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
In Beta
November 02, 2017 08:54 AM

The ability to add multiple emails to a contact is currently in beta!

In Planning
April 06, 2017 08:01 AM

151 Replies
globalblurb
Member

Yes I am also in this favour. Minimum 2 email addresses fielld.

JCalDigital
Member

No. This is a BASIC CRM NECESSITY. I've only entered a dozen deals into the system, and 2 people already have more than 1 email address.

 

As a consultant, I have 6 business email addresses. Every professional CRM from Nutshell to PipelineDeals to Nimble etc. all offer this core functionality. I'm sorry, but this pisses me off.

 

When we spend so much time to set up a system - even if free - & it's slapped together lazily because you don't care about your free users as much as you should.

 

Take a note from Google. Had their search engine sucked (you know... the product designed for free users) NO ONE WOULD HAVE USED THEM.

 

PS - My venting is in regards to more issues than just that. The entire layout of the Deals page is outrageously incompetent. Not really trying to be a jerk, but it's a little too obvious your team isn't trying very hard to improve, unless the CRM was launched this month.

Oscarrsm
Member

Hi Guys,

 

this is a very important feature. I don't understand why the secondary email addresses are supported for the platform users and not for contacts...

TexKen
Member

Is there a way to define more than one email address for a contact in Hubspot CRM?

ThomasP
Member

Good question. Interested and waiting as you for the answer 😉

BrettLanguirand
HubSpot Employee

Hi @TexKen @ThomasP,

 

Contacts in Hubspot can only have defined email address.  We have seen some customers create a custom property called "Secondary Email", but it is just a single line text field to store an additional email address.  The functionality of sending emails from the CRM or de-duplicating contacts would not work with a custom property like this. 

 

I'm not sure if something like this would work for either of you, but it might be something to think about.

 

I found this Idea on the previous Hubspot Ideas forum which requests that this functionality be added to the product.  I don't know if it is going to be possible for our product team to implement this functionality, but Please feel free to vote for the idea.

 

Let me know if you have any questions.

 

Brett

ThomasP
Member

Thanks for the answer !

Jose_Hernandez
Member

I think it is critical to be able to link in a contact profile with their LinkedIn profile. Many individuals use their personal email address for LinkedIn and a different professional one. Adding a second field who is also used to search LinkedIn would permit to feed data from LinkedIn directly into the CRM.

Jems212
Participant

Badly required as it's currently tracking the one person as two different people and their notes and records aren't up to date if someone calls us we could be looking at only half their activity and notes as some activity might be saved in a work email and some in a personal email. thanks 

AllanArrow
Participant

In reality many people have at least 2 emails: work and personal. I have 3 or 4. The bigger issue is when a customer sends me an email from his home email add, will the email properly attach to his record? Seems to me that hubspot, in this respect, might be poorly thought out. Why would having more than one email address prevent proper de-duping? Why couldn't de-duping be based on the field "email" while other emails could also be associated with this record? 

 

I just had a situation where a spouse emailed to ask a question. The family is registered under the husband's email. I added an "Email2" text field to my contacts and added the wife's email, but when I search, Hubspot can't find the record. This is a serious flaw in the design or coding. I should at least be able to search and find the record. 

mfinocchiaro
Member

@Jems212 we have the same problem... and I know I'm in HubSpot's CRM under 2 contacts -  my work and personal emails, based on the types of emails I get from them! We can't keep on top of the merging of the contacts who use more than one email, and we miss a lot of things based on what info lies in which account.

Jems212
Participant

@mfinocchiaro agree! We ran in to that same issue yesterday again.  Someone had booked one appointment via her personal email and another by her work email so now her history is in two seperate places. We don't want to merge as she would no loonger receive our marketing emails to both her email addresses and because we need to continue to reply to the email address she used initially for her queries.  

RealtyButler
Participant

I agree as well. Not having two email addresses makes it impossible to properly track when prospects are emailing as they may contact us from different addresses. Without manually looking each time, it gets really messy. 

TeresaFisher
Member

I'm a recruiter - candidates first come to me via a jobbaord which uses a a unique job board email address - then as the relationship develops it is via their actual email . So really need to be able to have both logged under one contact .

wedotraining
Participant

HI Brett

This is quite simply outrageous.

