There are now 3 deduplication options for Email V2:
- Email, Name, and Placeholders: Emails will send to every contact with a unique email, name, and placeholders. This is the default deduplication setting because it is best for all of your race communications. For example, if you send out a pre-race email that includes placeholders like Bib Number, Corral, etc., each person will receive an email even if they have the same email address.
- Email Only: Emails will only send to unique emails. For example, if you send a marketing email and choose to deduplicate on Email Only, the email will only send one time to each unique email address.
- Email and Name: Emails will send to each unique name and email combination on the list. For a marketing email, each person would receive an email even if they have the same email address.
You can select your preferred deduplication option on the Recipients page where you select Email Recipient lists to receive an email.
We will walk through each deduplication option in more detail.
Email, Name, and Placeholders
We recommend using this setting for all race communications that use personalized Replacement Tags from Links and QR Codes, Participant Details, and Fundraising.
Here is an example email with personalized replacement tags like Name, Bib Number, and QR Code.
The test event has 3 participants with 2 unique email addresses. The sent email details show that 2 recipients received 3 unique emails.
The recipient allison@runsignup.com with 2 participants registered received a unique email for each participant.
Email Only
We recommend using this setting for marketing emails that do not include unique placeholders. For example, promoting a race to a custom list. In this example, the Email Subscribers custom email list has 4 recipients and 2 unique email addresses.
Although the recipient allison@runsignup.com has 2 names associated with the email address, allison@runsignup.com only receives one email.
Email and Name
Using the previous example email (with %FIRST_NAME and %LAST_NAME% replacement tags added) and example custom list, the deduplication option for Email and Name will deliver 4 unique emails to 2 email addresses.
The recipient allison@runsignup.com with two unique names receives two emails.
Deduplication doesn’t just happen from RunSignup’s deduplication settings. It also happens outside of RunSignup in email clients like Gmail, Yahoo, Apple Mail, etc. While testing the new deduplication settings, we discovered an external issue with certain email clients like Gmail doing additional deduplication which was bad when trying to send multiple emails to one recipient with unique placeholders (i.e. Bib Number, Corral, Giveaway, etc.).
The email client deduplication was unrelated to the RunSignup deduplication settings; in fact, SendGrid (the email delivery provider we use for both Email V1 and V2) reports showed that all emails were delivered correctly. The email client was doing additional deduplication on the SendGrid Message ID in the email header. We did an update to how we batch emails so that multiple unique emails to the same recipient with RunSignup’s Email, Name, Placeholder deduplication option will successfully deliver to inboxes. This ensures customers using Gmail and other email clients that do deduplication on the header Message ID will have successful delivery for important pre-race communications and other emails that use RunSignup’s Email, Name, Placeholder deduplication setting.
We continue to make investments and updates to Email V2. The recent releases of Email V2 Analytics and Deduplication settings give races more insight and flexibility to control and understand their email deliverability.