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
susanj
Member

Multiple emails is definately a must have!  I've just signed up to Hubspot and now considering whether I should re-think my decision based on discovering this challenge.

kanioma
Participant

I need this functionality badly. The system's organic response to create a new user for each email is creating utter havoc in my maintenance cycles. I have some contacts that maintain up to 10 email addresses we can use for outside communication; we need the email tracking capabilities - from the group email connection (department@xxx.com) to their direct work email (joe@xxx.com) to their private but shared email (joe@gmail.com and joe@yahoo.com). 

 

I need to have a larger number of associated emails that can be uniquely managed and manipulated to support effective communication (marketing, sales or account management) based on business need. 

Cameron_Smith
Participant

If you want multiple email addresses on a Contact, encourage all your users of HubSpot to both click on the thumbs up when you click here and to insert a comment!  We can only assume the more 'votes' an Idea gets, the higher it rises for a development solution.  Thanks everyone! 

SumpAlarm
Participant

Completely agree with all other comments. This is a basic CRM requirement - not a feature request. All of us have home emails, work emails, multiple email clients. Why is there multiple phone numbers, but not multiple email addresses? Thats crazy. Hubspot cant proclaim themselves to be a TOP TIER CRM provider and not have the capabilities. So now we have to wait for enough people to complain about it for HUBSPOT to act?

StrivePhil
Member

Definitely need this!

myitsupport
Participant

This would be a huge help for my team, especially if we can link multiple emails to one contact. 

myitsupport
Participant

Thank you for pointing me to the correct request. I didn't see that one in my search.

 

I'm excited to see that feature is in planning. 

Cameron_Smith
Participant

Agreed.  Keep posting / voting for this Idea, we are at 98 'thumbs up' -- let's get to #100 and beyond if you ask all the members of your HubSpot user team to click at the top here!

jbotelho
Contributor

Putting in my vote for the ability to add a secondary/alternate email address as a Contact Property. Consultants are a big part of our contact database. In our industry, consultants typically have 2 email addresses - 1 for the consulting company they are employed by and then 1 for the organization they are contracted to. It'd be very helpful to be able to track both email addresses as part of the same contact.

 

We'd also like to use HubSpot Forms to manage the registration for our company sponsored events. As part of the registration process, it's not uncommon for an administrative assistant to register a C-level executive. The admins want the registrant to receive the registration confirmation email however they'd also like to receive a copy of confirmation email as well. Having a secondary email address contact property would allow them to enter their email address as an alternate so they could receive a copy of the email.  

SeektheKingdom1
Participant

To all the frustrated people in this thread, you are knocking Hubspot but not acknowledging that you're shopping a new CRM because whatever you are using isn't adequate or too pricey in the first place.  

 

I had a thought, not sure how this would work on the back end if at all, but why not make deals be capable of serving an email address and templates allow deal properties?  That way you can keep each contact as the main record and use different email addresses for various deals based on that particular acquisition type or pipeline.  You'll then be able to associate multiple email addresses to a single contact.  Not a perfect solution, and again I honestly can't be confident it's even possible with how Hubspot is built.  Just sayin...

 

I've been riding with the free crm for about a year and a half and we just pulled the trigger to use their Enterprise Marketing platform.  We're in a service based industry (construction) not a merchant, but we've put together a very effecient and scalable system with all parts of our customer journey with Hubspot already.  I've seen a ton of updates and improvements since we've started and can't wait to see their stuff on steriods!  Smiley Very Happy

RichieMs
Member

How is this not a first release feature! Necessary for work AND personal emails. Very important. Otherwise it creates a duplicate user if the contact uses another. Very annoying!!


@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.


 

KBarton
Member

We are a PK-12 school. We need this very basic functionality to include not only 2 emails for each contact, but more as well. It is very common for both parents of a child to be involved in the enrollment process, and for both parents to have at least one work email address and one or more personal email addresses. We are not currently able to log this in the system for tracking or usage. The bigger picture, related issue to this is that we are also not able to associate parents together which leads to much duplication and potential high risk of confusion and miscommunication. We have asked and continue to ask for a solution to be provided ASAP. The "workaround" has been offered to create "fake" companies for each set up parents, but this creates many problems and is not a workable solution.

archilogic
Participant

This is really important feature for us as well. 

I just wanted to add that we should be able to update the existing contact based on the secondary email address via API calls, since some of the integrated system (eg. accounting software), only have the secondary email (billing email for us).

As described here: https://developers.hubspot.com/docs/methods/contacts/update_contact

 

IanRayner
Member

Roisin,

 

Who builds a database and uses an element of the data as a unique identifier? Basic database design would suggest generating a unique key for each contact record so that, in future, any item of data in the record can be changed - you are not locked in.

 

People change email addresses all the time. They change jobs. Their email account gets compromised. They have a side business, a personal email, whatever.

 

In my case, I have the incorrect email address for a contact because that was the email forwarded to me by a mutual acquaintance. I merged a record with the correct email, but it is the secondary, not the primary. It's a problem because I have to remember to use the secondary and not the default!

 

I imagine the thought was to avoid duplicate data e.g. 2 records with the same email, which would cause problems matching incoming / outgoing email traffic to a record. But a simple data validation step any time one of these fields (e.g. email, phone number) that ought to be unique is entered, would prevent duplication.

 

At this point it looks like I will have to take another look at ZOHO - fortunately I decided to experiment a little with HubSpot before committing. Your product has so many great features, but how many other flaws are there in the design that I haven't run into yet?

 

 

hshafter
Participant

It appears that this issue may have been resolved. Now, when I merge 2 emails into 1 contact, it retains the second email. The test will be whether Hubspot recognizes the "merged" email when it is forwarded/bcc'd. Has anyone tested this yet?

IanRayner
Member

@hshafter

 

It does work - in my case the emails to the correct email address get associated with the correct contact. My problem is that I can't change the primary email address which is used to populate an email - I have to remember that the primary email address is wrong and to use the secondary.

 

If the database had been correctly designed, there would be an email address table where you specify the type of email address (primary, business, personal, whatever) for each contact record.

 

If I had a thousand contacts, how would I do that?

hshafter
Participant

Hi IanRayner,

Thanks for that info and great to know!

I suppose given the limitations of the CRM, it really cuts down on manual labor to triple-check that the primary email address is the one being kept. In case where the wrong email is kept as the primary, I would probably delete the "merged" email from the record. Re-enter it into HubSpot, and then merge again ensure the correct email is kept as the primary. Hope that's a helpful workaround.

Ideally we would have the ability to identify within the record which email is which though!

IanRayner
Member

Hi @hshafter

 

Inspired by your suggestion, I did the following and it worked!:

1) Delete the (correct) secondary email from the contact, leaving the (incorrect) primary

2) Create a new contact using correct email, first and last names

3) Merge the old contact record into the new

4) Delete the (incorrect) secondry email from the new contact

 

The history all came over, so all is well.

 

I guess the way to ensure that multiple emails are associated with a contact is to create a new contact with the email you want to add. If the new email is what you want as the primary, merge the old into the new. If the new email is not the primary, merge the new record into the old.

hshafter
Participant

Great!! Glad it worked. : )

EMSAdmin
Participant

Be very careful with merging records in HubSpot. We use Saleforce as our CRM - thinking of switching to HubSpot CRM be will not because of this major issue.