topic Re: contacts with multiple email addresses in Lists, Lead Scoring & Workflows

contacts with multiple email addresses

amazinghealth — Sun, 09 Apr 2017 18:03:12 GMT

I have many contacts with multiple email addresses such as work, home, and private. I don't want to loose this info when importing. How can I do this?

Re: contacts with multiple email addresses

Phil_Vallender — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 07:35:43 GMT

HubSpot essentially uses an email address as the unique identifier for a contact, so multiple email address will usually create multiple contacts.

You could work around this by choosing one email address to be primary - say, work email - and then create custom contact properties to store the others.

The limitation of this is that HubSpot will not be able to use those other email address for anything, just store them and present them to you on the contact record.

Is that any help?

Re: contacts with multiple email addresses

macbikegeek — Sat, 03 Jun 2017 02:20:35 GMT

@Phil_Vallender Not having the ability to have multiple email addresses for a contact is needed because some contacts have multiple relationships with different emails for each, so proper contact requires using the appropriate email. Just storing the secondary and other emails in a custom field is not adequate. Most apps that allow this permit selection of the email to use, as does almost any email client.

Re: contacts with multiple email addresses

Anonymous — Mon, 19 Jun 2017 19:44:52 GMT

@macbikegeek depending on your goal, you could create two contacts and label them as personal and professional. That would allow you to communicate with the contact through both email addresses. I'd also recommend voting for this idea as it addresses this point: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Enter-2-email-addresses-for-a-contact/idi-p/1170.

Re: contacts with multiple email addresses

macbikegeek — Wed, 21 Jun 2017 20:44:30 GMT

Thanks. I have already voted for that thread. And yes, I could have two contacts but that's pretty silly in this day and age. My list would grow by at least 25% by that approach. ~~I took the other method which is to create a secondary email field so I can at least store it in the contact. It still isn't what I need and lots of other people seem to agree.~~

Update: I'm down the two contacts method - it's not supportable to keep correspondence threads current in Hubspot. I came to this when a person changed emails for a particular exchange, so when I did a BCC to Hubspot, a new contact was created. So this is a "can't fight city hall" problem until Hubspot supports multiple emails for a contact.

Re: contacts with multiple email addresses

terchris — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 12:52:20 GMT

insightly was able to have more email adresses on a contact. But they changed their system so its not possible. It seems that moving to Hubspot is not a solution. Thanks for pointing that out.

Re: contacts with multiple email addresses

roisinkirby — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 16:41:45 GMT

UPDATE: The ability to log multiple email addresses for one contact record is In Beta.

Stay tuned for updates here. If you are interested in being a Beta user please email community@hubspot.com.

Re: contacts with multiple email addresses

warfieldgb — Mon, 20 Aug 2018 14:19:17 GMT

This is not a solution, and when I looked at the beta program (now released) it does nothing to address the fundamental issue, which is that we need need to keep track of individuals who have multiple email addresses, to have a single view of that person.

Could Hubspot "not get it" because their pricing is based partly on number of contacts? If so it's really extremely shortsighted.

I am new to Hubspot and enjoying it, but this single issue may force me to do something else, in which case the revenue will fall to nil instead of rising to a few grand per year.

Re: contacts with multiple email addresses

JerryReid — Wed, 13 Feb 2019 01:33:53 GMT

Are there any plans to update the hubspot to salesforce integration to support mapping of additional email fields, or text fields containing emails, or custom objects to sync up multiple contact emails in sfdc into the HubSpot email field?

Re: contacts with multiple email addresses

Sallen1 — Wed, 03 Apr 2019 20:23:39 GMT

This is a highly problematic issue for me.

I'm glad to know I got in *after* you could only have one email per person, but i'm in a tricky situation that's causing me a bit of headache.

Let me first state somethign that I think should be obvious-

In a sales workflow, the number of clicks one must make should be as low as possible. That's one of the most important aspects of a CRM for me.

I currently am wedged between two issues that make my work a bit diffucult as I adapt to Hubspot and they seem like (relatively) simple features to implement.

1) I currently have a database with 6k contacts in it. 10% of those contacts were imported with a "Secondary Email". I could not simply import those as a second email within primary, and I'm sure there's a good reason for that in your backend engineering. Just the same, every time I send an email at an address that happens to be secondary via a gmail thread, Hubspot decides to make a new contact. I'm currently spending about half an hour each day going through my contacts and de-duplicating. It also doesn't seem like an efficient use of my time to go through (or pay someone to go through) 600 contacts and copy/paste over emails into the primary field. An alternative would be to extend your email logging system to read the secondary field as well.

2) Regardless of how I'm going to get those 600 emails into a meaningful field where they belong, you really need to fix your email logging system. In it's current state, I understand it's actually not GDPR compliant. It's a very simple feature request. I should be able to say "Default to record all emails that match in the system, but do not create new records when the email is not recognized". I wouldn't mind a notification that the email isn't in the system. That's acutally useful information that would remind me to update my database... And no, it's not pragmatic for me to have to select/deselect "Record email" depending on whether or not it's in the system. That's a *ton* of clicking back and forth, and a HUGE burden on the workflow of inbox management... something that should be fluid and require no manual maintenance, let alone validation in anoter window. That context shifting is a non-starter.

Re: contacts with multiple email addresses

DomenicLeapDigi — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 12:27:52 GMT

Is this fixed yet:)

These days client have so many email aliases they work with. When using the email client plug in, each correspondance gets logged, and my database grows 25% a month for no reason other than this.

So I am forced to go in each month and selectively delete contacts, or flag.

Could we have multiple email address please, so that emails are logged to the person. Having a email address as the primary key is no different than telling me that I'm just a number in the system. Contacts in a database are excactly that, contacts. They are people, and our database needs to recognized that people have multiple email addresses.

1. Could we treat contacts in a database as "People", so that we can communicate with them as such.

2 This would be amazing: "I should be able to say "Default to record all emails that match in the system, but do not create new records when the email is not recognized"." The lack of such a feature has a long list of other problems. LIke having contacts such as support lines, or customer success teams in my contact list. I would maybe suggest that the plug-in provide you a list of all the contacts in the email beign drafted with a simple status, and give you the option to "add" to CRM when that email is not in the CRM.

Please

The email integration is great, but lacking some very important check to help keep the integrity of our databases intact.

Re: contacts with multiple email addresses

dr_bob — Sat, 18 Apr 2020 01:55:57 GMT

Is there any update on this issue from Hubspot? It is literally the only bad feature in hubspot but potentially its more annoying one!

Re: contacts with multiple email addresses

orbitdist — Mon, 05 Oct 2020 14:38:14 GMT

Likewise, I'm new to Hubspot and have ran into this issue along with sync not actually meaning sync.. When I sync between office365 outlook and Hubspot you can't remove deleted contacts with the sync. Gobsmacked really, as I was doing this with Goldmine about 10 years ago....

Re: contacts with multiple email addresses

sharonlicari — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 10:32:16 GMT

Hey @orbitdist

I'm not sure what are you referring with

When I sync between office365 outlook and Hubspot you can't remove deleted contacts with the sync. Gobsmacked really, as I was doing this with Goldmine about 10 years ago....

Could you please provide more information about the issue you are having?

Thanks

Sharon

Re: contacts with multiple email addresses

orbitdist — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 10:41:22 GMT

Hi Sharon,

It probably should have gone onto another thread as it doesn't relate to this thread. Apologies.. it was a mad moment at the end of a very long and frustrating few days with Hubspot sync..

Re: contacts with multiple email addresses

jhodanich — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 18:51:31 GMT

Very interested in seeing how this works.