We’re using companies to track “households” and family members, but many of the children in those households don’t have email addresses. Oftentimes their email address is their parents. Therefore, when a parent fills out a form on behalf of their child (or multiple children), the profile information is overwritten.
This then creates several problems, with one being future communication stating the parent’s child’s name and not their own.
The last community post I saw regarding this issue was in 2022, and I wasn’t sure if there was any updates since then.
Is there truly no way to have multiple contacts with the same email address?
Is there truly no way to have multiple contacts with the same email address?
The short answer is no. The email address is the unique identifier in HubSpot. If it wasn’t, that would have implications for consent, confirmation, deduplication and many more topics.
This then creates several problems, with one being future communication stating the parent’s child’s name and not their own.
If two contacts had the same email address, this would still be the case, wouldn’t it? An email directed at the child (hypothetically) would still land in the parents’ inbox. Have you considered simply not adding an email address to children’s records? If yes and that’s not an option, can you elaborate? Why does the children’s record need an email address?
We have a similar case, however I guess in our case we do need the email addresses for all the records. Our customer is a bank and it happens that the members of the same household share an email but have two different bank accounts. For example me I myself have an account and it is linked to anna@email.com and then my elderly father has his own account but since he has no email address it is also linked do anna@email.com. Would you still recommend creating records with no emails?
Hey Anna!
There is a workaround Karsten didn’t mention.
You can just place a “+1” infront of the email and then it also gets sent to the right adresser/you can have the same email on different contacts.
So in your case it would look like this:
1. anna@email.com 2.anna+1@email.com
You can create/automate this in a workflow by splitting emails up into two parts (properties) and putting them then back together.
Hey @AMarchioni !
Send you a DM with all the info and screenshot to the entire process
I’m not 100% sure how much my workarounds are appreciated here at Hubspot. Since I don’t want my workaround to be seen as a bug, I won’t share it publicly here. If a Hubspot employee tells me other wise i am more then happy to share my process
This would work fine as long as your contacts never submit forms. If they do, if any of the “+” contacts complete the form, their information will overwrite the data for the contact with the original email address.
