How to add multiple contacts that have a shared email address
Duplicate Contacts allows you to have multiple separate contacts with the same shared email address! This will allow you to address each of your clients individually when sending personal messages like birthday greetings. The new feature will also efficiently choose the first of the two contacts when sending automations, avoiding two emails sent to the same email address.
How Does the Duplicate Contact Feature Work?
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Duplicate contacts may have the same email address and last name, but they must have different first names.
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For the Happy Birthday campaign, each contact will receive an email.
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For the Monthly Market Insights (MMI), automations, etc., an email will only be sent to the older of the two contacts. In this case, “older” means the contact that was added first.
Note: For integrated CRMs, this feature does not offer the ability to designate a primary contact or bring over that designation from your CRM. We are aware of this gap and are working to solve it.
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This feature only works for certain CRM integrations:
Compatible: Not Compatible Today: Manual contacts editing MarketingPro CSV Redtail Ebix SmartOffice Guardian SmartOffice Salesforce Wealthbox
How to Add Duplicate Contacts
The Duplicate Contacts feature is ready to utilize — you just need to add your duplicates!
You can add contacts that share the same email address but have different names by navigating to Contacts > Manage Contacts in your left navigation menu:
Here, you can manually add the duplicate contacts, import them via CSV, or sync them automatically with a supported CRM integration.
Duplicate Contacts FAQs
Q: Is there a limit to the number of duplicate email contacts I can have? If four people share an email address?
A: The sky is the limit! There is only one rule: all contacts that share an email address must have a unique first name.
Q: When I look at my send history, I see that both John and Jane Doe received the Monthly Market Insights (MMI), which means their inbox received it twice!
A: Rest assured, two MMI emails did not go out to that shared email address. This specific inaccuracy within the send history reporting is a known issue, and we’re working on it. It looks like your contact Jane Doe was added before John Doe, so she is considered the “primary” contact. One MMI email was sent and addressed to Jane.
Q: Can I delete a contact and add them back right after to move the primary to the “older” one? What about within CRMs?
A: Unfortunately, there is no workaround today to make a specific contact the primary. This capability will follow in a later release of this feature.
Q: My integrated CRM isn’t compatible — will that change in the future?
A: Yes! We are working to support Duplicate Contacts for any future CRM integrations across our entire platform.