Deduplicating a list before emailing

[Peter_Steinberg]

So, among many other uses, my business hopes to use AirTable as a lightweight CRM.

Within our use records, some email addresses will be duplicated (why there are duplicates is a whole different challenge). When we go to email a set of email addresses is there an easy way to avoid sending duplicate emails?

-Peter

[bdelanghe]

For emails, you are about to send create a table (the primary field can be a date). Link the contacts you’d like to send emails to. If the primary field is an email it will only link to the first email in the list. And you’re done no dups.

If you have a different primary field you’ll need to create a rollup field. Select contacts and then the email field. Now ARRAYUNIQUE({values}). Now you should be good no dups.

(Both these method only work if all of your duplicate emails are in the same case)

[bdelanghe]

If you can I’d suggest deduping. It’s fairly easy.

1. Create a new table called Dups with only ‘email’ as a primary field.
2. Create a Linked field to ‘Dups’ in your contact table.
3. Copy the email field from your contacts into this linked field.
4. Go back to Dups at a ‘Count’ field to count the number of contacts with the same email
5. Go back to Contacts and add a lookup to this count field in the ‘Dups’ table.
6. Filter out the view where the count lookup is greater than 1
7. Now you can delete or merge these records

Also if you pay for pro you can also just use the Dedup block…

[Peter_Steinberg]

Sorry for the delay in replying. Ideally we would have no dupes. But the situation is this:

1. We’re managing a large table of investors, 300 or 400 and growing.

2. Most people are just that – people. They have an email address.

3. About 10% of the investors are legal entities – trusts, llcs and the like. They also have a contact email.

4. But frequently a person invests with us both as an person, say John Doe with an email address of john@doe.com as well as an an legal entity such as John Doe Family Trust… with the same email address – john@doe.com.

We explored the option of having a separate table for all the legal entities but it because a big mess. It seemed easier to just have each investor as its own row and deal with the email duplication problem as it seemed to be the only complication.

I’ll try one of the options you detail above. Thanks.