Sometimes you may have a subscriber sign up via different methods, and create separate contacts, one with an email address and one with a mobile number. This can lead to potential validation issues when uploading contact lists, and artificially inflating the size of your database.
The good news is that if you have a third piece of information such as a membership number, you can use this to identify these 'dual' contacts.
Step 1: Export and Back Up
- Go to Contacts > My Contacts
- Click the 'Export All' button on the right hand side.
- Once the file is prepared, click the Download link.
- This file will serve as a back up of your database.
Step 2: Sort and Filter the Contact Export
Using the Export All file:
- Use the Conditional Formatting > Highlight Cells > Duplicate values on the Membership ID column
- Sort or filter by Cell Colour - these contacts will be the "Dual Contacts"
- Save the dual contacts to a new CSV (email & mobile columns are the only ones required for this).
Please note:
- Due to file size/amount of data Excel may have trouble processing the various sort/filter funtions. We would recommend copying only the appropriate columns to a new sheet (such as email, mobile, membership ID).
- If you are using a Mac, ensure the file is in a CSV - MS DOS format.
STEP 3: UPLOAD AND TAG
- Go to the Contacts > Upload section of TalkBox
- Begin uploading the new CSV file.
- When you reach the Mapping and Tagging stage, ensure you tag the contacts (ie: "To be deleted").
- Let the upload complete before moving to Step 4.
STEP 4: DELETING CONTACTS
- Go to Contacts > My Contacts
- Click "Filter", and use the criteria: Tags - is any of - "To be deleted"
- With the results, click the "Select all" on the left hand side to select the filtered contacts.
- Click the "Delete" button on the right hand side.
Step 5: Upload cleaned contacts
- Repeat the process for step 2 to identify the dual contacts.
- Clean the list so that the email addresses and mobile numbers appear on a single row only.
- Once this is ready, save this as a new CSV file, and upload to your account.