Is there any way to assign the same email address to two different contacts? I would like profiles for up to 3 or 4 different contacts to track separate interactions but they share a sales@suchandsuch.com type address. Is there no way to give them each their own distinct profile while using the same email address? I’m not concerned that all emails will be tracked to all profiles.
Thank you in advance.
Matt
Hi @theXO
It’s not possible I’m afraid. HubSpot uses email address as the unique identifier for contact de-duplication, so entering a second name to an existing email address just overwrites the first one entered.
Thank you for your help Phil.
Could this thread be moved to Hubspot Ideas.
Most of my old customers use only one email for the couple. When i want to email one more than the other and would like to have the note in their respective profile, it get complicated. I have to copy paste…
Thanks
I have the same issue. 2 clients in the household, 1 email address for the both…takes up more time to “copy and paste” into the “other” record.
This is going to create problems for me. Some of my client contacts have shared email addresses. Not being able to add both with the same address is an issue. Is there a workaround?
Removing duplicate comment
Removing duplicate comment
This is an issue we often struggle with.
I can’t guarantee that this is the right solution, but a workaround I’m exploring at the moment is adding an incremental string and number into the email addresses, to allow us to create a second contact record, and then opting out those incorrect emails (by importing as an opt-out list - i.e. never contact unless the contact manually opts in).
You want to add a short string and number to the email (and not at the end so it still validates) to make sure everyone can using the crm can be sure that this is an invalid email that we created on purpose e.g. myname**-hs-multi1**@test.com.
If you have a lot of these contacts working with them in an Excel workbook can help with adding those incremental string and numbers and then creating a list of contacts (with invalid incremental email addresses) for opt out.
Here’s how I do that in Excel:
First Name Last Name Email Count Multi Identifier Final Email
| Matthew | Shepherd | test@test.com | 1 | test@test.com | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Joe | Smith | test@test.com | 2 | -hs-multi1 | test-hs-multi1@test.com |
| Jack | Black | test@test.com | 3 | -hs-multi2 | test-hs-multi2@test.com |
| Matthew | Shepherd | hello@test.com | 1 | hello@test.com | |
| Joe | Smith | hello@test.com | 2 | -hs-multi1 | hello-hs-multi1@test.com |
With formulas:
First NameLast Name Email Count Multi Identifier
| Matthew | Shepherd | test@test.com | =COUNTIF($C$1:C2,C2) | =IF(D2>1,“-hs-multi”&D2-1,“”) | =SUBSTITUTE(C2,“@”,E2&“@”) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Joe | Smith | test@test.com | =COUNTIF($C$1:C3,C3) | =IF(D3>1,“-hs-multi”&D3-1,“”) | =SUBSTITUTE(C3,“@”,E3&“@”) |
| Jack | Black | test@test.com | =COUNTIF($C$1:C4,C4) | =IF(D4>1,“-hs-multi”&D4-1,“”) | =SUBSTITUTE(C4,“@”,E4&“@”) |
| Matthew | Shepherd | hello@test.com | =COUNTIF($C$1:C5,C5) | =IF(D5>1,“-hs-multi”&D5-1,“”) | =SUBSTITUTE(C5,“@”,E5&“@”) |
| Joe | Smith | hello@test.com | =COUNTIF($C$1:C6,C6) | =IF(D6>1,“-hs-multi”&D6-1,“”) | =SUBSTITUTE(C6,“@”,E6&“@”) |
That way, you have multiple contacts one with a valid email that can be used for marketing and the rest that have an identifiably modified email address that stay in the CRM but are in your opt-out list and therefore not counting toward your contact tier.
Hi there,
I tried your workaround the way I understood it:
I added 1 contact with sales1@test.com and one with sales2@test.com (actual mail address of both is sales@test.com).
Now I wanted to add the real sales@test.com address as a second email address in both contact records. However, for the second one, it wouldn’t let me do it, but the second email address disappears again after a second.
Can you please tell in more detail how you do this?
Best,
Sabine
That may be a technical workaround but completely counter intuitive. Opt in/out is regulated in many countries and can not/should not be used for other purposes.
Marketing staff should define market segments without having to worry about duplicate email addresses. They think in terms of contacts. Whenever a market segment is using in an email campaign, only one email is sent for each email address, and in Hubspot we (should) know how many contacts we targeted.
I have a list of 20k contacts with duplicate email address. This is going to be a real issue for me.
Hey!
There is a workaround!
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. have different first/ last names / enroll them via workflow and sent it to the one email adress that you saved across the different contacts
The Emailadress would still contain the +1 but it would go to the right email like you see below:
So 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.
This is exactly what we do not want. It fills the database with incorrect information which is confusing and awkward .
You solution suggests that mail sent to anna@email.com and anna+1@email.com
gets relayed to the same recipient. That would mean that Hubspot ignores the “+1” suffix, which is strange to say the least. According to RFC 5322 both are valid addresses and hence should be treated as such. I have customers that already have similar suffixes in their email. How would Hubspot know when to ignore those?
You may be able fix this problem with custom code, but that only adds complexity. And once you integrate CRM with other applications you need to build logic into all applications (or interfaces) to selectively add/remove those extra characters. A maintenance headache.
And you can still only use that one user with the correct email address in lists (e.g. for marketing campaigns). That simply doesn’t make sense. What happens if that user changes his email address? Who is then going to change the other contact records that had the same email address? Who is going to add/remove them to the list? Of course you can build a solution for that too, but why???
One should simply be able to have multiple contacts with the same email address . All Hubspot has to do is:
1) change duplicate detection from “email only” to “any combination of fields that the user wants”.
2) take care of deduplication of the outgoing emails, to prevent that the recipients receive multiple copies.
This is the way most CRM applications deal with this. It is hardly rocket science.
I will ignore your patronizing statements, perhaps you didn’t read the entire thread. We have been asking Hubspot for years to come up with a solution to fix this. I was actually the first in this thread to mention the issues with sales@ type of email addresses, so please don’t tell me I don’t understand the problem.
Technical workarounds like yours may be acceptable to some, but not to my clients. Workarounds often have unwanted side effects, result in more work to develop/maintain and pose an unnecessary burden on end users.
Hutspot is a nice CRM solution with great potential, but they really need to resolve the issue. I have done CRM projects for 15+ years now using many well known CRM solutions (Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, etc). None of them has limitations like these and that is one of the reasons why Hubspot often doesn’t make to the shortlist.
So while you may think that a proper solution won’t take a while, Hutspot has already kept us waiting for many years, as you can read in this thread.
Hey @MHolzer thank you so much for sharing this workaround. I am sure this will help lots of users in our Community!
Kindly,
Pam
why not use phone number as the indentifier?
phone number is unique and everybody has one!
in my area many people just don’t use email… is that mean i have to create an fake email address for each of them?
much workload you know…
also, people won’t change their phone number often, they use their phone number as long as they can.
but people will change their email address.
Most of my team doesn’t have phone numbers, at least for business use, and a lot of phone numbers I call are the main business line which is associated with multiple contacts. I see how email works for expediency but would be great to use the contact ID number as the primary unique identifier because of this.
This is not about identifiers, it is about the way Hubspot uses the email address to detect and prevent duplicates.
If they would use the phone number in stead, that would create exactly the same problem. Only one contact with any given phone number can exist in the database. So forget about family members using the same home phone numer, office workers that use the company’s main number, etc.
There is only one solution: Hubspot should change the duplicate prevention rules to
- allow for multiple contacts with the same name, phone number, email, etc
- allow the user to define the duplicate detection criteria (e.g. a combination of name and email)
- allow the user to specify what needs to happen if potential duplicates are found: ignore, warn, block
I agree - this is a problem (although I get it). Would be really great to get around this - for example we keep the good email address against the child/daughter/son record of the contact (as they normally drive the comms process/need) and the parent/mum/dad has to have no email and we tyherefore loose that ability to email mum and dad about parent stuff.
