Deduplication Component

If there are duplicate contacts in the journey's audience, based on the email address, you can use the Deduplication component to select a unique contact based on a field such as MAIL or a combination of fields, such as MAIL and LASTNAME.

The Deduplication component is placed just after an Audience component. This avoids sending the email more than once to the same contact because the contact is in the audience list more than once.

NOTE: When the Deduplication component is used , the deduplication is only executed at the execution of the following action (an email, an interface, a control group, etc.) regardless where the deduplication component is situated in the journey. The reason is that Selligent will always analyze the complete path of the action to calculate the target group and only at the end deduplicate the records.

This means that when branches are located behind the deduplication component, unexpected results might be generated when duplicate records are split over multiple branches. When these originally duplicate records are situated in different branches, they will no longer be interpreted as duplicate after the branching constraint is applied.

This mechanism is applied to all components following the deduplication component (decision, split, selection, etc). The only exception here is control groups. The reason here is that control groups are considered as an action as well. The deduplication is performed at the execution of the control group and not at the end of the action  path.

Example of deduplication in combination with a split component:
Deduplication on MASTER.NAME
Split on MASTER.GENDER
Imagine 4 contacts:
Name       Gender
John          M
Sarah         F
Brooks       M
Brooks       U
Although the contact Brook appears twice, it will not be deduplicated as each occurrence of the name will be in a different branch of the split component.



Events

The Deduplication component triggers one event:

  • OnFinished — When deduplication is finished and a unique record has been identified

Properties

Unique key  Define the field that has to be used as a unique identifier. This unique key can either be one single value, such as MAIL attribute, or a combination of values, such as MAIL combined with LASTNAME.

The list of fields is retrieved from the Audience list selected in the Audience component.

NOTE: The date from the extended profile can be used in the 'combination of attributes' field.

Prioritization  Define the priority that must be applied when duplicates have been detected. This priority is defined based on an SQL expression. E.g. the most recent modified record: MODIFIED_DT, highest value. The contact with the highest value is selected, the remaining contacts are left out of the selection.

Keep the record with the   Select the radio button to indicate if the highest value or the lowest value identifies the target record.

 

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