If a company has rebranded and the email addresses have changed, how do you update/merge contacts to reflect the new branding? Furthermore, if the contact with the old branding was on a certain list, how do you make sure that the contact with the new branding is on this list as well?
@Mlho I would use the merge records feature to replace the existing/old brand contacts/companies with the new ones - that will keep them on lists, workflows, etc.
It will retain all of the history, but you won’t have to worry about duplicate contacts/companies. As long as you have the new company domain and email addresses, you can merge the company and then the contacts accordingly.
Hi @Mlho,
This is unfortunately not as straight-forward as it seems at first. Let’s not think about lists and first about updating the records.
If we are talking about a small number of contacts (e.g. less than 20), I would simply do this manually:
- Open contact record
- Edit email address
- Save changes
… and also update the company domain value on the associated company record.
If we’re talking about more than 20 records, I would do this by export/import:
- Export contacts
- Remove all columns from import file but Record ID and Email
- Use search and replace in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets to replace the old domain within the Email column with the new domain
- Re-import the file while making sure that Record ID is mapped
This will bulk update the records in their place with their new email domain.
All of the above does not take into account lists and there is unfortunately not general solution to this. You would have to open a few of the contacts before making the changes and check which lists these contacts are on. Make note of these lists and which ones matter and would potentially have to be updated after you change the email domains of these contacts.
Static lists will of course remain the same. Active lists might have to be adjusted, especially if they’re referencing anything that’s email specific, such as subscription status, email hard bounce reason or simply keywords within the domain. For example, if your company is rebranding from acme.org to acme.com and you have lists filtering for contacts with email domains containing “.org”, your updated contacts will inevitably leave those lists. That’s why you need to review them before and potentially adjust the ones that your contacts would leave.
Let me know if you have any follow-up questions!
PS. As mentioned above, subscription status and double opt-in status are email specific, not contact specific. If you change the email address, contacts will not automatically be opted into the same subscriptions for this new email address and their new email address will also not be considered confirmed. Make sure to document before making the changes which subscriptions these contacts are opted into and which ones have a confirmed email address. This is especially important if you have ‘Legal basis required’ enabled in the GDPR options.