Any ideas on how to clean up a massive amount of contact and company duplicates quickly?
Some contacts are exactly the same except the email addresses, which might be .nz and .au as the difference.
If I merge the contacts, will it keep both email addresses?
If yes, what happens when I send out an email blast? Will they get sent an email to both addresses?
With companies, some are being created automatically via our integration with Outlook. Someone’s email gets included in an email chain that’s being tracked, and that email address gets created as a contact.
Then HS pulls a company name from the email domain, e.g. @johnsmithgroup.com.au and creates a company called John Smith Group.
The real company already exists in our system but is called John Smith Group Pty Ltd so the new contact doesn’t come up under it, instead it comes up under the newly created (wrong) company.
I would appreciate a list of DOs + DONTs for merging duplicates based on the above.
Hi @kenzogianni,
This article walks through all the what-happens-ifs of merging records in HubSpot: Merge records
@kenzogianni wrote:
If I merge the contacts, will it keep both email addresses?
Yes, but only the email address of the contact you designate as primary will be used in HubSpot’s tools, such as email marketing.
@kenzogianni wrote:
If yes, what happens when I send out an email blast? Will they get sent an email to both addresses?
No, just the primary contact.
@kenzogianni wrote:
With companies, some are being created automatically via our integration with Outlook. Someone’s email gets included in an email chain that’s being tracked, and that email address gets created as a contact.
Then HS pulls a company name from the email domain, e.g. @johnsmithgroup.com.au and creates a company called John Smith Group.
The real company already exists in our system but is called John Smith Group Pty Ltd so the new contact doesn’t come up under it, instead it comes up under the newly created (wrong) company.
You might want to consider turning this feature off then: Automatically create and associate companies with contacts
There are pros and cons but knowing your CRM landscape, you can make an educated decision whether it’s better to have this toggled off or on.
If you’re interested in bulk merging, HubSpot isn’t very well equipped to handle this amount of duplicates. However, a third-party integration provider is; Insycle. HubSpot Data Standardization & Cleansing | Insycle
Pricing is, I’d say, very fair and by setting deduplication rules or picking a template, you can work through large numbers of duplicates pretty quickly, by manually approving or automatically merging.
Best regards!
Hey @kenzogianni,
Just wanted to come in and share a bit of context. I work for Insycle as a product marketer, thank you for the recommendation @karstenkoehler.
With Insycle, you can deduplicate companies flexibly, using any field in your database as a matching field. You can even do more advanced things like ignoring numbers, punctuations, symbols, whitespace, etc. Then, you can define how to retain data post-merge on a field by field basis, you can always ensure you keep the most important data during a merge. Here’s an article we wrote about some of the advanced ways Insycle can dedupe.
Best,
Ryan
Here are a few bulletpoints that you should know about Insycle’s Merge Duplicates module that you might find helpful: