topic Re: CRM - Shared Inbox in Tips, Tricks & Best Practices

CRM - Shared Inbox

alexagatiss — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 15:55:24 GMT

Hi all,

Posting this because I know we're not the only company that deals with this! How are others managing accumulated shared inbox email addresses? For example sales@xxx.com? Or help@xxx.com? We do not need these email addresses in our CRM but they seem inescapable since all account reps have connected inboxes and sometimes these addresses are included on emails. Is there some way to keep them separate from everything else?

Re: CRM - Shared Inbox

karstenkoehler — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 16:02:31 GMT

Hi @alexagatiss,

If these are personal email addresses, they shouldn't be connected as conversation inbox team email addresses. Instead, they should be connected as personal email accounts: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/email-tracking/connect-your-inbox-to-hubspot

For anything that's a shared inbox, if you want to clean up, you could set up auto-forwarding but that might cause more problems than it helps.

Can you explain again why these are both connected but you don't need them?

Best regards!

Re: CRM - Shared Inbox

alexagatiss — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 16:13:24 GMT

Hi @karstenkoehler , I am referring to the actual data that we have in HubSpot. We do not want to be sending emails to info@xxx.com email addresses, however they still end up in HubSpot as contacts. What is a good way to separate them, as I am assuming everyone deals with these types of contacts?

Re: CRM - Shared Inbox

karstenkoehler — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 16:20:19 GMT

Hi @alexagatiss,

Ah, entirely misunderstood what you meant. Thanks for providing more context.

This depends a bit on the industry, in some industries there simply aren't any alternatives to having contact records for shared email addresses. If you feel like this can be avoided, it's something you'd have to educate your sales team on who are likely creating the most of these contacts. In website forms, you could emphasize that personal business addresses should be used, not shared addresses.

Lastly, you can use workflows to notify owners of these contact records to try and get an email address belonging to person and update the record.

But as you already noticed, it's almost impossible to avoid this entirely. You can educate, you can put mechanisms in place to limit but with various contact create channels it's tough to avoid this phenomenon entirely.

Hope this helps!

Re: CRM - Shared Inbox

alexagatiss — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 21:20:49 GMT

Hi @karstenkoehler ,

Thank you for getting back to me.

We have determined that the "auto add" feature with connected inboxes is what is creating these contacts. They are not coming in through forms or manually. Can a rule be created, that if there isn’t a name, the contact information doesn’t get brough into Hubspot to eliminate the sales@ ; info@ ; accounting@ ?

Re: CRM - Shared Inbox

karstenkoehler — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 04:00:54 GMT

Hi @alexagatiss,

There is not, no. Whoever logs an email would have to keep this in mind, that's the training part I was referring to.

Simply not logging would probably not be an alternative however, would it? You would still want to have that sales touchpoint logged – only that it would be better if it wasn't a shared inbox.

Theoretically you could set up a workflow that automatically removes these contact records. I wouldn't do that however, I would still want to have the information the sales team documented here and rather work on processes that help replacing these shared email addresses with personal email addresses.

Best regards!