Dedupe key
A dedupe key is the field, or set of fields, a system uses to decide two records are the same person or company. For a person it's usually the email, lowercased and trimmed. For a company it's usually the web domain. When a new record matches the key, the system updates the existing one instead of creating another.
Why it matters
Without a key every tool agrees on, the same lead ends up as two or three contacts. Follow-ups go out twice, reports count one lead as several, and soon nobody trusts the CRM enough to work from it.
An example
As an example, a prospect fills in your contact form on a Monday as sam@example.com. On Thursday they fill it in again as Sam@Example.com, because they didn't hear back. A system that compares letter by letter sees two people there. The next week they reply to one of your emails from the same address. With the lowercased email as the key, all three land on one contact with one history. Without it, the form makes two contacts, and the reply sits in one person's email where the rest of the team never sees it.
How a system handles it
A system picks one key for each kind of record and writes it down: the cleaned email for people, the domain for companies. Every way a record comes in cleans the key the same way and looks for a match before anything is saved. A match updates the record you already have. A record with no key, like a form where the email was left blank, waits for a person to decide, so it never becomes a contact nobody can match later.
Questions
What should the dedupe key be for a contact?
The email address, lowercased and with spaces trimmed. Almost every form, inbox and import already carries it, and CRMs like HubSpot already match contacts on it. Names make a poor key, because two people can share a name and one person can spell theirs two ways.
What's the dedupe key for a company?
The web domain, cut down to the bare name, so example.com, www.example.com and a link to their contact page all count as one company. Company names make a poor key, because the same firm turns up with and without its legal suffix, or with a typo.
What happens when one person uses two email addresses?
An email key sees two people. I'd have the system flag likely matches, like the same name at the same company domain, and let a person merge them. Merging on a guess can fold two real people into one record, and that's harder to undo than a duplicate.
Related
- Source of truthThe one system whose copy of a record wins when two tools disagree. Why it matters for opt-outs and phone numbers, and how a one-way sync keeps it that way.
- How do I stop website form duplicates in HubSpot?Where the handoff from your website form to HubSpot makes duplicates or loses leads, which field is the key, what stays with a person, and what I'd pick.
- Duplicate contacts: why your CRM keeps making two of everyoneDuplicates come back after every cleanup because each intake lane creates its own records. One match rule, checked before any record is created, stops that.
- CRM hygieneCRM hygiene is keeping CRM records accurate, complete and free of duplicates. Why it decays, what it breaks, and how a system keeps it as a routine.
- Records from forms and emailed PDFs, kept in one place that stays rightA system I built that keeps the right version of each customer record in Airtable. Forms and emailed PDFs feed it, and HubSpot copies from it.