A "unique" contact is essentially an individual record - i.e: it excludes any duplicate contacts in your account with the same email address or CRM ID.

The way that unique records are governed and duplicate contact records are handled depends on how your contacts are managed in ActivePipe:

Contacts manually uploaded in ActivePipe

If your contacts are managed within the platform using CSV files, ActivePipe defines a unique contact by their email address, therefore duplicate email addresses cannot occur within a single user account*.
If you re-upload an existing email address, the contact record in ActivePipe will be updated, not duplicated.

* It's important to note that the same email address can be uploaded to different User accounts within your office/brand. If the contact subsequently matches campaign audience filters for multiple users, the contact will receive multiple emails.

CRM integrated contacts

If your contacts in ActivePipe are integrated with your CRM, a unique contact record is defined by their CRM Contact ID, rather than by their email address.

In addition to this, within each users contact database (i.e: the contacts assigned to one particular agent), ActivePipe also recognises if there are multiple contact records containing the same email address.
In the case where duplicate emails are selected in a particular campaign audience, only the contact record that was created first (i.e: the oldest record) will be sent to*.

If the contact unsubscribes, ActivePipe unsubscribes all contact records with the same email assigned to that user *.

* Note: The de-duping process applies on a User level only. If you have multiple contact records for the same email address in your CRM that are assigned to different users, if both users are selected for a campaign this could lead to multiple emails being sent (from different agents) to the same email address.

To avoid this, ActivePipe recommends that before adding a new contact to your CRM, firstly identify if the email already exists (e.g: assigned to another agent), and if so amend or update the existing record if necessary, do not add a new one.