Identity and prevent duplicate records in Marketo Engage

Transcript

So, how do we actually find and prevent duplicates in the first place? The easiest way to find duplicates in your Mercado Engage instance is by checking your database with the provided system smart list possible duplicates. This smart list will check the database for any leads that have the same email address. You will need to create your own version of this if you intend to use a custom unique identifier inside of your instance. You can find this list in your database by going to the database tab, choose your workspace out of the possible, usually default, go to system smart lists, and then possible duplicates. This list will be used in how to handle the use cases coming up. Most of the duplicate issues stem from the CRM integration. This is because the Mercado Engage API uses email address as the deduplication key by default, and when you use the normal ways to ingest data like form fills or list uploads third party connectors, they will use email as well. The CRM native sync uses the Mercado unique ID instead, or MKTO underscore unique underscore ID instead, and it will map based off of this value allowing for multiple records with the same email address, hence the different ways that people are interacted with inside of Mercado based off of ingestion. The best way to prevent the duplicate records is to implement and train a structured workflow process with everyone. If you have a manual CRM input, make sure that all the people who add data are aware of the importance of keeping that data clean in the CRM, and why that data will help clean and dramatically prevent duplicates entering the Mercado Engage instance. If you can, the best way to prevent duplicates is by having an automated process, constantly even being added to any system, whether that be Mercado Engage or your CRM. Implementing proper safeguards could take a while in the beginning, but trust me, it will save you and your team time, effort, and money in the future. Aside from ensuring people processes, implementing an instance audit periodically will keep your instance healthy and allow you to catch a lot of potential issues before they even happen, not just the duplicate records. One way that you can go about this is by talking with your team, whoever that is, or your sales team, or anybody that you interact with who together will ingest data into Mercado. Talking with them and ensuring that they understand how their instance or their product will essentially downstream affect you, and that will affect your marketing capabilities and being able to trust or not trust your data. I suggest with all of my clients to have that meeting, sit down, and talk. This is why we need processes to be the way they are. Do we have processes in place that will ensure that whenever you’re entering somebody into the database, are you checking to make sure that a duplicate is there or not? Do we have automation in place to prevent duplicate entrants or not? The best way to avoid it is communication and ensuring that everybody is on the same page.