Tips for managing empty email address records?

Smart CRM & Sales Hub CRM
1

Looking for any advice or tips! We have an ongoing problem with contact records being imported with no email addresses. I’ve tried addressing this with our marketing teams but the problem continues…

So I’m looking for some workarounds!

  • Is there any way to prevent importing records if the email address is blank?
  • If I edit the ‘email’ contact property to have a minimum number of characters, would this help the problem?
  • We have thousands of duplicate contacts where one record with an email addresses matches a record with no email address - are there any quick wins to clean/merge these en masse (so that I don’t have to go record-by-record in Data Quality!)?

Any other tips would be great, any ideas for managing contacts without email addresses, would be hugely appreciated!

2

Hi @EloiseFrancis,

Happy to help here.

@EloiseFrancis wrote:

Is there any way to prevent importing records if the email address is blank?

Aside from taking away import permissions from these users and centralizing the import process (this is what I typically do as HubSpot admin for my customers), no, unfortunately. There are no settings to make email required upon import.

@EloiseFrancis wrote:
If I edit the ‘email’ contact property to have a minimum number of characters, would this help the problem?

No, field validation is only evaluated when editing a field value in the CRM directly, not upon import, via API or integrations.

@EloiseFrancis wrote:
We have thousands of duplicate contacts where one record with an email addresses matches a record with no email address - are there any quick wins to clean/merge these en masse (so that I don’t have to go record-by-record in Data Quality!)?

Deduplicating by name is risky (just consider common names in certain countries), but in general is best done with, in my opinion, Koalify. Detailed documentation can be found here. Disclaimer: This is a referral link which makes me eligible to receive commission, should you choose to purchase a paid subscription.

Koalify allows you to define custom deduplication rules and deduplicate in bulk.

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions!