Determine when duplicate records are necessary

Transcript

Why are purposeful duplicates sometimes necessary in Marketo? In some Marketo-engaged instances, duplicates are not actually a bad thing. In some industries, purposeful duplicates are actually a necessity. The idea of a multi-person household is required for effective marketing and, sometimes, by law, to make sure that everyone receives required update information. For example, the banking industry needs to send out update emails to all people connected to a specific account, even if all those people use the same email address. It is also common to see people in a household share their email in the retail industry as well. So, removing duplicates may or may not be a necessity for your instance. If you need to have purposeful duplicates of an email address, there are ways that you can change that duplicate ID. You can create a support ticket to change it inside Marketo-engage, and this can cause a lot of havoc in your instance, so be sure to do your homework and talk with the support team before you go down this route. A duplicate record is commonly defined as two Marketo-engaged person records with the same email address. This can be changed, but email address is the unique identifier in Marketo-engage by default. When managing duplicates, you will need to choose a master record or the record that you wish to keep, and you will have the duplicate record, or the record that will essentially be deleted upon merging. When you merge a record inside of Marketo-engage using the merge people action, the activity data of the duplicated record will be added to the master record as well. And all the master record fields will be persisted unless you specify during that merge process. Otherwise the master will succeed and the duplicate will cease.