💡 How do I prevent contacts from being added to my automation twice?

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:bulb: CX Tips is part of our community tips series, where we post some of the most commonly asked questions we hear from ActiveCampaign customers. Have a new question? Start a new topic by clicking +New Topic in the upper right hand corner!

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Automations with multiple tiggers make it possible for a a contact to enter your automation more than once at different times even though each trigger is set to “Runs Once.” A check I like to use is—

  1. Add an “If/Else” statement under your trigger that checks for a tag, (ie, tag is “been in X automation”)
  2. If “Yes,” you can end the automation
  3. If “No,” add an “add tag” step where you tag contacts with “been in X automation,” followed by the rest of your automation steps

This check will ensure you aren’t getting duplicate contacts in your automation!

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Personal preference as there is no right way, but I prefer the “yes” side to be the preferred behavior, so if the tag doesn’t exist, it is a “yes” and they proceed, adding the tag in the next step. Screenshot attached. Regardless of which side you choose - like left twix vs. right twix, this trick is one everyone should know.

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Note - you don’t need anything on the opposite side - I usually put a wait in for testing, but it can be empty, or you can be really OCD and add “end this automation”.

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If you have multiple start triggers, a contact can trigger them each independently. This means that even if the start triggers are set to ‘runs once’, the contact can still enter the automation multiple ways through other automations or by different start triggers. You can set up a condition in the start triggers: ‘has not entered automation’ and selecting the current automation you are in. See here: Amy 2024-04-10 at 08.27.11. You will need to do this for each start trigger.

This will ensure that contacts will only trigger the automation once, the first time they trigger a start trigger, and not re-enter the automation multiple times via the start triggers, after entering the first time.

To set this up:

  1. Open the automation and view the start triggers
  2. Select the checkbox next to ‘segment the contacts entering this automation’
  3. Search or type out ‘Has not entered automation’
  4. Select the automation name that you are currently in
  5. Ensure that ‘any entry way’ is selected. This will ensure that if the contact has entered the automation via a start trigger in the past or a manual addition in the past (via bulk import, via manual add, via CSV file import or via API) they will not trigger into the automation multiple times through different start triggers.

See this demo for a walkthrough: Zight Recording 2024-04-10 ...

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