How are duplicate contacts handled?

Wise Pelican checks imported records against the contacts already in your database. When it finds records that appear to belong to the same person or property, it merges them instead of creating another separate contact. Duplicates are merged, never dropped, so no information is lost.

Duplicates are identified differently depending on where the list came from:

• Uploaded lists: matched by the contact's email address, or by their name and mailing address when no email address is available.
• Purchased property lists: matched by property address (street, city, state and ZIP). The same property is treated as the same contact.

Each list shows three numbers so you can see exactly what happened:

• Total Contacts: every record in the uploaded or purchased list.
• Contacts: the unique contacts added to your list.
• Duplicate Contacts: how many records were merged because they repeated.

For example, a 100-record list with one repeated property would show Total Contacts 100 · Contacts 99 · Duplicate Contacts 1. You can also select View Duplicates to see which records were merged.

Merging duplicate records helps keep your database organized and prevents you from paying to send the same mailing to the same person more than once.