Duplicate user created when they change Email

[davecoleuk]

We have a situation where when a user changed their email address, a second account has been created in HubSpot but the infromation was not copied across. Their opted in to our programs and marketing consent are the ones that are causing issues for our marketing team.

We have a fix in place to stop these duplicates but we still have a lot of these orphaned contacts

Has anyone had the same issue? What approach did you take to clean this up?

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

@davecoleuk so your question is how to identify these contacts and merge them? The best option here would be the duplicates tool: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/records/deduplication-of-records#manually-deduplicate-contacts-and-com...

[RBozeman]

If you can identify them manually, you can merge them manually. There should be other fields that you can use as well as ID fields - first name+last name, company name, telephone number, company domain, etc. If you would like to do this in bulk, Insycle can help. Full disclosure, I work for them in a marketing role. 

With Insycle, you can use any field as a potential matching field for duplicates. Then, you have complete control over how data is retained post-merge, down to the field level. Then you can automate the dedupe template, either on a set schedule or injected into Workflows so deduping happens after a record is created and before your communication with them starts.

[Jonas_De_Mets · Accepted solution]

@davecoleuk, to build on @karstenkoehler's feedback, I recommend double-checking if the integration can avoid creating new contacts for existing users. If not, this issue aligns with my experience as well. In our B2B SaaS application, users who changed their email addresses were duplicated as new contact records in HubSpot. Lacking an effective solution for this, we developed koalify.io to simplify deduplication in HubSpot. In our case, for example, it could identify and automatically merge records when the first name, last name, and user ID are the same.

Hope this helps!

[davecoleuk]

We have it all fixed now, the problem we have is that we have these Duplicate/ Orphaned users with the wrong email and correct marketing information and "Live" users, with the correct email address but wrong marketing information. We want to find some way to merge these to give us one users with the correct information.

We have been trying to identify if there is a way to do this within HubSpot

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

@davecoleuk so your question is how to identify these contacts and merge them? The best option here would be the duplicates tool: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/records/deduplication-of-records#manually-deduplicate-contacts-and-com...

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @davecoleuk,

That depends entirely on how exactly these duplicates are being created - where does the contact come from? Form submission, import, integration?

Which issues exactly is this causing for the marketing team? If someone provides consent to be contacted under two email addresses, they should expect to receive emails under both - and to then unsubscribe from the one they don't want to receive emails under.

Best regards

[davecoleuk]

When the user changed their email address, we updated the user via the API but HubSpot didn't update the existing user, a new one was created with the new email address. This new user was not set up with the marketing status as a marketing contact or the subscription statuses (marketing and our newsletter), Hubspot is the master for this information. This meant our marketing team could no longer market to these users.

[karstenkoehler]

@davecoleuk if you attempted to update the contact via the HubSpot API but a new contact was instead created then it sounds like the API call is not set up correctly. Can you confirm with whoever set up your integration that it's set up correctly? https://developers.hubspot.com/docs/api/crm/contacts