Top Commercial Real Estate Company Achieves 90% Reduction in Duplicate Records with Salesforce Marketing Cloud and TETHiK

About the Client

A leading commercial real estate firm manages property marketing and sales outreach using Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC), Sales Cloud, and Pardot. The Marketing team depends on reliable data, effective automations, and targeted campaigns to drive client engagement. However, recurring issues with duplicate records, manual deployment bottlenecks, and inconsistent list preparation processes were impacting campaign quality and operational efficiency.

Use Case

The client needed a more robust, scalable way to manage campaign data preparation, duplicate contact resolution, and marketing list imports. Historically, marketing lists were prepared manually, with frequent re-imports of opted-out contacts and duplicated records. This not only increased compliance risks but also created significant inefficiencies in campaign execution.

Additionally, the Marketing team relied heavily on ad hoc administrator support for SFMC deployments and troubleshooting. This limited the team’s ability to self-serve and delayed time-sensitive campaigns.

Initial Enhancement Implementation

The initial engagement included a detailed knowledge transfer and process mapping to document existing workflows. The Marketing Cloud Administrator:

• Conducted ~20 hours of meetings and working sessions to identify pain points.
• Designed a new list preparation process combining SOQL queries and vlookup routines to accurately identify opted-out and duplicate records.
• Established an action plan to rank and remove duplicate contacts, reducing data redundancy by over 90%.
• Built documentation and conducted training sessions to educate the Marketing team on using UI Sends and self-service campaign management.

Solution Approach: Configurable, Data-Driven Processes

To future-proof operations and reduce dependency on manual intervention, the team implemented:

• Standardized SOQL-based list preparation workflows to automate identification of opted-out contacts and duplicates.
• A process for ranking and excluding duplicate records prior to import, ensuring compliance and cleaner segmentation.
• Clear guidelines and training for the Marketing team to execute manual deployments and leverage best practices without constant admin support.
• Process improvements for SFMC automation monitoring and troubleshooting, including documented escalation paths.

This approach allowed administrators and Marketing users to operate confidently, with consistent results and fewer errors, without requiring repeated code changes or deployments.