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.

151 Replies
hvy_weight
Contributor

I was told by Hubspot that this feature is now "Live".  However, the system is setup only for merging contacts, and so if you manually need to add an email address to a contact (something we do 100's of times a day on the phone), this is the process to an add an email address: 

(1) Create a new contact

(2) Add your desired email address to the new contact

(3) Go back to the original contact

(4) Click on Merge

(5) Find the newly created contact

(6) Merge

 

I would like to suggest that the capability extend to allowing the user to manually add an email address - the same when clicking on the "Phone" icon gives the user to manually add another phone number, clicking on the "Email" icon should allow the user to add another email address.

 

jhporte
Participant

I would not call that a solution - I would call that a "work around" - hopefully that is not their final answer.  

eloyd
Participant

I hardly consider that a "solution."  More of a "cumbesome workaround."  I don't see why having a "email address 2" field is so hard?

macbikegeek
Contributor

@hvy_weight Are you saying that the second email address from the merged contact is retained in the combined contact? All the merges I have done lose the second email.

eloyd
Participant

@roisinkirby No offense, but didn't you just provide a link to this same request?

hvy_weight
Contributor

@macbikegeek yes, this feature has recently been released by Hubspot.

macbikegeek
Contributor

@hvy_weight with all due respect, I just merged two contacts and the behavior is the same - the merged contact email address is gone in the merged contact.

hvy_weight
Contributor

@macbikegeek I don't work for hubspot. I would suggest that you ask them why this is not working in your account.

BIF
Member

We are desperate for multiple email addresses for a contact. We have cases with people with multiple records (multiple emails) and different HubSpot Owners for each record. They are receiving multiple communications from our organization, because of the different emails, and it's just not cool. 

paulanz
Member

Creating a manual field for secondary email now....Yes to this g, for many reasons - social profile usually is attached to a personal email, people sign up to access marketing whitepapers/guides with personal/junk email, and we're a software company and need to track Google Play/Apple store related email which is 99% of the time is different to work email.  So benefits would be: more accurate tracking of prospect/customer activity. remove risk of overwriting email addresses due to zapier integrations...seeing all activity for customer/prospect properly, not divided across mutliple 'contacts'

IanRayner
Member

Hi

@hshafter @EMSAdmin @roisinkirby

  - I came across a partial solution for the "email as table key" problem.

 

I have a number of contacts whose email I do not yet have - most of my new contacts come from LinkedIn and I often message back and forth a number of times before getting an email. I found it frustrating that I could not start immediately tracking the relationship in HubSpot as I thought you had to have an email.

 

Turns out you can create a contact in HubSpot without an email. Furthermore, if you do that, you can add and edit the email later! This doesn't solve the multiple email problem, but it does solve the problem where the email is immutable.

 

If soemone on the tech side could weigh in on the possible risks if doing this it would be great.

shawnfreeman
Participant

I NEED this to avoid duplicates when people use a personal and a work email.

LM
Member

like phone numbers, ppl tend to have more than one...

TELLandTRAiN
Member

@lsirac wrote:

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.


Gotta have this. comma separated in the same field would be nice. I notice with merged contacts you use <first email> and <second email> format.

jesse_AMPTAB
Member

Here is a response that my team is using to better handle multiple email addresses. It's unfortunate that you need to creat a new contact, then merge the contact to add a second email address vs. just adding in the word "and" or adding a semi colon to signify a second email address.

I do see how if the email address is being used as the unique identifier that this would cause problems but maybe if you assign each email address to a GUID as a record_ID, then maybe you'll be able to have more flexibility on adjusting and combining email addresses for one contact. I'm sure this would be a major core change.

Thanks so much for contacting HubSpot Support!

It is totally possible to assign multiple emails to one contact. When you merge the contacts, the primary email of the contact you are merging to, will be the contact's primary email. The email of the contact you are merging will become the contact's secondary email, but will still live in the email property field. Please be aware, once you do this, you will not be able to create a new contact with that secondary email address. Here is a helpful walkthrough from our academy on what happens when you merge contacts, I think you might find it helpful!

Sincerely,
Andrew

CrazyIdealist
Member

PLEEAAAAAASE add this feature! Thank you! 

Schooper
Member

I'm going to add to the fodder, this is so needed, beyond needed, required

Dunkirk
Participant

The work arounds in HS for limiting contacts to one email address (and companies to one doman) are draconian.  Tracking deals and tasks where contacts have multiple email addresses and companies multiple domains can't be done properly in the Sales screens. You have to manually associate each email with a different address for the same contact.  You have to create new companies for each new domain for the same company.    

peter2
Member

Actually, there is one really clunky solution: You can create a dummy contact with the second email address and then merge it to the first contact. This way you can have as many emails as you wish.

Form submissions will be attributed to the correct contact no matter which one of the emails will be submitted.

Don't know how this works with the email integration though.

 

Edit: Just noticed that jesse_AMPTAB already mentioned this solution 🙂

emcosenza
Participant

I also agree that this is essential for the free version. Many people have two different emails even for the same company (like a shortened one). Even if I merge the contact, I want to have both emails in there.