Export contacts to bulk edit

[spotlight_sound]

I've read a couple of other posts but i'm not confident they've given me the right answer.

The issue I have is my contacts have a custom property for a contact (ID), this might ba 'Supplier', 'Competitor', General Customer' etc.etc. It is a check list.

I've over 1000 contacts that need updating so can I,

- Export the contacts

- Edit the custom ID field in a CSV, using checklist values

- Import the amended records back into hubspot

I need to make sure:

- It will not duplicate any contacts (I believe the e-mail address must be present for this)

- All previous assocatiated companies, deals and other records remain.

So in summary I am just updating 1 custom field with this export/re-import, no other properties or links in the contact will change.

Thanks

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @spotlight_sound,

When you tick the box to select all contacts on a page, the bar below should appear:

When you click the link, all contacts on all pages will be selected.

Hope this helps!

[spotlight_sound]

Thanks @karstenkoehler .

I did start the filtered views and bulk editing process but as you can only view select within the 100 contact max view it started to become very tiresome and I thought there must be a better way. 

I will definetly use the contact ID as the reference, I thought Hubspot could only do it by email address but that may have changed.

Many thanks

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @spotlight_sound,

Depending on how many options your check list has you could also work with filtered views and bulk edits. You'd navigate to Menu > Contacts > Contacts > More filters, search for your property, set the filter to "[Property] is any of Supplier", select all returned contacts and bulk edit them. You'd have to do this one by one, for each option of your property. Feasible if there are 5 options. Not so feasible if there are 50.

Your solution works perfectly well, too. If you export your contacts, they will come with the HubSpot contact ID. If you keep this column, you'll be able to tell HubSpot during the import file to use it as a unique identifier. (This is a bit more reliable than using the email address as unique identifier, as you mentioned there could be contacts without an email address. Per default, each contact has a contact ID in HubSpot.)

To make sure that you're not accidentally updating any other values (if, for example, a contact has filled out a website form while you made the edits in Excel which you'd be overwriting with your import), I'd recommend only importing two columns: the HubSpot contact ID and the column for your custom property. HubSpot will each contact based on the HubSpot contact ID with the new value in the custom property column.

Hope this helps!

[Peco]

Hi KK,

I'm working with the Industry field on Contacts. We have data on many records and need to normalize these and change the record type to dropdown. I can export all records but need to save many data values (as we don't want to re-enter them). Can I convert this Industry field to a dropdown type? If so, what would be the process to do so? Thanks!