Kickstart your Marketo clean-up: data hygiene best practice tips

Marketo data hygiene
Adam Kemlo
Lead Consultant - EMEA & APAC

22/3/2023

You don’t have to wait until Spring comes around to assess the quality of your data in Marketo! Brush up on your data hygiene processes with a good Spring clean.

And there’s a wealth of reasons why you should clean up dirty data. For starters, poor data leads to lower deliverability rates, lower campaign engagement and inaccurate reporting. Duplicate records impact lead scoring effectiveness and attribution. If you have lots of records in Marketo that are unmarketable, you’re paying inflated contract rates to Adobe.

Don’t let bad data and poor data hygiene practices cost your team valuable time and money.

Here are four data hygiene tips to kick start your Marketo spring cleaning:

1.ㅤOrganise your instance

First things first. Is your Marketo instance organised? Is it easy to find programs, landing pages, lists and reports?

Start by going through your programs, opening each folder and checking your assets. Get rid of any duplicate emails, lists, reports or tests. We also recommend deleting anything that’s unnecessary to the campaign, does not work, or that is not a final version.

Don’t forget about your global forms or templates in Design Studio – check your test forms and test templates as well.

Our suggestion? Set a timer and give yourself fifteen minutes a day to do this. If you spend 15 minutes daily tidying up your instance, you’ll total 5 hours of cleanup time over a month. We think that’s time well spent!

2.ㅤClean your data

Go through your Marketo data and identify unsubscribes, invalid emails, and records you don’t want to do business with. Our recommendation would then be to delete them, as these records are cluttered and are artificially driving up your Marketo contract price. 

However, before you delete anything, confirm whether the records are needed for reporting or if they should remain in your CRM! If that’s the case, set up a custom sync filter to ensure control of the flow of records between your CRM and Marketo, and make sure you can identify the bad data in your CRM.

3.ㅤAutomate your tasks

Marketo’s powerful automation is great for helping to clean up your data on an ongoing basis. Using smart campaigns and smart lists you can easily identify records that need to be purged or cleaned – and set up the rules to do so. For example, you could have lists for invalid email fields, empty email fields, soft or hard bounces and then automate how you want to deal with them.

You can also set up data management flows that correct data values. Some common fields where this might be helpful include country, number of employees (to employee range), bad lead source to good lead source, and translating old field values to a new field (full to empty).

4.ㅤDownload your free data hygiene report

Click here to access a free visual insight into the current quality of your data in your Marketo instance. Discover more about your data and utilise our data hygiene recommendations and quick wins to get back to a squeaky clean database!

Get your report

One thing to remember before you begin your spring cleaning

Cleaning your data doesn’t have to happen overnight. This process can (and should!) take some time. However, by breaking down some basic data hygiene best practices into manageable tasks, you can make a real difference in how efficiently your team manages day-to-day activities and gets more value from Marketo.

Keep up on top of your Marketo data hygiene with our download, 5 Data Hygiene Must Haves for more tips and best practices.