How can we email secondary emails only?

[VeraDevera]

We are a new HubSpot customer (yay!) and we're migrating from our old CRM to HS. Our community members use their personal emails to opt-in and receive communications related to the community, and some of them also have business addresses in Salesforce (for product emails or for sales communications (prospect).

We primarily send the community newsletter to their personal (secondary emails) but our Hubspot CSM is saying HS can only email to primary emails (business). We welcome non-business emails so that we can follow folks around as they hop from job to job.

Ideally we could choose primary or secondary email to communicate with our members depending on the content--we thought that would be built into HS. Just wondering if there's something better we could be doing?

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @VeraDevera,

I agree with your HubSpot CSM – the only email field in HubSpot that can be used for external marketing email sends is the default Email property.

In HubSpot workflows, there is the option to send an internal marketing email to a custom email property. Internal marketing emails are supposed to be used as designed internal notifications:

You could use this to send marketing emails to custom email fields.

If you are going this route, I'd recommend testing whether all of the mechanisms like full opt-out, unsubscribes, access to preference page etc work as expected and are documented accordingly on the contact record. For regular marketing emails, HubSpot automatically excludes previously unsubscribed contacts, for example.

In other words, you could hypothetically email the default field with regular email sends and a custom email field through workflows.

However, this feature is really not meant to be used this way. As someone who's worked with HubSpot for close to a decade, I would not built a marketing email infrastructure on this.

The part I don't quite understand is: If some people sign up with their personal address, some with their business address, wouldn't all of those submissions land in the regular default Email field and wouldn't you just email whatever type of inbox they provided? This is what I'd recommend. Whatever the primary email address for the person is, legal basis for communication permitting, should also be used for marketing email sends.

Best regards!

[VeraDevera]

Some people email us and subscribe with both their personal and business
emails. How do you handle the separation between community-focused emails,
where people prefer those sent to their personal email accounts, vs.
something that's more product or non-community related?

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @VeraDevera,

A HubSpot form, from a purely technical standpoint, only takes into account one email address. You can add additional fields, but they don't mean anything to HubSpot.

HubSpot is unfortunately not really made for this specific requirement. One email address is the unique identifier. The system isn't designed for communicating to multiple email addresses per contact.

If you have multiple business lines, I'd create forms asking for personal email addresses for one, and forms asking for business email addresses for the other. In that case, make sure that forms are set to "Always create new contact..." in the settings tab of the form editor. This will create duplicates but it means you can address these contacts separately. All email addresses will be stored in the default property.

If that doesn't really apply, I would encourage users to pick one of the two and submit only one in the form.

Best regards!