HubSpot Ideas

MPamintuan

Allow Two or Multiple Names for one shared Email

A lot of our clients use a shared email address such as info@company.com 

 

Becuase HubSpot CRM can't have multiple names for one email, the most updated name will always replace the previous name when importing. This makes it a big hassle and inconvenience since our organization has different departments who deal with different stakeholders from the shared email address so we always end up updating the Contact Properties Name / Contact Owner when we have to. 

17 Replies
KristeenRomero
Participant | Platinum Partner

This would be super useful. We're currently working with a client in the healthcare industry, where multiple family members often use the same email address when filling out forms.

 

This has the potential to update the contact record's name to their children's or their spouse's. Doesn't look great when we accidentally send a marketing email addressed to a minor, or promote healthcare products that don't match the primary contact's target group.

inigolekunberri
Participant | Diamond Partner

+1

rayfirnbach
Participant

Agreed on this.

 

I certainly understand the rationale to reduce errors, but this is important for associating contacts.


We have a client who has 4-5 people send out of marketing@company.com . When they send in support requests, the ticket record is only associated with the one contact associated with the email.

 

Is there any way to use the technology that analyzes & pulls phone/address info out of the email to rotate through contacts who have the shared email?

 

Ex: is a shared email, find name & phone, bounce that against data existing in the CRM, associate the most-likely contact.

 

That's not nearly as clean as 'associate the email' but it's worth asking for a solution to the current process of 'disassociate wrong contact, copy/paste correct contact email to associate the right contact' a couple times a day.

PDuque
Participant

It's a must have, we have several customers sharing the same email

DGuas
Member

Really good idea. We have a music school and several kids are between 4-12 and they do not have an own mail adress, more than their parent's so it is difficult to separate customer profiles for each student if it's not possible to have them associated to their parent's mail-adress (which is the same, of course).

JvanderWerff
Member

This is a must for Staffing agencies since they all work with HR departments that use a shared inbox. Therefore multiple contacts with one e-mail address.

CArthur7
Member

+1000! 

 

Use Case:

In instances where our customers have purchased multiple subscriptions, the purchase information of their original subscription is overwritten by the new subscription details.

 

Suggestion:

Please allow users to select/specify our desired 'Unique Identifier' property when importing contacts.
ex) Phone Number, Role, a custom property such as 'Subscription ID')

AAllen58
Member

My company echoes everything CArthur7 (see above) just said. Allowing users to select/specify our desired 'Unique Identifier' property when importing contacts is exactly what's needed. The majority of businesses have their own and those who don't could default to Hubspot's identifier.

 

The current way of deduplicating by combining/overwriting contact records makes businesses look foolish and inaccurate at best and opens certain businesses (like financial institutions) open to risk and liability if they send the wrong content to the wrong person, such as a minor. 

 

It is a huge problem and is making my company research other options. A shame, because we love everything else Hubspot has to offer. 

Grey
Participant

IMHO.. having a shared email address conflicts with HubSpot's encouragement of creating high-quality contacts based on trust and identity/data verification. Here, it is more of a marketing tool than a CRM. We use HubSpot for both and more. Allowing multiple contacts to be listed for the same email address is a necessity for all of the reasons above - but would also require a tagging mechanism for the primary receiver of marketing emails.

katherineladue
Contributor | Diamond Partner

Has anyone figured out a good workaround for this besides just using a placeholder email address, maybe with a custom object or something? We have a client for whom this is going to be a huge issue, and placeholder email addresses help a little bit to at least get the records into the database but there's so many HubSpot sales tools that you can't use when you don't have an actual email address in the default email address field. They went through the whole sales process not realizing that this would ever be an issue so they're understandably very frustrated right now. 

esteeratliff
Contributor

I didn't even realize this was a real issue until we ran into it today. I just assumed that everyone had their own email addresses, BUT could be included in a distribution/shared email address. So, i would create "real" contact records for the singular email addresses & then a generic shared contact record for the distriution email address. Well now, we finally ran into a customer where their employees really do not own their own email addresses and just share one address. As a data person, that is a CRAZY concept to me lol but now we're just trying to find a resolution. 

DavidGeorgeHall
Member

💯 yes please. This is important for us. 

rodericks
Contributor

Is there any update on this? 

FDelvaux
Member | Platinum Partner

We have the same issue for our financial services client. A father buys a financial plan - which is eligible for his wife and his son - they are on the same plan.

As they have the same email not able to associate the wife and son to this financial plan.

Each person as a unique ID but the same email.

What do you recommend?

As it is rather urgent - for an enterprise HubSpot account

 

 

 

medmindermedia
Member

I'm in the same boat, I'd like to be able to have two separate contacts have the same email address.

It would be helpful to have the option to add another contact identifier like first and last names.

We sync our info with Salesforce, and we are able to have multiple contacts with the same email address, but when the data comes back to use in HubSpot it isn't helpful.

AnnaMbudo
Participant | Diamond Partner

We have the same issue working with several banks who have clients from one same household who have different bank accounts but share one email.

Would be very useful!

KGomes2
Participant

Very important to our organization, and others in the financial industry (I've attended quite a few seminars where HubSpot has been highlighted as the potential "unicorn" product if only the email as the unique identifier issue was solved). Without this, a lot of financial instituitions are walking away from using HubSpot due to the limitation. 

 

While we use HubSpot, it has prompted conversations about potential product additions/reconsiderations due to the unique identifier limitations.

 

HubSpot you are very close to opening up the doors to be the "Unicorn" product and getting a great deal of market share for a lot of industries, not just the financial sector. Highly recommend this is pursued further.