HubSpot Ideas

lsirac

Enter 2 email addresses for a contact

Some businesses benefit from entering 2 different email addresses for a single contact. For now, they create a custom property "secondary email", but if someone fills in a form with this secondary email, they have to manually merge the contact every time.

HubSpot Updates
May 29, 2017 01:27 AM

Hi @ChrisHanlon @TexKen @AllanArrow @Cameron_Smith @Géza_Molnár thank you all for your feedback on this thread. I do however urge you all to vote and comment on the official feature request for this idea, to ensure you are all taken into accout by the HubSpot product management team. Check it out here: IDEA: Enter 2 email addresses for a contact

 

Thanks!

151 Replies
hshafter
Participant

Hi Roisin,

I am also coming across this issue. I recently switched to Hubspot from another CRM and did not realize until too late that only 1 email can be tracked. I agree with some of the comments above, that the main email should be the primary identifier, however, the software should have the capability to search multiple email fields, and attach the BCC'd/FWD'd email to the matching contact(s). It may be possible that one person shares a secondary email with someone else -- then the email should be copied to both contacts. This would prevent a lot of duplicate contacts being creaeted, which I must constantly merge manually in my CRM.

Thank you for considering this approach,

Heather

mrh
Member

I agree 100%. I've been entering the contacts twice, with separate emails. It just makes sense that there is a field for a second email.

linkedinninja
Member

This is a HUGE issue with me. My target market is required to have their official business email monitored by compliance. As a result, there are messages that I need to send and track from their personal email address to avoid the monitoring. This is a MUST HAVE! With Microsoft adding a mini CRM to 365, I may have to use that instead if this isn't fixed. Particularly if they integrate it with LinkedIn.

Géza_Molnár
Member

Hi,

When I buy a bicycle I am not inerested how bearings work... I want to get from A to B and be my guest to add some requirements of comfort. Thus, what you wrote is an insight into the technical side of the topic - irrelevant for me, The User of HubSpot /if you don't mind the capitals/.

My two cents, email address as an ID of the contact-record is a... 'peculiar' decision.

Furthermore, I tried to associate/link/connect (whatever your jargon would be) a contact to more companies. Guess - did not work: left the last one only. It's more then common that people have roles in various organisations - this is the era of the startups, don't you agree?

Basicaly, I face certain situations when n:m relations of various items are part of the reality - to keep it on the technical side. Building a CRM and etc. apps based on 1:1 assumption... khm.

Btw, yes HubSpot has some cool features - there are bicycles with cool features that 'alter' the basic functionality. In the XXI. century, when IT resources are (almost) endless, keeping the code this simple is somewhere before the MVP. /again, my opinion/

Best.

selikas
Member

Most people have more than one email address (e.g. work and personal) so would be helpful to be able to store them all in one file as opposed to mutiple records. One primary default email (where campaigns are sent) and others which a customer may also use. 

jhporte
Participant

Sounds great - but why limit it to 2 emails? If you are going to create a secondary email - create an array of them.  We have clients who have multiple emails- some from the same company (eg. fred.flintstone@acme.com fred@acme.com fred.flintstone@acme.parentcorp.com) etc.  

 

I would set a primary email on a contact and then allow for 1 or more secondary emails.  When a new email is sent in via BCC, etc. you would look up that email against any and all primary and secondary emails to match to the client. 

 

When you merge customers (I currently have one customer with 3 emails), pick one to be the primary and shove all of the other emails in as secondary. 

 

We migrated from Pipedrive and their system worked that way - 

 

Thanks!

Cameron_Smith
Participant

Hi there, we recently switched from Salesforce to use HubSpot, but we too are very frustrated that we cannot use more than one email with a Contact.  We end up with multiple Contact records for one person now, it is a complete headache and we may need to switch back to the old Salesforce + MailChimp combination that was clunky and more manual in nature, but it certainly worked.

 

Community Managers, thank you for your responses, it is clear this isn't an easy switch for you all.  At Salesforce, the unique identifier is a unique, Salesforce Account Number -- why not do the same with a unique HubSpot Account Number and not have any fields like an email address be limited to just one on a Contact?  This is about as major a limitation as I can think of for HubSpot, please fix!

