Deduplication and suppression
An acquisition campaign should not send your existing customers back to you as new leads. When several suppliers deliver the same contact, your team should receive only the responses the campaign is meant to accept. LeadScale applies your duplicate, repeat and exclusion rules before records reach your systems.
LeadScale’s technical team sets up data deduplication and suppression in the LeadScale Engine™. Duplicate and frequency rules determine whether another response should be accepted. Suppression checks incoming records against client data, such as existing customers or exclusion lists. Both are applied centrally across the sources feeding your programme, before delivery.
When is another response worth receiving?
A person submits another enquiry after responding to a consumer campaign. A business contact downloads content through two publishers. In either case, both records may contain correct contact details. Whether you want the second response depends on what you are trying to achieve.
If the programme is meant to find new contacts, that second record may add nothing. If it is built around several interactions, another response after an agreed period may be useful. The rule needs to reflect that difference.
For a B2B programme, the company can matter too. You may want several people from one account while limiting how often each person appears. LeadScale can set caps at individual and company level, so reaching more of an account does not have to mean receiving the same contact repeatedly.
We agree those requirements with you: what counts as a duplicate, which repeat responses are useful and how frequently a person or company can appear.
A first response can still be one you need to exclude
An existing customer fills in a campaign form for the first time. There is no earlier campaign response to match, but you already know this person. If the campaign is for customer acquisition, you may not want the record delivered as a new lead.
That is the job of suppression. It compares incoming records with data identifying the contacts you want excluded. A record can have correct contact details, be new to the campaign and still match that data.
LeadScale can retrieve existing-customer data from your CRM and use it for suppression. Your own exclusion lists can also be used.
The customer data may need work first
Suppression depends on having the relevant data available. When customer records sit in several CRM instances, preparing that data is part of the technical job.
LeadScale can bring records together from those systems and deduplicate them to build a suppression set. We start by identifying where the information lives and which records the programme needs to check against. For the connections needed to retrieve that data, see the technical data services page.
Handle overlaps between sources in one place
Two suppliers may each submit a person only once and still deliver the same person between them. Checking the sources separately would miss the overlap.
The Engine applies the programme’s rules centrally to the records it receives. It can handle repeats between sources and check records against the same suppression data before sending them into your CRM or marketing platform. Each supplier does not need to retrieve and prepare your customer data separately.
Duplicate handling also belongs in the processing order. A duplicate can be identified before an external verification lookup runs, avoiding another lookup on the same record. Our lead validation page explains the available checks and how their order is set.
Set the rules, prepare the data, apply the checks
- Define what you want to receive. Agree the treatment of repeats, any individual or company caps, and the contacts to exclude.
- Make the suppression data usable. Identify the relevant client systems and lists, then retrieve and bring together the data needed for the programme.
- Configure the Engine. Set the duplicate, frequency and suppression checks within the processing that runs before delivery.
Your exclusions built into delivery
Your team receives records screened against the repeat-response rules and client exclusions specified for the programme. These checks run alongside its other processing requirements.
Consent information and suppression
The exclusions applied depend on the data and rules specified for the programme. Our consent and provenance page explains what is recorded about a record’s origin and how consent information from client systems is applied.
Frequently asked questions
We already check records in our CRM. Where does this work happen?
In the Engine, before records are delivered into your systems. It applies the programme’s rules across the incoming sources and uses client data for suppression.
Can we receive another response from the same person?
Yes, if the programme allows it. Frequency rules can permit further responses after an agreed period rather than excluding every repeat.
Can a record pass contact-data checks and still be suppressed?
Yes. Correct contact details do not establish that you want the record. It may still match an existing customer or another contact you have excluded.
Explore related pages
- Technical data services— how the technical team connects your systems to the Engine.
- Engine configuration— how requirements become processing rules.
- Lead validation— the checks available and how their order is set.
- Consent and provenance— source history, capture evidence and supplied consent information.
Which contacts should your programme keep out?
Tell us which sources you use, when another response is useful and where your customer and exclusion data lives. We can work through the requirements with you.