topic Re: Updating one property for many (many) contacts in APIs & Integrations

Updating one property for many (many) contacts

MichaelBrock — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 15:03:44 GMT

We are attempting to use the api to automate the process of sending a weekly sales email. The email body will vary each week with a different set of products for sale. We have been instructed by the individual managing the HubSpot side of things to upload the email body to a property of every single contact and that property will be used for each individual contact's email.

This worked fine in the development acount which had only a few 100 contacts. However, the live account has almost 660k contacts. Even updating the contacts in batches takes almost 25 seconds per 100 contacts (maximum batch size). The body of the email being pushed is pretty big.

The site owner and person managing the HubSpot account do not seem inclined to purge the contacts or significantly reduce the size of the payload so we're trying to figure out an alternative.

Does anyone have a suggestion? Is there some other way to use the api to upload an email which can then be sent to all contacts without having to update the property of every single contact?

Is there some un-documented feature of the api that might let us POST the email body but specify multiple contacts without having to have the body in the update of every contact? I tinkered with specifying multiple ids in single POST but that was a wild stab in the dark which did not work.

Re: Updating one property for many (many) contacts

coldrickjack — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 17:17:38 GMT

Hey @MichaelBrock,

It's a really interesting use case! I did a bit of thinking and one option I think you could consider is to leverage the CRM Import API.

This allows you to import a CSV or XLSX file programmatically into HubSpot to create, update (or create and update) records in the CRM. The benefit of using this versus the traditional CRM APIs for those operations is that you can include much more data in your request and get around some of the issues you are facing with batching. You can import up to 80,000,000 rows per day however each individual import file is limited to 1,048,576 rows or 512 MB, whichever is reached first.

The other option to look into (and I'm really thinking off the cuff here...) is to look at using multiple different access tokens so that you could run batch operations in parallel. For instance if you had 5 private apps, each would have their own independent API limits which means you could update 500 contacts in one go (5 unique requests to the Batch endpoint).

One thing is for sure though - I'd also strongly advise against going down the route of an undocumented solution as from experience there is no guarantee it'll work that way forever and when that happens you'll be right back to square one and arguably in a worse situation.

I hope this is in some way helpful and wish you the very best of luck on the project moving forward! 😊

Re: Updating one property for many (many) contacts

MichaelBrock — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 17:25:56 GMT

Thanks! Those are both good suggestions and I'll look into them. I have made some progress in convincing the site owner to cull their contact list so that might be the way we go, at least until it gets too large again.

Re: Updating one property for many (many) contacts

coldrickjack — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 17:28:15 GMT

Glad they helped and also happy to hear the site owner is open to reducing the numbers that'll likely make life easier for you and save them some money in the long run with their HubSpot subscription!!! 😊