6 Tactics for a Spic-and-Span Marketo Database

“Contact data ages like fish not wine…it gets worse as it gets older, not better.” – Greg Thaler

It’s a proven fact that empowered marketers achieve greater ROI. Keeping your Marketo database squeaky clean plays a huge role in administering that. According to a Gartner study, poor data quality is a primary reason for 40% of all business initiatives failing to achieve their targeted benefits affecting overall labor productivity by as much as 20%. Manually fixing it equals to 20% of your time wasted that is 8 hours per week.

Bad data constitutes of several old or duplicate leads that push you over your Marketo or Salesforce pricing threshold, which may result in exorbitant fees per year. Is your Marketo database dirty? Do you suffer from the ‘Bad Data Syndrome’? Let’s remedy that, shall we?

6 Tactics for a Spic-and-Span Marketo Database

You can’t keep all bad data from sliding into your database, but you sure can clean it up. Here are 6 sure-fire tactics to cleanse your Marketo database of all evil, the evil we call bad data:

1. Spot the duplicates: Duplicates are unpreventable when you start gaining traction from your database. You need to stay on top of your game to cleanse your database of these duplicates. Tread carefully while verifying both lead records (the original and duplicate) and identify which record has the most significant data (i.e., email address or phone number), and then accordingly consolidate the records.

Marketo provides a great way to assess duplicates, even though it isn’t the best platform for removing duplicates. You could create a Smartlist that determines the multiple records that share the same email address, in the Master Data Retention Program. This list would give you a quick snapshot that would get you closer to identifying the duplicates sans the complex logic. Find the source of the data, once you get the duplicate count. You’d need an additional software or a third-party service like the M-Clean App for Marketo.

To begin with, perform a one-time deduplication, then run an ongoing service for duplicate reduction, and then cleanse and repeat a one-time deduplication every 3 to 6 months.

2. Expunge the inactive contacts: Before you go on a full throttle ‘kill them’ spree, address a few questions. How long must a lead stay in your database without any activity before you delete it? Why aren’t your marketing campaigns receiving any engagement from these contacts? You could expunge them on the basis of 15 months of inactivity, no active opportunities, not a part of a specific lifecycle stage, Salesforce leads only. Also, keep in mind that Marketo limits inactivity filters to 90 days. You could perform a one-time delete once you get a low-down of the criteria that works best for you, and then cleanse and repeat quarterly.

3. Clear-out the recently deleted Salesforce records: Records that are deleted in Salesforce aren’t automatically deleted in Marketo. If you compose a campaign that purges your deleted Salesforce records in Marketo, one that runs regularly, it’s a whip-smart win.

4. Scrutinize for consistency: As necessary as consistency and uniformity are, they could be challenging for marketers. For instance, if you let prospects type into the “Country” field, instead of selecting from the drop down, you may end up collecting inconsistent results like “UK”, “U.K.”, “United Kingdom”, or “Great Britain”.

Your platform should have the capability to automatically cleanse similar data values so that you won’t miss out on a lead because of bad data.

5. Eliminate email bounces: What an ideal world it would be if we could just delete the bounced email contacts, right? But, well, in our less than ideal world, you want to keep these contacts in your system to maintain reporting intelligence. Before anything else, differentiate between the soft bounces and the hard bounces. For multiple soft bounces in 30 days, set these to “Marketing Suspended=TRUE” for 30 days. For multiple hard bounces, if a lead hard bounces more than twice in 30 days, set them to “Suspended” or “Invalid”.

To begin with, you could perform a one-time delete on the basis of Email Invalid is TRUE, and then cleanse and repeat quarterly or annually, whichever works best for you.

6. Set up system notifications: You can stay on top of the database game by taking advantage of system alerts and notifications. For instance, hypothetically, your platform has a dedupe functionality on the basis of email, and a contact with a duplicate first and last name on your form comes in. The catch is that it has a different email address, what would you do now? The answer is setting up system alerts that would notify you in such a case and you’d be in a position to decide if it’s a duplicate.

Every marketer loves the idea of a spic-and-span Marketo database. Don’t just let it be wishful thinking. As tedious as this sounds in theory, the benefits would be worth the effort, making you end up with a healthier Marketo instance, quality leads, happy sales folks, and improved customer experiences. So, get cleansing, now!

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