How to manage Lead generation in Marketing Cloud?

Question

We are migrating from Salesforce Pardot to Marketing Cloud . Currently in Pardot they have lead nurture form where a user sign ups in form and when they qualify , signed up user get converted as lead .

I do not want to create a lead on smart capture form submission like mentioned in below link Lead generation in marketing cloud (where I can check if lead exists or not using RetrieveSalesforceObjects & CreateSalesforceObject Ampscript function ) instead I want to create Lead only if they nurture & Qualify as a lead . Because not all records who signs up the form are leads since some are scam as well.

How to implement this scenario in Marketing cloud ?

We are re-building the Pardot forms(newsletter & other campaign forms) in Marketing Cloud cloud pages & when customer signs up in the form , send them an email . When the customer qualifies as lead based on some criteria, create a lead record and sync it up in salesforce ?

So I have created a smart capture form and sending email to them .

The problem is occurring when I try to create a lead record if it gets qualified

For the same email address 2 records are getting added to contacts .

1. When user A ([email protected]) signs up via smart form and email needs to sent, so record is getting added to all subscribers with subscriber key
2. When the user A ([email protected]) is qualified & created as a lead in salesforce, lead record is getting synced into Marketing Cloud with same email address resulting in duplicates.

So for same email address 2 records are added into marketing cloud

| SubscriberKey | EmailAddress |
| [email protected] | [email protected]|
| 005F0000NXAAa2| [email protected]|

How can I overcome this issue ?

Answer 1

You basically have two options:

1. Create the lead in Sales Cloud immediately upon the initial form submission in SFMC, utilising ampscript
2. Use contact deletion to remove the record with email address as subscriber key

Solution 1 is IMHO the cleanest, however I do acknowledge it might "pollute" Sales Cloud with leads not being sufficiently qualified. This can be overcome by configuring Sales Cloud to hide the lead records not meeting the expected criteria. Only once they are sufficiently qualified, they will become visible, and (if applicable) assigned to a queue or an individual.

If you want to keep these leads out of Sales Cloud, you can check for duplicate records by comparing email addresses on your subscribers. Once you see same email address applied in two different subscriber keys, you can use contact deletion to remove the unwanted one. This, however, comes at a price, since all the engagement data (email sends, opens, clicks, etc) which happened prior to the lead being created in Sales Cloud, will be lost. This is due to them referencing the email address as subscriber key. There is unfortunately no way of migrating the data onto the new subscriber key, except of placing these engagement records in a custom data extension and replacing the subscriber key in there.