How to Manage and Remove Duplicate Data in Marketo

Data is the new currency!

But if your data has duplicates, it can certainly affect your marketing efforts, which in turn, impact your bottom line.

If your data is preventing you from bringing value or making informed decisions, there’s an underlying issue to work on.

The time to transform your data and ensure the quality of your data is now!

So, before that duplicate data brings down your brand reputation and exhausts your marketing budget, it’s crucial to knock out bad data from your database. And this blog is all about it. So, let’s get started.

The Real Impact of Duplicate Data on Your Business

Have you ever scrolled through the email marketing campaign reports only to realize that you have sent the same email to the same email address multiple times?

No matter how small this mistake might seem, it can reflect poorly on your business. Not just this, it can confuse your audience and affect the productivity of your sales and marketing team.

Duplicate data can:

• Lead to unnecessary data storage
• Affect your marketing budget
• Impact the image of your brand
• Ineffective customer service
• Lead to negative target implication

Should You Fix the Duplicates or Prevent Them?

The cost of duplicates is alarming, which can have a significant impact on the bottom line of your business. To get rid of duplicates, one question that might cloud your mind is – “Should I fix the duplicates or prevent them?” A classic dilemma, right?

Well, as we know, prevention is better than cure. It means preventing duplicates rather than fixing them is a more feasible and economical option.

But, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fix and clean your data regularly. Along with preventing bad data, you should also focus on ensuring the data that’s already in your database is squeaky clean.

A similar situation of data duplication can occur in Marketo when new leads are added via form submissions or imports, updating existing leads with matching emails instead of creating new ones. Additionally, leads added directly in Salesforce can sync as duplicates, which then need to be manually resolved in Marketo.

But How Does Marketo Handle Duplicates?

Marketo addresses duplicates by updating the most recently modified lead record and ensuring single email delivery in campaigns. It accomplishes this by identifying duplicate addresses and attributing activity to the lowest Lead ID.

It also enables the merging of lead histories, provides control over the retained fields, and maintains comprehensive campaign history using tools for finding and mass-merging duplicates.

Fortunately, a real-time cleansing tool, like Grazitti’s M-Clean can help.

However, before decoding its features, let’s understand its need for Marketo users.

The Role of a Real-Time Data Cleansing Tool

Due to the increase in speed and volume of data, you can find it difficult to manage your data, especially if it is not cleansed and analyzed. To remove irrelevant and inaccurate data from databases, automated tools to perform these tasks can be your best bet.

If you’re facing issues of duplicate data in your Marketo database, you might want to consider using a real-time data cleansing tool. Why, you ask?

Such a tool will allow you to ensure duplicate records are correctly entered into your database in a timely manner.

This will help ensure that most of the duplicate records are removed quickly before they cause any further damage to your existing customer record.

Why is Data Deduplication Crucial?

Keeping your customer database lean and clean will help make sure there are no duplicates in your database.

Deduplication is crucial when it comes to protecting your existing customer data and avoiding duplicate reporting mistakes.

Here’s why data deduplication is crucial for businesses.

1. Improve Brand Credibility and Build Trust

Ever received an email with your name spelled incorrectly? How did you feel? Doesn’t call for a good experience, right?

The same goes with your customers as well. Even small mistakes like these can tarnish your brand’s reputation, thus, affecting credibility. Deduplicating the data can lead to effective marketing campaigns, more brand credibility, and enhanced sales strategies.

2. Decrease in Cost

In most cases, it is more economical to implement data cleaning before you use data in your marketing campaigns. Deleting unnecessary records can save money on CRM and validating email addresses can save you money. For instance, you might have spent on printing assets, such as brochures, for each contact.

Not just money, just imagine how much time you’d save, which your executives might have spent on making calls to passive customers.

3. Improve Customer Relationships

Customer relationships are important for business operations. Rather than the price of the product, the experience customers are getting from your brand is more likely to affect their loyalty towards your brand. For this, you need to understand your audience, which is only possible by collecting valuable insights from data.

With a clean database, you can target the right person at the right time and track customer behavior.

4. Smarter and More Accurate Business Decisions

Poor quality data can adversely affect your reports and analytics, causing you to make biased and wrong marketing decisions.

For instance, you’re going through your email marketing campaign report, only to find out the inflation in analytics due to duplicate records. However, if you have a clean database, you’d have accurate metrics, better insights, and easier-to-digest data.

How to Get Started?

There are several ways to implement data deduplication into your business. You can find data deduplication software that’s optimized for your industry, as well as tools that allow you to manually reduce duplicates. There are also cloud-based tools for data deduplication that work with most major databases.

To dedupe your data in Marketo, M-Clean – a real-time data deduplication app for Marketo – can be your best bet.

M-Clean stands as a premier solution for data deduplication and standardization, elevating data quality across your Marketo platform to unparalleled heights. With its robust capabilities, M-Clean excels in eliminating duplicate records not only in Marketo but also in Salesforce and MS Dynamics, ensuring uniform data structure throughout.

M-Clean accomplishes this by automatically merging duplicate records, linking child and parent entries, enabling customization of deduplication criteria, and organizing diverse data formats for improved data quality.

Some of the notable features of this tool are:

• Configurable Field Settings
• Quick Setup
• Fuzzy Match Principle
• Live Dedupe Report
• Real-time Duplicate Check
• Seamlessly Integrates With Marketo, Salesforce, & MS Dynamics

M-Clean can:

• Align sales and marketing team
• Curb duplicates
• Provide real-time dedupe reports
• Improve campaign performance

Wrapping Up

Identifying and managing duplicates should be a top priority for any business owner who wants to protect their customer base and make sure they’re consistently sending out accurate and personalized campaigns.

To protect your customers from inaccurate reporting, a dedupe tool to help you enable data cleaning is a must. And M-Clean can help you do just that.

Ready to Foster Data Cleaning in Marketo? Take a Demo!