How do you treat generic "no-name" contacts?

[mariamarketing]

Hi,

Was hoping to find some ideas on how to treat contacts from shared inboxes of companies, e.g. Accounts@abc.co, Reception@abc.co, Manager.

We might not know the name of the person or multiple people might manage that email address.

I think it is not a great practice to add them to the CRM as a generic title.

The contact is getting added to the CRM as we are dealing with them, but personalised emails (First Name) getting sent out means these look terrible e.g. "Hi, Manager".

I thought about putting these generic email addresses under the company property but then they won't get pulled to any emails as they are not under a contact in the CRM.

It would be handy to have the history of interactions with these generic records just populate under company instead of a seperate contact. "Uniform Manager that works at ABC co." with the same contact details as the company itself is not as useful.

Any smart naming conventions or processes to get around this? 

[StefaniUAT]

Hi @mariamarketing,

Leaving the first and last name empty will default all the emails to use their email address.

We are a University and use High Schools as Companies. That way, it is easy to associate and track incoming students to their High School. We have numerous High Schools (Companies) with multiple representatives we are in touch with such as multiple teachers, counselors, etc. We created a contact for each one with their persona "High School Counselor" "Teacher". We then associated the contact record to the Company. That way all interactions are visible in the Company Timeline, and we can send emails to just counselors, or a specific counselor from that company. This way if you do speak to someone and fill in their name, the emails will start being addressed to that person by name. If you get emails from multiple people from a generic email address, add that email address as a contact, leave the name blank, and associate it with the Company. I hope this helps, if not let me know what part I am not addressing/fixing and I can come up with some other options!

[mariamarketing]

Hi Stefani,

That seems to be a good solution! When you say "persona" I'm assuming you're using the first/last name fields to put in "High School Teacher" etc, or are you using a workflow?

That's pretty much what we're doing now but not as an official process. It still doesn't solve the personalised emails problem, but as @Phil_Vallender said this is probably something that has to be monitored manually.

[StefaniUAT]

Hello again @mariamarketing,

When I say personas, I mean the HubSpot property. They have been my best friend over the last couple of years. You can use the Job Title property to add job titles to use as personalized tokens as well. If I may ask, what HubSpot plan do you have? I know they have released a beta for an AI program to search and input names, titles, etc. from email signatures from incoming emails.

[mariamarketing]

Hi Stefani!

We definitely can start using our current personas in a more useful way. We have Marketing Hub Professional.

[StefaniUAT]

@mariamarketing,

I would ask your HubSpot representative or support to see if you can join the AI email signature beta or ask when it will be released. The beta is an AI feature that scans someone's email signature and adds it to the correct HubSpot field if the field is unknown. This would help when someone who does not have a first or last name sends you an email. HubSpot would auto fill in their first and last name. 

@jennysowyrda  do you have any more details on this?

[Phil_Vallender]

Hi @mariamarketing 

Given that you don't necessarily know who the recipient is, and the fact that HubSpot deduplicates using email address meaning you can't have multiple contacts with the same one, I think the best thing you can do is leave name fields blank and take care when setting the fall back value for name personalisation field - sometimes updating email by email. 

Hope this helps.