It may happen that multiple contacts in the system actually represent the same real‑world person, or that you have more than one account in the system that represents a single real‑world organization. The merging functionality allows you to get rid of such duplicities by merging multiple contacts or accounts into a single object.

 

There are two ways how merging can be performed:

 

•Manual merging - available for both contacts and accounts. It can be performed on the Merge tab of individual contacts' and accounts' editing interfaces by selecting contacts or accounts to be merged with the currently edited one. A merge suggestion functionality is available here, offering to merge contacts with identical parameters.

•Automatic merging - available only for contacts. It can be performed automatically when multiple contacts are associated with the same E-commerce customer or newsletter subscriber, depending on settings made in Site Manager -> Settings -> On-line marketing.

 

After merging, only the single object (so‑called parent) into which multiple ones have been merged is displayed in the user interface. However, the ones merged with it are still stored in the database. On the Merge -> Split tab of each contact's or account's editing interface, you can see a list of contacts or accounts that have been merged with it. It is possible to split these contacts or accounts from the parent back into separate objects. More information on how this can be achieved is available in the Splitting topic.