Example chapter

Background & Challenges

For Essent it was imperative to allow duplicate email addresses in Marketo, originating from their bespoke CRM. Allowing for these intended duplicates opened the door for a lot of unintended duplicates, which had grown out of control.

Duplicate email addresses cause quite a few problems in Marketo. A few key examples:

• A person’s behavior will get registered across multiple contact records, which means lead scoring will always deliver an incomplete image.
• Data across the multiple records can be inconsistent, resulting in a person being included / excluded from a campaign based on incorrect data.
• List uploads will select the most recently updated record with the same email address to include in your list. This may not be the record you intended, resulting in incorrect data being processed within your campaign.
• If a person that already exists multiple times in the database fills out a form, Marketo does not know which record to update and will create a new record instead, adding to the duplicates count.

Essent’s Marketo database had developed to contain more than 16% duplicate records over time, with only 5% being intended duplicates. It was difficult to assess the exact source of each duplicate, but it was clear a lot of them needed to be merged back into a single record. This meant thousands of sets of duplicate records needed to be merged. In the process it would be necessary to always identify the correct master record to survive and to ensure important data from the dropped record would not get lost.