Challenge
Arlo will only associate a booking with an existing contact if the first name, last name and email address all match. If any of these values differ, a new contact record is created.
Through our Arlo to Mailchimp integration we discovered many unintentional instances of duplicate contacts caused by variations in their names, e.g.
- Tom vs Thomas
- Ed vs Edward
- Will vs William
- Chris vs Christine vs Christopher vs Christian
Reviewing and merging these avoidable duplicates was using valuable time in the team and impacting marketing efficacy.
Implementation
We developed a process to automatically pre-fill the Arlo booking forms with existing values for known users.
This works by passing data in the links to the WordPress website from the Mailchimp emails.
A custom WordPress plugin captures these data and makes them available to the Arlo-hosted booking process. A small script in the booking form then pre-fills the fields with the known values.
Results
This small change has had a big impact: duplicate contact creation has dropped by over 90%.
The team have recouped the time previously spent managing these duplicates without compromising data quality. And users get a smoother experience. Win-win.
