What option to choose for Imports?

[donrua]

I often clean and validate contact data in HS by exporting a list created with the contacts in question, running through a validation service, then importing the updated email status, etc.

When I do this, I'm asked by HS, required, to choose a GDPR legal basis. However, I don't build the lists to be uniform for these GDPR options when I'm working with list data. So, I might have a list of "all marketing contacts with a gmail address" that I want to re-validate after Google's recent purge. I export, validate, import.

But I can't say the legitimate interest is "customer" or "prospect", etc, because the list isn't built on those terms. Many of them are not. It's a mix of prospects, customers, vendors, any emails that I might need to work with at the moment. What GDPR choice should I choose that says "don't worry about it, I'm just re-importing existing contacts".

I wouldn't want to overwrite any of their existing Legal Basis with something like "Not Applicable", I just want to ignore this stuff and keep whatever basis they previously had.

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @donrua,

I would approach this differently, without an import, bypassing this issue altogether.

Since all of your contacts exist in HubSpot already, you can create an active list and set up list filters for the contacts from the import file by email address. Apply this method; copy your email addresses from import file into a list filter "Email is any of".

After saving, you get a list of all contacts that match one of the email addresses from the file. You can then compare this list with the full list you exported earlier (before validation) and then delete the contacts that make up the difference.

The legal basis stays untouched 🙂

If you want to do this by import, you'll have to break the import into segments, importing them one by one, each segment corresponding to one legal basis dropdown option.

Best regards!

[JeanLestréhan]

This doesn't work for fixing past values that were erased, or if you have a list of more than 1000 contacts.. Or maybe you want to go one by one? Isn't there a way to not overwrite the legal processing during an import? This is not a solution at all

[donrua]

I'm not sure how this gets the emails exported, validated by my tools of choice, then imported back in, without the necessity to create split lists all the time.

It seems the easier solution would be for HS to add a feature to importing, to say "skip" the legal basis step. Exactly for people just exporting and importing to do some cleanup, etc.

I apologize but I don't understand what you are describing in the middle of your answer, to show how that step would end up with all of my emails being validated. I already have active lists that pull contacts by "email is", as well as other factors that cut across segment/customer/noncustomer lines. But it seems like to work with the way the 'legal basis on import' feature works, I would be forced to export and deal with 3, 4, or more separate export/imports separated along the lines of their legal basis status, which really has nothing to do with what I'm and trying to accomplish in a validation step.

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @donrua,

What I described in my previous reply replaces the import back into HubSpot. You would still export and validate the emails the same way. It's just that there isn't any need to re-import them – you can create a list of those validated emails without importing, by copying/pasting the email addresses as described.

Does that make things clearer?