The problem

Amy Parker buys a course through your checkout, subscribes to your newsletter, joins your community and opens a support ticket. Four systems now hold four records of the same person. Count customers by adding those systems together and you get four Amys, four "first purchases" and revenue that does not tie out.

The rule

KeyMetriq stores one contact per person, and the email address is the key. Whenever data arrives from a connected platform, KeyMetriq looks for an existing contact with that email address before creating anything. If it finds one, the incoming record attaches to that contact. If not, a new contact is created with that address.

More than one address per person

A contact can hold several email addresses, not just one. The lookup checks all of them and ignores case, so someone who checks out as Amy.Parker@Example.com and subscribes as amy@northwind.com resolves to the same contact once both addresses are on the record.

Each connected platform also records its own identifier for that person on the contact, so KeyMetriq knows which record on which system belongs to which contact. That is what lets a single profile show purchases, list membership, community activity and tickets side by side.

Website visitors

Anonymous website visitors are not contacts. A visitor becomes a known contact at the moment their email address is captured, usually by submitting a form. From then on, the browsing that browser did before that point is attached to the contact record, which is why the Activity tab can show pageviews from before someone ever bought anything.

When it does not resolve automatically

Identity matching is only as good as the data. Two records survive as separate contacts when there is nothing linking them: different email addresses, imported at different times, with no shared identifier.

That is what the Duplicates page is for. KeyMetriq scans for records that look like the same person and offers them for review, and you merge the ones that really are. Merging moves every email address, transaction, tag and piece of history onto the surviving contact, so the next import from any platform resolves to it too.

What this means in practice

  • Use the same email address for a person across your platforms wherever you can.
  • When you import a list, include an email column. Without one there is nothing to match on.
  • Review the Duplicates queue regularly rather than editing records by hand.