Hello. One of our contacts seems to have about 100 email addresses attached, and only 1 is correct; the others are all different people.
Is there a way I can work out how this happened, to avoid it happening again in future?
Thanks for any advice!
Hi @Anonymous,
Are these additional email addresses or was the email address changed over time?
If it’s the latter, then you probably need to enable the “Always create contact for new email address” toggle in the forms editor. Can you check whether this contact has submitted a form recently / multiple times? If so, open the form, then toggle this optoin in the Options tab.
Best regards
Hi @Anonymous
You can check the property history by clicking on details when hovering over the email in the contact record view:
The most common reason is that a form has been filled out repeatedly on the same machine - happens often at events or tradeshows - the the form was not set to always create new contacts in the form options settings.
Hope that helps.
Frank
Aha! Thank you Karsten and Frank. That makes sense and probably explains it.
The next problem we have though is that our forms weren’t created inside in HubSpot; they’re Gravity Forms on a WordPress website, using the Gravity Forms HubSpot connector, and it seems that using that method means there is no setting at either end to enable the “Always create new contact”. But at least now I’m on the right trail and can try and find a solution for that.
Really appreciate your helpful responses!
Hey @Anonymous just to provide more context to the “always create contacts..” feature and integrated forms (such as gravity forms).
“Always create contacts for new email” isn’t really an advanced feature, all it does it doesn’t include a cookie when a contact submits a form on a browser with a known cookie, but an email address that doesn’t match the existing email address for the contact.
The only way around this on an external form would be to not send cookies at all on the submission, which most third party forms don’t allow. If you’re sending a cookie with a form submission the HubSpot CRM will always append the information on that cookied submission to the contact that exists with that cookie. The only way a third party form could know the email doesn’t match, would be to pull your CRM data while the form submission is being processed, which isn’t going to happen for a third party form either.
If you’re using an external form you’d have 3 options to avoid this:
1. Create a custom integration to pull your CRM data and check emails to avoid sending cookie data.
2. Completely block HubSpot cookies from your forms (this would lose all website tracking information on the contact record).
3. Move to HS forms to enable this feature.
Thanks very much @TomM2 ! Makes sense.