Duplicate Contacts for a Same Client who is targeted through different campaigns

hope you are well. For contacts acquired on Infusionsoft, if a user is targeted through 3 different campaigns, each time at end of each campaign, a tag will be applied to the user and a duplicate contact is created for the user. Hence we may have the same client targeted for 3 campaigns who completed the goals and Infusionsoft creates 3 contact cards of the same client. How do we merge all the tags for the 1 user into 1 contact? For example Jennifer is tagged (Ebook downloaded) after 1st campaign. Then on 2nd campaign, Jennifer “Completed feedback form” and instead of adding the new tag to the existing contact for Jennifer, it creates a brand new contact card for Jennifer , hence there is a duplicate of contact. How do you solve this issue?

I’ve never heard of anyone intentionally creating duplicate contacts to run through campaigns as it’s generally a difficult thing to manage and creates issues. What’s the use case that requires you to do this?

Exactly so why is Infusionsoft doing this on my account whenever I run a campaign through the same group of people? How do I merge the contacts that were duplicated? It feels like my account is not acting normal with duplicated contacts created every time I run a campaign through the same user. Instead of adding goal tags to the user, it creates a duplicated contact with a new tag for the user.

Please advise how I can fix this issue

Thank you

Jen

Ah!, Ok, I thought you were saying that you were intentionally creating them for some reason lol

So I’ve seen this happen many times when people are using products like Zapier or Parsey or others. Some products don’t dup check for contacts or they have an option that has to be enabled for dup checking to happen. So basically, anything third party that isn’t your actual Infusionsoft app, that you might use for solving a problem that IS doesn’t provide for (tools generally) could be suspect including Zapier/Parsey etc. Often you’ll see this in the form of an HTTP POST within campaign builder.

So when tags are applied, is this done buy an http post to a tool mentioned or possibly other tool. Do you know if you are using any services that take advantage of webhooks and might automatically be doing the contact creation? If so, then looking for dup check options in that tool or contact the company for that tool might be your next step.

If you don’t use anything like that and your Infusionsoft app is all there is without any tools or services involved, then you’ll likely need to contact support so they can check out what’s going on behind the scenes.

As to merging contacts, if you go to your admin menu and select the “Data Cleanup” option, you will have multiple options to find duplicate contacts and merge them into one. Use the one that best suits your needs to create one contact out of many with the same email address.

Hi John

Thank you for your email. We don’t use any 3rd party app with Infusionsoft. I have contacted the help desk and will have to go through the data cleanup and merge manually as suggested. But any way to stop this happening going forward? or i’ll have to do data cleanup very often to merge contacts and try not to go over the limit of contacts I am allowed for my classic account?

Thank you

Jen

I’ve not heard of any cases where IS decides to create duplicates on it’s own so I’m still going to lean toward an additional process. Do you do contact imports at all?