Dealing with Contacts whose email changes

[JimH845]

Hubspot is tracking emails on our business deals. However, we've had 2 types of situations where a contact's email address can change.

1. Multiple situations where companies have merged or changed names, so the email address changes.

2. We have also had contacts who change employers so their email address changes.

If I change the contact's address, does the previously saved information still reflect the old address (which is helpful for histor) or does it overwrite the previously recorded email address (which is more of a problem because we lose history with regard to the company that was invovlved)?

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @JimH845,

The email address is the unique identifier in HubSpot. Generally HubSpot will treat two different emails as two different contacts. There are some exceptions, more on that below, but if a contact enters your CRM under a different email address, HubSpot will create a separate contact record. That way, you have the full history of both versions of the contact or company.

If you want to deduplicate these contacts, you can merge contacts. The primary contact record will remain after the merge. The secondary contact will be merged into the primary record. More on the effects of merging under the previous link.

As mentioned above, there are a few situation when HubSpot will automatically merge the contact. For the use cases that you're describing, the major one is unlikely: If someone has accepted website cookies, comes back to your form, is recognized by HubSpot (form option "Always create contact for new email address" disabled, see here), HubSpot would update the previous contact to have the new email address. With contacts who change employers, it's very unlikely that they would access one of your HubSpot forms through the same device with the same cookies however.

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