Duplicate contacts

In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to avoid and handle duplicates on your Heyloyalty list. Duplicates can lead to problems such as duplicate communications and incorrect data updates. That’s why it’s important to decide whether duplicates are allowed on your Heyloyalty list.

Understanding the problems with duplicates

Duplicates can cause several problems:

• Campaign distribution: If the same email address appears multiple times on a list, the recipient may receive the email twice, which is not ideal.
• Data changes: When updates reference an email address, the wrong recipient may be updated.

Therefore, avoid allowing duplicates, both on the list itself and when creating contacts via the API. You can prevent duplicates on your list by editing it and setting the Duplicates option to Do not allow.

Note: When you create a new list, the duplicates setting is set to “Do not allow” by default.

Heyloyalty’s duplicate check

Heyloyalty automatically checks for duplicates in the following situations:

• When users sign up using a Heyloyalty form.
• Via the API, where a message about existing members is displayed.

Find duplicates manually

Since Heyloyalty does not offer an automatic duplicate removal feature, you’ll need to find them as follows:

1. Export your list to an Excel spreadsheet.
2. Add a column called Duplicate.
3. Use the following formula in Excel to identify duplicates:
   

   =HVIS(TÆL.HVIS(B2:B104;B2)>1;"Ja";"Nej")

   The formula above is for a Danish version of Excel. In an English version of Excel, use:
   

   =IF(COUNTIF(B2:B104,B2)>1,"Yes","No")

4. Sort the Duplicate column to identify duplicates.
5. Identify which members should be kept or deleted by adding a To Be Deleted column.
6. Select duplicates for deletion.
7. Export the organized data as a CSV file for import.
8. Add a new field called To Be Deleted in Heyloyalty.
9. Import the CSV file containing the duplicates.
10. Filter the list by [To be deleted] = “Delete”.
11. Delete the contacts in the segment to remove the duplicates: select all contacts in the segment, and choose Action for multiple contacts → Delete selected.

You have now learned how to identify, sort, and remove duplicates from your list in Heyloyalty. By following these steps, you ensure proper data management and effective campaign delivery. Continue to optimize your lists to improve your communication strategies.