AllanArrow
Participant

This  is a basic flaw in Hubspot's VIEW OF THE WORLD. They think the CRM is a freebie that doesn't contribute to the financial well-being of their company, so they don't want to spend the money to fix it. Because it is free, they NOT US undervalue their CRM. If the CRM could handle multiple emails, then we would switch to it and probably take the money we are spending now on a CRM and put it toward Hubspot's other paid services. BUT we can't do that until the Hubspot CRM works like a real world, grown up CRM and allows more than one email address per record.

ChrisHanlon
Participant

I'll vote in favour of finding a way to add multiple email addresses. 🙂 

 

Until then, though, a couple of points...

 

It's a kludge, but what I do is just let the CRM create a new contact.  When I see someone that I know is an existing customer at the top of my contact list, I know what's probably happened.  It takes 2 seconds to merge those contacts, and end up with all of the timeline information in one place.

 

Second... I'm a tester for the android version of the app.  One thing I've noticed is the exceptional responsiveness of the dev team.  For all the above posters that are feeling discouraged about Hubspot over this less than perfect functionality... I wouldn't worry too much.  IF there is a way to accommodate us, I'm sure it's in the works. 🙂

roisinkirby
HubSpot Product Team

Hi @ChrisHanlon @TexKen @AllanArrow @Cameron_Smith @Géza_Molnár thank you all for your feedback on this thread. I do however urge you all to vote and comment on the official feature request for this idea, to ensure you are all taken into accout by the HubSpot product management team. Check it out here: IDEA: Enter 2 email addresses for a contact

 

Thanks!

philipp
Member

Please do this feature!! Soon! Thanks

myitsupport
Participant

I'd like a field in the Contact's profile for an alternative email, to list personal and business emails. I have multiple contacts that I have to merge weekly because they use multiple email addresses and the Hubspot Sales email tracking creates a new contact each time. 

amp
Participant

there needs to be an option for an existing and merged lead to select/pulldown multipe email addresses.  you should not have to have two duplicate contacts nor should you have to delete a record.

roisinkirby
HubSpot Product Team

Hey @myitsupport to clarify, are you looking for the ability to be able to enter two / multiple emails for one contact record? If so please see this feature request: Enter 2 email addresses for a contact

andyb
Contributor | Gold Partner

I completely agree with the users' comments. I have just switched over from Insightly, am now paying £500 + per month and the one email address to one contact is a major issue. 
To an extent, I could live with it short-term if there was a way to manually link a received email to more than 1 contact when forwarding from Gmail (same an Insightly does), but there isn't. So emails get split over several 'same' contacts & we completely lose the thread of the conversation. 
This is basic stuff for a CRM system.
Thanks
Andy

andyb
Contributor | Gold Partner

I completely agree with the users' comments. I have just switched over from Insightly, am now paying £500 + per month and the one email address to one contact is a major issue. 
To an extent, I could live with it short-term if there was a way to manually link a received email to more than 1 contact when forwarding from Gmail (same an Insightly does), but there isn't. So emails get split over several 'same' contacts & we completely lose the thread of the conversation. 
This is basic stuff for a CRM system.
Thanks
Andy

Cameron_Smith
Participant

Agree this is a MAJOR issue.  We recently switched from Salesforce to use HubSpot, but we too are very frustrated that we cannot use more than one email with a Contact.  We end up with multiple Contact records for one person now, it is a complete headache and we may need to switch back to the old Salesforce + MailChimp combination that was clunky and more manual in nature, but it certainly worked.

 

Community Managers, thank you for your responses, it is clear this isn't an easy switch for you all.  At Salesforce, the unique identifier is a unique, Salesforce Account Number -- why not do the same with a unique HubSpot Account Number and not have ANY fields like an email address be limited to just one on a Contact?  This is about as major a limitation as I can think of.  I cannot recommend HubSpot yet, please fix!

christareed
Participant

2 email addresses is an absolute necessity. PLEASE make this change 🙂

eloyd
Participant

Not only everything that's already been mentioned, but we do a lot of government contracting where the contract officers have multiple emails depending on which computer they're sitting in front of (hard to explain).  So it might be "Chris Smith" or "Chris A. Smith" or "C. A. Smith", each with a different email.  But they're all the same person discussing the same deal.

 

Andzejs
Member

We are evaluating solution but lack of multiple emails per contact will be dealbreaker. We use Highrise with less functionality, but they have resolved this issue from the day one. Can't believe this should even be discussed. About 30% of our customers would use multiple email addresses, how do we forward their emails to HubSpot?