Matching Fields on Data Import

[JLaver78]

Hi all.

This might be a silly question!

I understand that HS will match email address for contacts and URL for Companies.

What I don't understand is when importing an refreshed data set, HS  detects the email/URL has changed for a record, I assume it has other matching critera for the record to be updated/overwriten and it does not create a brand new record of the contact/company leaving the 'out of date' record still in Hubspot.

Thanks for any clarification on this.

James

[MiaSrebrnjak]

Hi @JLaver78,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community! There are no silly questions! 🙂 

That's correct – while HubSpot normally uses the email address and website URL as unique identifiers to prevent duplication of contact and company records, every CRM-record also has a record ID which can be used to update property values of existing records, even email addresses & website URLs. The easiest way to get record IDs of multiple records is with an export, the IDs will be included in the export file. You can read more in this Knowledge base article.

If you would, for example, like to update the email address of multiple contacts, export them to get the record ID, update their email addresses in the export file, and import that file. Select the record ID as the unique identifier in the next step:

I hope this helps!

Cheers
Mia, Community Team