People with email address are still showing as anonymous

Let's consider the following scenario: You import a list of people with email addresses and they are successfully created in Encharge. However, when these people visit web pages on your website, they show up as anonymous people and generate anonymous page visits or other anonymous activity.

Why is that?

This happens because Encharge has not matched the anonymous profiles (and the anonymous page visits) to the profiles of the people. 

Because Encharge uses cookies to track and match anonymous people with identified people, simply adding a person with an email address will not automatically match them. In other words, the email address is there but the cookie is not connected, and for that reason, Encharge doesn't know that it should map the anonymous user (and the cookie they have) to a specific profile with an email address.

Even though you have the email address of the person, Encharge still needs to connect that profile to the anonymous profile using the cookie. 

So how and when is the anonymous activity matched with the identified person?

When a user submits a tracked form

Every time a user submits a tracked form on your website, and they enter their email address in the form, their anonymous activity will be identified and their anonymous activity will be matched to the person.
Only forms tracked via Form Tracking can identify anonymous visitors.

When a user clicks on an email

Whenever a person clicks on a link from an email sent by you. any anonymous sessions associated with that email click will be matched with identified person's profile.

For example, John visits your website on his desktop computer and leaves his email on a signup form. Later that day John receives one of your emails on his phone and clicks an email link from the phone. His phone sessions and the activity generated in these sessions will be matched to his existing profile and previous desktop activity.

If the JavaScript Event Tracking identify method is used

You can use the identify method of the JavasScript Event Tracking to uniquely identify the person on the front end and send that user information to us, so Encharge can identify the person.

When you enter the email of the person manually

You can always manually change the email address of an anonymous person. 

Note that if a profile with that email address already exists, the anonymous person's profile and their activity will be merged with the identified profile. This action is irreversible.