Importing contacts and updating existing contacts

[Connell1]

I need to import approximately 90 contacts to Hubspot.  About half of these people may already be in the Contacts section of Hubspot already.  After the import, I want the contacts that were previously in Hubspot to keep their original information but be updated with the new information from the import. 

So, for example, in Contacts, I have a ‘Property’ called ‘Region’, within ‘Region’ there are multiple choice options such as London, Wales, Scotland, etc.. so, someone could be allocated to more than one region.  

If Mr Smith is already on Hubspot with his Region set to London for example, and I import Mr Smith again (as I wouldn’t have known he was already on Hubspot) but when I import him again and the import states his Region as Wales, I have been told that this new region Wales will overwrite the original London region, and Mr Smith’s contact will only show him as Wales and not London and Wales.

Ideally I would want my import to update existing contacts if they are already in Hubspot, with the latest details in the import, so I want to see that Mr Smith’s region is allocated to London and Wales.

As it stands it looks like I have to go through each of the 90 contacts on my CSV file and cross check them against Hubspot in order for me to see if they are already on the system or not.  If they are on the system, I would then need to update the contact manually with the details from my file.  As you can imagine, this would be quite a long-winded way to deal with this, but I don’t know how I can do it otherwise.  The best option would be to import all 90 people, but I wouldn’t want existing contact details to be overwritten, only added to. 

Could you advise if there is a way round this please?

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @Connell1,

HubSpot will always update contacts based on the unique identifier, their email, when you import a file. This cannot be deactivated. I would recommend manually remove those 90 HubSpot contacts from your import file. 

Alternatively, you could use HubSpot's behavior to your advantage. Before importing the new file, export all contacts and relevant properties. Next, you'd first import the new file and then the recent export – effectively resetting all existing contacts to their status before the import of the new file. (An existing contact would first be updated by the new file and then updated/reset again by the import of the recent export file.) I'll add the disclaimer that this is risky. Overwriting hundreds or thousands of contacts always is.

Hope this helps!