Why is supporting duplicate contacts based on email address important?

Recently, in a conversation with Marketing Automation analyst David Raab, we discussed why anyone would actually want to support multiple prospect records with the same email address in their marketing automation system. This may be a religious war right up there with Captain Kirk vs Captain Picard or Emacs versus VI (ok, maybe I'm a nerd...).

Some marketing automation systems do not support multiple contacts with the same email address.  As a marketing purest I agree with the concept, but unfortunately the buying public does not! Here are three reasons why you will benefit from supporting multiple contacts with the same email address in you marketing automation system.

3 reasons why marketing automation systems should support duplicate email addresses

1. Salesforce.com is notorious for permitting duplicates. Sales people simply add new contacts and leads without hitting the link to check to see if the person already exists in the database. Why is this a problem? Consider this scenario.
   Lead exists in database, synched between Marketing Automation and CRM. Sales gal adds a duplicate contact, same email address.Marketing automation system that only supports one contact per email address cannot synch the duplicate over. Marketing continues to record interactions with the original contact whilst sales records their interactions in the duplicate copy. At some point thecontact tells the rep they want to unsubscribe. Sales gal unsubscribes the non-synching duplicate in CRM.Trouble looms.
2. Many companies think of Leads, not as people, but as early stage opportunities for products. So one person, may represent several leads (interested in several products). In my naive marketing state some years ago I attempted to tell customers what abad idea this was. Telling billion dollar firms to rewire their sales process and CRM, and re-train the global sales team, to accommodate purest marketing concepts...ahhh not such a good idea. This is one of the leading reasons marketing automation systems that cannot support multiple contacts with same email address are often not integrated with a CRM!
3. A slightly different twist on #2 is when different divisions of the same firm, may have contacts who are interested in different products, and have different contact owners. If a person expresses a different product interest by registering for a document or event for a different product, the marketing automation system should be able to create a new contact record for that person, because the CRM will assign ownership to a different individual in a different division. You can still create "fatigue" rules to ensure that the person doesn't get overloaded with email from multiple divisions, but their contact records for each division can be unique. This is considered a very cool feature by some of our Market2Lead enterprise accounts.

Bottom line, life is much better, and data quality is higher if you have a marketing automation system that lets you deduplicate on any combination of fields you choose, but still maintains a separate master opt-out database so that if any of the duplicate contacts opts out at a global level, no email goes to any of the contacts with that email address. It goes without saying that our global customers drove us to develop Market2Lead this way, and we thank them for it! Marketing listening to Sales.

-Kevin

PS sorry I neglected my blogging for a few weeks we were finishing up our new website. Check it out! Lots of lovely new short video demos of the application.