Prevent Duplicate Contacts in Your CRM
One of the key pieces to keeping your CRM data clean is to make sure you don't have multiple CRM contacts for one person. By setting prevent duplicates you can keep your CRM clean of duplicate contacts from form submissions.
Preventing duplicates is a setting on any form connection to the CRM. There is no default field that the CRM automatically checks against. Email is ideal to prevent duplicates because almost every form asks for it and it's unique to the individual. The settings to prevent duplicates depend on where your contacts are coming into the CRM from:
Marketing 360® Forms
You'll find prevent duplicates settings in the Field Mapping of Marketing 360® Forms in the CRM's Leads Inbox.
Third-Party Forms
You'll find prevent duplicates settings in the Field Mapping in Sources in the CRM's Settings.
FAQ
What happens to the new information?
Depending on the settings in your Submission Rules, the new information will either replace the existing information or be ignored.
The setting most businesses use is to overwrite mapped fields with the information or values from duplicate submissions. To overwrite fields, check the box in More Duplicate Submission Settings.
What can I do with duplicate submissions?
First, make sure the prevent duplicate settings are in place on the source to ensure it doesn't happen again.
You can merge duplicate submissions on your Contacts page in the CRM. Merging contacts is a manual process, only merging 2 contacts at a time. You can use the search bar with that contact's email to ensure you capture all duplicate entries.
What should I use if my form doesn't ask for email?
Phone Number is another option. While the CRM is pretty good at interpreting all the ways a phone number can be saved, his can get tricky if the phone number format isn't consistent. Set up your form to have a default way of formatting the phone number as it is entered.
Do not use Name. There are several Sam Smiths out there, so Name is not unique enough to prevent duplicates. Using Name would be preventing new people with the same name from entering your CRM.
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