I am so impressed with Hubspot and was creating a csv file ready to import from our old CRM, but have now discovered the inability to add extra email addreses to a contact

This is such a shortoming and oversight that I can't use Hubspot if this is going to be the case.

Are there any plans to address this in the near future? I notice a 'Pending' Idea/thread about this with over 800 Kudos and 90-ish comments. When does a community issue become part of the plan for development changes?

In addition to this should be the ability to mannualy overwrite any email address in the 'To' field of the email editor (like tyou can in the CC field)

 

Thanks

Nearly converted

Andy

 

BrettLanguirand
HubSpot Employee

Hello @wedotraining,

 

I certainly understand your frustration.  We receive this request a good amount (as you saw on the Ideas Forum), but I don't have insight into when/if something like this will be changed or what that change would actually entail.  While other CRMs might have that ability to have multiple email addresses, they might not have some of the functionality that the free Hubspot CRM has.

 

I'm sure our product team would love to be able to flip a switch and simply allow multiple email addresses, but it isn't that simple.  Email address is the unique identifier in Hubspot, so allowing multiple email addresses on a contact record immediately complicates things - how do we handle de-duplication, how do we log emails on the correct contact records, can secondary email addresses be used on multiple contacts (info@, billing@, help@, etc.)?  There are just a few questions that need to be asked, and once they questions are answered, the product has to be adjusted to accomodate those answers.  

 

I hope that at some point I'll be able to update this post and let everyone know that it is possible to have multiple email addresses on contact records, but for now, it is the expected behavior to only have one email address per contact.  

 

Thanks,

Brett

 

AllanArrow
Participant

OMG! I can't believe you mentioned that it is "free", as if it is a "less than fully functional freeby giveaway to get you to sign up for a new phone plan. Why not assign some programmers to figure it out and charge for it? Or figure it out, knowing that it will push us into your other products? I'm very interested in some of the higher end things like built in telephony etc. BUT I can't consider the cool premium products IF the CRM doesn't have this MOST BASIC functionality of facing the reality that people have multiple emails. So the email is the main identifier? Can it be that hard to make the "main email" as the main identifier or generate a unique ID number based on a person's first registered email? What you don't seem to see is that NOT FIXING THIS FLAW IS KEEPING A LOT OF PEOPLE FROM MOVING UP TO YOUR AWESOME PREMIUM PRODUCTS. You are damaging your sales because you are NOT HOOKING us on the CRM and then upselling us. Right now we CAN"T move to Hubspot as a company because you won't let us, because you won't fix this obvious flaw. Fix the flaw and I'll move my team over to Hubspot tomorrow. Then we'll begin experimenting with the other sales products. Can't do that right now because you are locking us out.

roisinkirby
HubSpot Product Team

Hi @AllanArrow @TexKen I wanted to follow up on @BrettLanguirand's post to provide some further context.

As Brett confirmed, this functionality is not currently possible. This is because HubSpot's contact databse is built on the basis that contact records are associated with one unique email address. This allows the software to a) de-duplicate recores based on email (find out more here) and b) allow users to automatically associated contact and company records.

 

The fact that this thread alone has generated so many replies is of course indication that the ability to have multiple email addresses per contact, in some way or form, is a use case for many HubSpot users. Your feedback is important, and as Community Manager I can assure you that the Ideas Forum is monitored by our Product Teams.

 

In full transparency, we are in the process of migrating featre requestions from ideas.hubspot.com to here on community.hubspot.com, where you will be better able to track the progress of your ideas. To date, Brett and those of us on the Support team are not able to provide a roadmap for if/when this feature will be implemneted, but your idea post as well as this conversation will be fed back directly to our product teams.

I would encourage you to include as much detail as possible in the commentary of the idea, e.g. example use cases, as this helps our Produt Team investigate the request but also helps other users identify and vote for feature requests that effect them. 

If you have any concerns about the Community or Ideas Forums then please feel free to reach out to me direcltly.

 

Thank you,

Róisín

roisinkirby
HubSpot Product Team