You can either follow the steps below or scroll to the bottom of this article to watch the recorded video from our live training. Click here to go to the video.
When managing multiple contact lists, it's important to prevent duplicate sends. This article walks through two ways to combine lists without duplicates and includes options for filtering your audience before sending.
Why Merge Contact Lists?
Avoid sending the same message multiple times to the same person
Protect your sender reputation by minimizing spam complaints or unsubscribes
Simplify list management and communications
(See 00:00:00 in the video)
Method 1: Create a Segment From Selected Contact Lists
Use this method when you want to build a reusable, deduplicated list from existing contact lists.
Go to the Contacts tab
Click on Contact Lists
Use the checkboxes to select multiple lists
Click the dropdown that appears and choose Create Segment from Selected
Give the new list a name (e.g. “Leads + Clients - Deduped”)
Confirm the segment creation – duplicate emails will be automatically removed
(Optional) Apply filters:
Remove by engagement
Include by engagement
Remove if on other lists
Filter by contact fields
🕒 Timestamp: 00:01:30 – 00:04:45
Note: The original contact lists are not modified, and the new segment will not update automatically if the original lists change.
Method 2: Use Contact List Filtering When Sending a Mass Email
This is a faster option when you’re preparing a one-time email send.
Click the + icon in the upper right
Choose Send Mass Email
Select multiple contact lists to include
Click Filter Contact Lists before proceeding
In the modal:
Name the filtered segment
Optionally apply any filters (same as Method 1)
Click Apply Filters (important for filters to save)
Optionally remove specific contacts from the view
Click Save and Preview Send to finalize
🕒 Timestamp: 00:05:26 – 00:08:26
This method also saves the filtered list as a segment for future use.
Important Note About List Updates
Merged contact lists (segments) do not update automatically. If you change the original contact lists, you will need to recreate the merged version to reflect those changes if you want an updated list.
🕒 Timestamp: 00:08:26
Watch the Training Video
Transcript
Transcript
00:00:00
Drew Ross: Hello everybody. My name is Drew and in this live training we're going to talk about how to merge contact lists without creating duplicates. Uh this is a very important thing in you know list management and in mass emailing mass texting and you'll often find yourself looking to send to not just one list but another and it's helpful to have a nice and easy way to combine those two lists and to avoid having duplicates across those lists. So I'm going to cover how to do that. Um, another thing that's important to keep in mind here too is that this this helps protect your sender reputation because after all, if you are repeatedly messaging people and it's getting annoying, they might uh spam report you or you know send a stop request to your texts and we want to avoid that as much as possible. So without further ado, let's take a look at how to do this. So, here we are in Viploud. We're going to go to our the contacts tab because contact lists is in there.
00:01:30
Drew Ross: We're going to click on contact lists. And so, here we are looking at the contact lists table. Each row is a different contact list. And I'm going to look to combine two of these lists. I've got this one right here that says example list. Another one that says customer list. And you'll notice I'm clicking a little the little check box all the way to the left in each contact lists row. This is how I can interact with multiple lists at a time. And I'm going to go up here to where it says two selected. little dropdown at the very upper left column and we're going to see right here we got an option that says create segment from selected. So I'm going to click on that and here we go. It opens up a modal that allows me to create a segment of these two lists. Now what this is going to do is it's going to make a new contact list entirely. So, we're not going to lose any data here.
00:02:44
Drew Ross: You can feel free to do this and um and rest assured that your contact lists, the original ones are going to remain untouched. So, right up here, I can give it a new name. So, I'm going to just call it uh I'll call it big marking list. This is going to be the new name of the new contact list that I'm going to create. And if the goal is to simply combine these two lists into one, all I have to do is hit that okay button, and it's going to do that. And what it'll do, too, is it's going to only have a single instance of every contact um from each of the each of the lists. So, if somebody's on both lists, they're going to appear only once in the new list I'm going to create. Now before I do that, I do just want to show you that there are some pretty cool additional options here that are worth knowing about like remove by engagement. So if we want to, you know, remove contacts who have replied for instance, we can do that.
00:03:58
Drew Ross: Include by engagement. So only including people who maybe have clicked a link in an email. Remove if on other lists. This is really useful. So, if you're looking to create a send, but you don't want to communicate with people who have already received some other kind of communication and they can be uh found on another list, just click on this right here and choose the list that you want to uh of the contacts you want to suppress from this current communication. You can do that. And then also right here filter by contact fields. So if you want to communicate with say only people in a particular state, you can do that right there. All right. So I'm just going to do this right here. All right. So we have now created our contact list. and we can find it right up here. So fantastic. We have made our new combined contact list that will not have any duplicates on it. Now I also want to show you one other way that you can go about doing this.
00:05:26
Drew Ross: So let's say we are sending a new mass email. I'm clicking the plus button in the upper right corner here for quick actions. We're going to click on mass email and we're going to choose the contact lists that we're going to be sending to. So, I'm going to choose multiple lists here. Now, if I were to just hit preview send and then send a mass email to this without clicking that filter contact lists button, this this is effectively just sending two mass emails. And if there are duplicates across both of those emails, they're going to receive however many emails uh there are for instances of that contact being on any of the contact lists. So, we most definitely want to avoid doing that, which is why we can click on this filter contact lists button. And then here we're basically, this will actually look kind of familiar to you based on what we were looking at before. We have very similar options here of filtered list name. So we can give it a give it a name.
00:06:57
Drew Ross: And if we simply just want to uh to just hit this save and preview send like this will combine both of these lists. Now, um, one thing to know here too is that like first of all, it's very useful how here we're able to, um, we're able to also take a look at all the contacts that are on our that are across both those lists and we can just selectively remove them. So, this is definitely a good way to just see a complete list of everybody that's across all the lists and selectively remove them. There's a search bar up here as well if you got a lot of people you need to search through. And then of course also we've got our options for for filtering these uh for filtering these these lists. One thing you do need to know is that if you're going to be filtering these lists based on any of uh you know remove it by engagement, include by engagement with these, you will need to hit the apply filters button down here at the bottom left to save those save those filters basically and have them actually apply to the list that we're going to be working with.
00:08:26
Drew Ross: So, that's just one thing to uh to keep in mind if you're going to be doing this. But here, I'm just going to hit this save and preview send. And now I'm going to be sending to that like I'm going to be sending to that particular uh segment that I just created. And it'll be saved in your contact list as well. So you don't have to go through that every single time that you're uh that you're looking to send to that particular segment. So um one thing too that I think is good to keep in mind when you're doing this is these are not going to dynamically update. So if you're working with, you know, list A and list B, combining them to create list C, and if there's any changes to the original lists, those aren't going to automatically update to that segmented list. So, if this is something that you uh see yourself needing to do kind of on an ongoing basis, it's just good to keep in mind how fresh that particular segment is um and to consider maybe just proactively deleting that segmented list once it's uh no longer necessary.