How does deduplication work for MigrateMyCRM?

Last Updated on July 22nd, 2025

Why Duplicates May Appear After a CRM Migration — And How to Handle Them

Duplicates can sometimes appear after your CRM migration is complete. Here are the most common reasons:

• Your source CRM contains contacts with identical names or email addresses.

• Your target CRM already includes records with the same names or email addresses as those in the source CRM.

To help manage this, the MigrateMyCRM service offers multiple deduplication strategies designed to ensure clean and accurate data migration.

How Deduplication Works

Deduplication is the process of identifying and resolving duplicate records during migration, helping maintain data integrity in your target CRM.

Let’s say you're migrating data from Salesforce to HubSpot, and several Salesforce contacts share the same email address. These contacts might also have associated deals, notes, or tasks.

MigrateMyCRM can detect and merge these records into a single contact in HubSpot. If a contact with the same email address already exists in HubSpot, the Salesforce contacts will be merged into that existing record. Otherwise, the first contact will be migrated as a new record, and all activities and associations from the remaining duplicates will be linked to it.

Deduplication Options Available During Migration

You can choose how duplicates are handled before your full migration begins. MigrateMyCRM supports the following strategies:

1. Replacement Strategy
   This approach replaces existing records in the target CRM with information from the source CRM.

   Note: This option requires advanced handling and is available only through the SyncMatters team. Contact us if you’d like to proceed with this strategy.

2. Set Empty Strategy
   In this case, only blank fields in existing records are populated with data from the source. All existing data in the target CRM remains unchanged.

3. Custom Duplicate Preservation (for Manual Review)
   If you prefer to review duplicates manually after migration, we can preserve them in a specific format.
   For example, if you're migrating to HubSpot—which doesn’t allow multiple contacts with the same primary email address—we can still migrate the second contact by leaving the Primary Email field empty and storing the email in a custom property.

   This method requires custom setup by our tech team.

If you need help deciding or want to explore advanced options, don’t hesitate to reach out to our team — we're here to assist every step of the way.

Deduplication rules for some CRMs:

The majority of CRMs have certain deduplication rules for importing data by API. MigrateMyCRM follows these rules during the migration process.

Here is a list of the most popular CRMs and their respective deduplication rules for importing records by API:

• HubSpot 
  • Contacts (by “Email” field)
    
    
• Salesforce 

For the standard Salesforce validation rules, click here.

Salesforce can also validate the record that is migrated as a duplicate against records in other objects. 

As an example, say you migrate a “Lead” record. Salesforce can validate the record as a duplicate to the contact according to the validation rules setup. The migration tool then skips the “Lead” record and its related data (opportunities, activities, etc) during the migration process. 

To have duplicate records migrated, make sure you`ve disabled this validation rule.

• Vtiger 

Custom validations within this CRM can be set up using unique values in any of the following fields: 

• • Accounts
  • Contacts
  • Opportunities 
  • Activities 

If these custom validation rules are enabled in Vtiger, the migration tool considers all records with the same value in validated fields as duplicates and excludes them from the migration process. 

• ZohoCRM 

Custom validation rules can be set up within this CRM, and you are able to define if a field is required to be unique or not for both native and custom fields. 

This feature is available for the following fields:

• • Companies
  • Contacts 
  • Opportunities

• BaseCRM
  • Tags (by “Name” field)
• CapsuleCRM
  • Accounts (by “Name” field)
  • Сustom fields (by field name)
• FreshSales 
  • Accounts (by “Name” field)
  • Contacts (by “Email” field)
• Microsoft Dynamics 
  • Products (by “Code” field)
  • Emails (by “____MessageId” field)
• Pipedrive
  • Users (by “Email” field)
• ProsperWorks
  • Accounts (by “____email_domain” field)
  • Contacts (by “email” field)
    
    

Still need help?

Please submit an inquiry on the contact page, email support@syncmatters.com, or simply reach out to us via chat.