January 15, 2019

Once in a while we come across an email address that’s shared by more than one person. This often happens in businesses with group inboxes like purchasing@acme.com, but sometimes occurs in consumer households too. One way of handling this is to simply ignore duplicate emails within a single job. However, if you’re using dynamic content for things like your salutation, that’s probably not the best way as we’ll demonstrate here.

In the example below, notice we have two contacts both sharing an email address. If we take the first occurrence, our salutation will go to Wile E. Coyote – who may very well no longer be with Acme, given his propensity to fall off cliffs and run into walls. Plus, he hasn’t interacted with us for over two years. As you can clearly see, Road Runner is a much better option since his purchase date is more recent

MarketWide’s “Constraint” feature makes handling this a snap, and we’re here to show you how! Ready? Here goes…

In the Constraint window, simply choose the field you want to dedup (i.e., consolidate) on – in this case EmailAddress – and enter a limit of 1. In MarketWide lingo, this means “one per email address.” Next, establish which contact name to use by selecting PurchaseDate as the priority. Finally, the Order column lets you sort PurchaseDate from newest to oldest or oldest to newest. Since we want the most recent order, go with Descending.

Presto – just like that, our campaign has merged duplicate blocks of emails into one, choosing the name from the contact who purchased most recently within each set. Pretty cool!

Like to see it in action? Drop us a line and we’ll be happy to give you a guided tour.