Campaign Audience Builder has many powerful features you may have yet to hear of. To give them their time to shine, we start our new blog series: Hidden Features of CAB.

We kick it off with a relatively simple but effective tool that helps you keep your campaign member lists clean from duplicates based on the email address.

Deduplicate your Campaign Members

Campaign is the Salesforce standard object our application evolved around, and duplicate records are an omnipresent challenge for every database.

So, it didn't take too long before users asked us how to clean up their campaign member lists from members with the same email addresses, for example, info@ addresses used on different contacts or, in general, duplicate contacts. Our ultimate goal for Campaign Audience Builder is to provide the most complete solution for Salesforce Core, covering everything regarding segmenting audiences. Cleaning up the final campaign member lists should also be a part of our functionality, as Salesforce itself doesn't offer such deduplication for campaigns (campaign members).

Different use cases for different purposes

You may ask if this is needed, as all marketing automation tools have built-in deduplication. Account Engagement (f.k.a. Pardot) and Marketing Cloud ensure that an email address only receives the sent email once, even though multiple entries might be in that list with the same email. This is a valuable feature to avoid unwanted behavior and unhappy recipients being spammed in your brand's name.

In the first place, not every company uses advanced Marketing Automation tools, and they may use the standard "Send List Email" feature. In that case, duplicate campaign members receive an email for each contact or lead in that campaign using the same address. Campaigns aren't exclusively used for email marketing. You may also prepare recipient lists for physical campaigns, like letters, booklets, mail, and postcards, you name it. Therefore, it might also be beneficial to identify duplicates based on the email address.

Another scenario where deduplication is very important is your reporting. Let's say you send out event invitations via Account Engagement with clickable response buttons within the email (Accept/Decline) that automatically update the campaign member status through an Engagement Program. In the case of 3 contacts with the same email address, it would only update 1 campaign member record, and the other 2 would look like they didn't respond. Therefore, your reporting would be incorrect.

A challenging task with an easy solution

Let me show you how you can clean up your Campaign Member lists with a few clicks. This feature is also part of the Free version so that every Salesforce user can benefit from it.

1. Click the "Remove Duplicate Members" button on your campaign layout. Check this link on how to set it up.

2. This opens the deduplication interface. You can choose between the manual and the automatic option. If you remove duplicates automatically, the system will keep the oldest campaign member record based on the creation date. Manual allows you to hand-pick each duplicate. Select the members that should be removed. Confirm the deduplication, your job is done, and the campaign is cleaned up.

As you can see, you can clean up your campaign member lists with 2 clicks (1. Remove Duplicate Members | 2. Confirm - Automatic option). So, there are no excuses to keep duplicate records in your campaigns if they aren't needed.