If an email is forwarded to a co-worker or friend, and they use a different email address when filling out the form, HS should not update the contact the email was intended for. It should have created a new contact in the system, especially if its on a different computer.
By having the cookie over rule the email address submitted, it means you are defeating the whole purpose of getting new names from our inbound activities. Plus without realising the change has occured, you now are sending the wrong person information intended for the original person.
This is a big problem for my organization as well. I set up a report in salesforce to notify me when an email address changes so I can see which contacts have been overwritten by coworkers. To separate the two contacts I have to create a new contact with the original contact’s information but then I lose all of the history of that original contact. If I create a new contact with the forwardee, then I lose the recent form fill out for that person. Either way, I lose information on a contact.
Yes - this doesn’t seem too logical. In the 8 months since we went live with HubSpot, this has already happened twice with impactful consequences for us. It seems particularly strange that any subsequently submitted email is added to the record, which plays havoc with synchronisation to a CRM like Salesforce.
We deduplicate based on email address and usertoken/cookie and considering how important cookies are to our systems, I don’t see that changing. However there are different options to tackle this common issue:
You can set up a notification system so that you are notified when this occurs as I have outlined here
Add link for users to reset the form - as outlined in this article
There is a new tool that is currently in BETA and due to go live soon that will also assist with this issue
This feature has now gone live, you can read more about it here and within your form setting options, you can find the toggle to create a new contact for a new email address as per below.
I cannot believe this has been out there since 2017. I’m furious. We just had data on one of our most important customers overwritten because of this (or we’ll have to spend hours fixing the HubSpot screw-up). I’ve already emailed HubSpot support to explain how absurd this is.
Every marketer HOPES recipients will forward campaigns to friends or colleagues. That’s been a basic premise of email marketing since the 1990s. Yet HubSpot is shoving “AI intelligence” at us while the basic platform isn’t smart enough to see that if the first name, last name, and email are all different, that’s a new contact, not an update. That’s elementary if-then logic from the 1970s. And the kicker: the form fill pulls from the cookie, not the email—so it makes no sense at all.
Proposed solutions like setting Always create Contact for new Email addresses are problematic too. Aside from the fact that there are legitimate cases of respondants needing to have their contact records updated, hubspot isn’t smart enough to be able to have tat setting on and still provide progressive fields. Conversion rates drop dramatically without progressive fields in our market.
“Add a link to reset the form”? Be serious. When someone gets a forwarded email with a link, they’re not going to think to look for a reset button on the form, they’re just going to write over whatever is there.
At this point I guess we’ll need a disclaimer on every campaign: “Please don’t forward this. If someone wants to become a customer, have them contact us directly. We can’t accept referrals because our CRM can’t handle them.” It’s embarrassing that this would even be necessary.
