scoring outcome. Inaccurate lead scoring resulting from duplicate records may lead to a miscalculation of MQL and often leave behind hot leads in Marketo. Apart from causing duplicate errors, these also cause lost opportunities for conversion by leaving leads which could generate revenues.

Higher cost of Marketo: Marketo charges its users based on the size of the database in it. And the volume may often take in presence of duplicate data and chances are, Marketo users are unfortunately being charged for unwanted duplicate records in their database.

Incorrect data analysis: Duplicate records of leads in the Marketo database will also cause miscalculation of data analysis and reports that result in reduced opportunities of ROI.

But, marketers can sidestep the loss and issues that duplicate data triggers, by adopting periodic data cleansing practices to keep pesky duplicate records at bay. The following five steps are best recommended to minimize the risks of duplicate data and other data errors to maintain good health of your Marketo database.

1. Spot duplicate records

As soon as marketers start with data building activities, duplicate records start surfacing inevitably. That’s why it is important to take proactive action and to develop routines to spot and scrape off the bad duplicate data from time to time. It is possible to maintain the good health of your database, free of duplicate leads.

In this process of eliminating duplicate records, marketers must take adequate caution in deleting records even though they are found as duplicate. We recommend a deep dive that carefully examines both records to ascertain which lead data is more useful for campaign whether email addresses or mobile number. They can also merge both the data accordingly.

2. Set rules for automatic de-duping

Another way to spot and get rid of duplicate records from the large volume of thousands of data is to set rules for the automatic elimination or de-duplication of lead data. Such practices of automatic de-duplication helps marketers with saving hours of valuable time and efforts in scanning through their both marketing automation and CRM database manually. This process is more feasible when Marketo users are adding lead lists when they can append bigger sets of lead data and avoid duplicate records as and when new contacts are getting added to the system.

3. Eliminate Junk Contacts

Many anonymous lead records may contain inaccurate, bad data such as “xyzw@gmail.com” or “meh@hotmail.com” with no accurate details of lead contact. Such records are generated when contacts are unwilling to share their actual email addresses. These kind of contact details are unnecessary that marketers do not need and have to pay for the space these take in within the Marketo database. Marketers can set up and run smart campaigns to spot and scrub off these garbage data automatically from their database. They can set campaigns in ways that will identify such bogus email addresses, remove and suspend or even blacklist those spam contact details.

4. Set Up Alerts

Marketo users can also play this card of setting up alerts which bring them to the top of the game of their database. Spotting and deleting duplicates leads based on their email address is easy, but what if first name and last names are duplicate but both records contain different email addresses? In such cases, marketers need to set up alerts to be automatically notified of existence of such duplicate records. As soon as they get notification, they can determine if the record is simply a duplicate entry or those are of two different persons.

5. Scan data for uniformity

We recommend that companies and marketers work to ensure uniformity in order to maintain clean and good health of their Marketo database. However, there is a difficulty – if contacts choose to type in the country instead of selecting from the drop-down list menu, chances are the database will contain same country with different country values such as, for United States there can be multiple types of data input as “U.S.”, “US”, “USA,” “United States of America” or “U.S.A.” Make sure the form users can get to only choose from the drop down menu of list and cannot type on their own.

Marketers can also apply filters to get rid of lead records that become inactive for a considerable amount of time. In such cases, they can set filters to determine if those leads are engaging with their marketing campaigns or if they have left the company. As soon as they can verify those are inactive and useless leads, marketers can simply decide if they want to keep those records to run re-activation campaign or cleanse those records.

Do you need professional assistance in setting up campaigns and managing your Marketo database? Do you need help to keep your database spotless and free of bad data? Why delay? Contact our Marketo specialists at (408) 502 6765 or connect with us via Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.