What Is Data Deduplication?

Data deduplication (or dedup) is a critical data hygiene process that identifies and resolves duplicate records in business databases. Duplicate records waste sales effort, create confusing customer experiences, and lead to inaccurate reporting and analytics.

Duplicates enter databases through multiple channels: importing the same contacts from different sources, multiple team members adding the same contact manually, form submissions from the same person with different email addresses, and CRM synchronization issues.

Deduplication algorithms use various matching criteria: exact match (identical email addresses or phone numbers), fuzzy match (similar names with slight variations), domain matching (same company domain), and composite matching (combining multiple weak signals).

Enrichabl handles deduplication during CSV import, automatically identifying potential duplicates based on configurable matching rules. This prevents duplicate records from entering the system in the first place, which is more effective than trying to clean up duplicates after the fact.