Tag: merging leads

Trigger “Duplicate Leads Merge” action

Trigger “Duplicate Leads Merge” action is useful when leads created via API create duplicates in your account;  you can then automatically merge them through Triggers.

Definitely, you want to keep a clean and consolidated data. This allows you to generate more accurate and meaningful reports and analytics, which can help in making informed business decisions.

Setting the Trigger “duplicate leads merge action”

Trigger actions get executed based on a certain event that you specify in the triggers feature:

  • Select the event that will cause the trigger to fire.
    • e.g. Lead created via API

  • Under Actions, click “+ add another action”
  • Select from the actions drop-down:

[Lead merge] Merge new lead into existing duplicate

Trigger duplicate leads merge action

  • And indicate the merge method (email/phone).

  • This automatically merges new leads by ‘phone’ or ’email’ if ‘Lead created via API’ option was selected as the desired event.

Good to know:

If a lead with the same email was sent via API but doesn’t appear in aNinja, you should check if the “Do not add new leads via API if lead with similar email already exists” rule is disabled. This rule prevents duplicate leads from being created, and therefore, the merging logic will not take effect.

  • You can also indicate if this action should stop executing all subsequent actions/triggers in case the new lead has been merged. This is helpful if you don’t want a specific sequence to fire off for already existing leads.

  • With that being said, it would be better if you set the trigger using this action with a high priority number so that it gets fired first.

Keeping a clean database

Bad data infiltrates every database in form of duplicate contacts, un-standardized lead data, and junk records. While you can’t always keep bad data from coming in, you can clean it up when it’s there.

In order to keep a clean database, you can sanitize your contact file before you import it, and perform a clean-up routine to the existing data.

Importing a correct data

Before you import contacts in a CSV/Excel file, check the following tips:

  • Provide correct email addresses to ensure the deliverability of your emails.
  • Provide correct phone numbers to ensure the deliverability of your texts and campaigns.
  • If possible, assign the mobile number to the primary phone number.
  • Ensure the uniformity of custom fields: don’t create multiple custom fields for identical data. This will lead to confusion over the correct custom field to keep updated, and over the Smartlists results.
    • e.g. on a first data import, custom field “Source”; on a second data import, custom field “Created through”, on a third “Origin”, on a fourth “From”. This creates 4 custom fields for one identical data.
  • Set the Global Setting rule: Do not add new Leads via API if Lead with similar email already exists (avoids duplicates)

Cleaning up the existing data

However, the bad data can still be cleaned up when it’s already there.

  • Remove duplicates
    • Go to Settings > Data Clean up
    • Choose the merging method (by email or by phone)
    • Repeat this task every now and then, depending on the volume of the incoming leads.
  • Prune inactive and junk contacts
    • Contacts with no emails and/or phone numbers are of no use in your database.
    • Leads who asked to stop receiving from you can crowd your database and preferably be deleted.

Keeping a clean database reserves more space for the correct data.

Reach us at support@aninja.com to assist you in merging duplicates.

Merging leads

When you create or import new leads into your aNinja account, if they already exist in the system based on the email or phone number, they will be detected as duplicates by our duplicate search.

However, you may want to merge those duplicates into one lead file to avoid bloating your system. Merging leads could be also a good solution to avoid contacting the same lead several times.

Please note that when you merge leads, you can no longer retrieve the merged lead.

Merging Leads

You can access the merging feature from 2 different places in aNinja: From the lead view, and from Settings.

  • Lead view:
    • When on the lead view, scroll down to the end of the page and click on merge.
    • Then, choose a destination lead to merge this lead into. Immediately, this lead will be deleted after the system merged into the destination lead.
  • On the left sidebar > Settings > Data clean-up
    • Then, choose the method you want to use for your search to merge through (by email / by phone).Merging leads
    • Locate the leads you want to merge.
    • Lastly, click on the ID of the lead you want to merge. The system deletes this lead after it merged it into the lead you want to keep.

What are the fields that get merged?

What’s merged and appended into the lead file you’re keeping includes:
– Contacts
– Opportunities
– Emails
– Tasks
– Address
– Texts
– Calls
– Notes
– Triggers
– Chat conversations
– Workflows
– Custom fields

Note! All the email or text sequences of leads that are being merged are stopped. Therefore, only the sequences for the remaining lead stay active.

Duplicate Data Cleanup

Sometimes duplicate data is useful, sometimes it just makes it harder to understand your data. Perform a duplicate Data Cleanup more often to merge the relevant duplications as you don’t want to send multiple emails / texts to the same lead.

Using Data Clean-up

Use the data clean-up to find and highlight duplicate data. That way you can review the duplicates and decide if you want to merge them.

  • In the left sidebar, click on Settings > Data Clean-up
  • Choose to see the duplicates based on Email Or Phone
  • Merge the duplicates in a single lead