FAQ Fridays - Add your Questions for our AMA on Nov 15

[jbrewer]

FAQ Fridays are your opportunity to ask questions about HubSpot tools and strategies and get immediate advice and guidance from a HubSpot expert. Plus, you'll benefit from hearing the questions of other HubSpot users just like you.

Our first session on Friday November 15 2019 at 1 pm EST is dedicated to a crucial element of HubSpot - contacts. 

We'll answer your questions live. Some items we plan to cover are:

- contact list hygiene

- using default and custom contact properties

- auditing your database

What else would you add to this list? Is there a certain question(s) you'd like us to address?

Share your questions below, and use the 'upvote' feature to help us prioritize the questions we'll cover during the session.

Note: Any questions not answered live will be answered here. 

[jbrewer]

Thanks for joining our first FAQ Fridays session.

Here's the session recording in case you missed anything or would like to rewatch.

Feel free to continue asking follow-up questions here!

Hope to see you next time.

[Customer-1st]

I am new to HubSpot and due to my lack of knowledge I'm finding your instructions video's are over my head.  We are an unusual company in the fact that we have both client and independent contractors contacting us daily.  Is there a way to automatically seperate client contacts from IC's?  There are two of us that receive only client contacts, but others in the company that recieve only IC contacts.  It appears everyones contacts are being filtered into one comapny contact list. 

Secondly, I have attempted to send out a company newsletter through the marketing option but it keeps asking me to select a future date.  I have done that twice but the newsletter has yet to send.

On another note, I have put in 3 ticket request over the past two months and no one has replied. 

[jbrewer]

@Customer-1st 

To distinguish your client contacts from IC's, you'll want to create a custom contact property that you can use to 'tag' them differently. Once the contacts are appropriately tagged, you can create a list which references that customer property. Here are instructions on how to create a custom property and here are instructions on how to create a list. 

Here is a help article which describes how to send a marketing email. 

Sorry to hear that you haven't heard back from support, that is very surprising. If you're having trouble with anything you mentioned here or still haven't heard back from support - please reach out to customersuccessteam@hubspot.com and we will make sure to get back to you in a timely manner and check on that. 

[MFrankJohnson]

Recommendations for managing HubSpot Contacts with multiple email addresses as they create multiple leads/contacts in Salesforce when using the HubSpot-Salesforce native integration.

[Totally understand if this question is too nuanced for this AMA.]

[jbrewer]

@MFrankJohnson 

In this scenario, you'll want to make sure the two email address are merged into one contact in HubSpot. Once merged, the native HubSpot Salesforce integration should only create a Salesforce lead for the primary email address, not the secondary email address. 

help article here

[SGLPGT]

Just looking for advice on managing contacts in general, as far as keeping them up to date. Do other companies hire a full-time person to do this for them?

Also, with the auto-import of contacts from email, keeping those under control and getting them on appropriate lists, and possibly deleting ones that have been inactive for a long period.

Our bill gets bigger and bigger, and it's painful to see when it seems like a lot of them might be inactive/irrelevant contacts, or bad email addresses.

[jbrewer]

@SGLPGT 

I’ve worked at HubSpot for 6+ years and worked with hundreds of businesses on topics like this. I’ve found that most companies have a dedicated resource who is responsible for marketing, including managing the contact database.

With smaller companies and startups, that marketer often has other responsibilities and it may be a smaller portion of their work. I recommend having clearly defined responsibilities for who is responsible for managing the database -- it will be important to both marketing and sales efforts. Much of the work will be front loaded with mapping out a clear vision on how you want the database to look and how you’ll leverage properties and segmentation to get the most out of it. Once everyone is aligned on that, ongoing maintenance won't be as much of a time commitment. We recommend 'cleaning' the database about every 6 months.

You can control the 'auto-import' of contacts by toggling the 'log in CRM' checkbox on or off for a given email. If you're sending an email to a contact that you don't want added, simply uncheck that box. You may not need/want EVERY email send to be tracked in the CRM.

(help article here)

[wbero]

Seeing today's topic is focused on Contacts and auditing data, I'd like to ask how others best manage the shifting of contacts from company to company? 

It is not uncommon for engineers we work with to be somewhere new every year or two (less if they are on a contract), and editing their data in Hubspot has proven...challenging.  

[jbrewer]

@wbero 

HubSpot contacts are unique by email address. If a contact in your database leaves their company and goes to a new company, they will naturally get a new email address. If you’re able to recognize that this happened, you have a few options. 

Option 1 You can simply edit the existing contact and update the email address in HubSpot. This will allow you to retain all the historical activity on the contact record and it will overwrite the previous address. Help article here.

Option 2 If you know the contact is working with both companies or you don’t want to overwrite, you can add the new email address to the existing record and keep both of them on file for one contact. In HubSpot this is called a secondary email address. You’ll always have to designate which is the primary and which is secondary, but they will both connect to the same record. Help article here.

Option 3 If the same contact ended up becoming a new contact in your database -- meaning you have two that are really the same person, you can merge the two contacts into one.  Help article here.

[jeyso10]

Is there a way to sync Company Name on contacts with Name on a company? We've noticed that we sometimes have inconsistencies here which affects the data we pull in lists.

[TamiJK]

I'm struggling with keeping email activity up to date in Hubspot. If a contact emails me (without responding to a thread that was generated in Hubspot) it appears to be excluded from the activity on Hubspot. Is there a way that Hubspot can identify an existing contact and automatically include the email in the contact activity?  Thanks! 

[jbrewer]

 @TamiJK 

HubSpot will automatically track sent, and consequently received, emails to contacts if the “track” button is checked off. As you mentioned, if the email conversation is not initiated by a HubSpot tracked email, replies will not automatically sync into HubSpot. So if you receive an incoming email from a contact on a non-initiated thread, the only way to have that logged in HubSpot is to forward it to the CRM. You can send to HUBID@BCC.Hubspot.com and that will successfully log it. Help article here.