How to Reduce Duplicate Contacts

It's very easy to build up duplicate contacts inside your Ontraport account. You can follow our guide below to reduce this from happening.

1. Merge Existing Duplicate Contacts

   1. Watch the training video here

2. How to Reduce Incidents of Duplicates* 

   1. Append name & email to links in emails to auto-fill the forms (See Notes Below for more info)

      1. https://domain.com/page/?First+Name=[First Name]&Last+Name=[Last Name]&Email=[Email]&SMS+Number=[SMS Number]

   2. This solution is on all Ontraport forms and needs to be added to emails in your automations

*Notes on Reducing Incidents of Duplicates

We can configure all order forms to prefill the name and email address fields when a person lands on the page. 

When this is set up, Ontraport will try to guess who is visiting the page through cookies and other browser-based data.  This is imperfect and can sometimes result in Ontraport prefilling incorrect information.

That's why we can supplement this feature with another feature, which is to append the name and email values to any links in emails where we are sending people to opt in or order form pages.   

The formula looks like this:

https://domain.com/page/?First+Name=[First Name]&Last+Name=[Last Name]&Email=[Email]&SMS+Number=[SMS Number]

The first part in yellow is the link to the page, followed by a "?" and then all the fields we want to populate. 

Ontraport will auto-merge the part in brackets [ ] from the contact record into the corresponding fields on the form. The result is that the form will be prefilled with first name, last name, email, and SMS number. 

More important notes:

• Emails must be sent from Ontraport for this to work.  This will not work if sending emails directly from Gmail.  

• Also, this will only work if the destination page contains an Ontraport form... it will not work if we are sending people to a page that contains a form from a 3rd party like Stealth Seminar or calendar booking system.