Marketing 101: What is deduping?
Marketing has a language all its own. This is our latest in a series of posts aimed at helping new marketers learn that language. What term do you find yourself explaining most often to new hires during onboarding? Let us know.
Deduplication, or deduping for short, is the process of removing identical entries from two or more data sets such as mailing lists.
Also known as merge and purge, deduping can be done for a lot of reasons. For example, the marketing team for MECLABS Institute, MarketingSherpa’s parent company, need to dedupe lists for its online certification courses.
Basically, if a student is enrolled in all four courses, they would be on four lists as a student.
So if Erin Donker, Associate Director of Marketing for MECLABS, wants to send an email to all the course students, she would dedupe the master list of enrolled students so that a particularly industrious one who is enrolled in all four courses wouldn’t receive the email four times.
When combining lists for a send, test or just as a general list cleanse, deduping is vital to the health of your email program.
Most consumers have been a victim of a non-deduped send. If you’ve ever gotten the same email twice from a company, that very well may be a deduping error that should have been corrected beforehand.
Not only is it slightly annoying and avoidable, but if a customer goes to click delete on one email from you, what are the chances they go ahead and just delete the other one as well?
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Categories: Email Marketing deduping, Email Marketing, optimization, testing
