HubSpot Ideas

whartwell

Find Contacts with Multiple Email Addresses

As Hubspot allows multiple email addresses to be stored on a single contact, we need a way to locate all contacts with more than one email address. Though Hubspot may allow multiple email addresses on a contact, our integrated systems (Salesforce, for one) do not, and we have no direct visibility into secondary email addresses created through form submissions without such a feature. Please help!

 

Thanks,

Wesley

51件のコメント
ksingleton
参加者

It sounds like we are working through some similar issues that you have. A number of people who receive emails from our organization do so using both work and personal addresses. We can reflect both addresses in HS but have to designate one as primary for email purposes. The result is our communications team tends to create multiple records for the same person to send to the multiple addresses and Salesforce won't then sync because of duplicates.  Would love to see a technical solution that prevents creating the integrations headaches.

MFrankJohnson
ソートリーダー

>>"The result is our communications team tends to create multiple records for the same person to send to the multiple addresses ..."

Wait. What?

HubSpot will not permit the creation of a SEPARATE record using an email address that already exists on a contact record.

 

JerryReid
投稿者

I think he meant in salesforce. Salesforce allows dupes unless it’s configured to not allow dupes, but once you have dupes in sfdc with two email addresses  that are tied to one HubSpot contact, then HubSpot cannot sync to both contacts. You have to merge in salesforce and use a primary or split the contact in HubSpot to sync both contacts.

MFrankJohnson
ソートリーダー

@bradmin, thought you'd find this interesting.

bradmin
キーアドバイザー

For anyone struggling with this in the interim, custom single-line text properties are searchable. If you have an integration which has an explicit email data type - say, like with Salesforce - you could write a HubSpot workflow that copies the email property from the integration into a custom single-line text property, then it'll be searchable in HubSpot.

 

In no way am I trying to suggest this should supplant the very good idea proposed here. It's just a workaround.

JerryReid
投稿者

I would like to mention that the above solution may work for providing searchability within HubSpot for end-users to alternative emails found in a system outside of HubSpot (e.g Salesorce), however, there is nothing you can do with this information from a workfow perspective to update the main HubSpot email addresses, so I find the solution quite limiting for dedupping website form fillers when they use secondary email addresses.

 

I realize that some people use HubSpot as a CRM and have concerns over choosing which email to send to for a single message, but I think the most common practice is to choose a primary and usually always send to that. With that being said, I think the biggest thing for HubSpot to focus on is it's backend workflow and API integration related to this limitation.

 

Here are some of the other issues that I've found when trying to implement a solution.

 

1) You can't reference the full list of emails in HubSpot and then use those in workflows to append into fields that you could then bring back into another system to update it's database of emails. If you export contacts list, it will only show primary. If you export the email property change history, that shows limited number of changes. So, there is basically no readable source from a workflow, file export. etc from which to base an integraton off of. The only option I am down to now is using email sent into Salesforce from the form submission with the provided email and parsing out the email and adding it via code on the Salesforce side.

 

2) The original post brings up that there is also no way to pickup on emails that are added into HubSpot from cookied HubSpot forms. In fact even the audit trail doesn't show these changes! This visibility should be there in the audit trail, exports, and in workfow both when copying, set values.

 

If anyone has any other workaround let me know, but as it stands now this appears to be the biggest gap on the HubSpot platform that I have seen so far. Earlier today I logged another idea as this one seems more focused on finding/searchability vs the API/integration use case.

jbotelho
投稿者

Would like to add my support for this functionality as well.  We use HubSpot forms for our event and webianr registrations. We repeatedly have contacts that sign up themselves and then sign up another person(s). If form browser cookies are enabled, then contact info keeps getting overwritten and causes a mess in trying to figure out who the person is. We had to disable browser cookies as this was causing huge issues with our Salesforce integration.     

 

I understand there's a fix forthcoming for the browser cookie issue however how can I compile a list of all our HubSpot contacts that have more than 1 email address? I'd like to try to fix those that are already in there. 

JerryReid
投稿者

@jbotelho How's life been since you disabled cookies on those forms? Do you just de-dupe the leads on the back-end in Salesforce programmatically?

jbotelho
投稿者

@JerryReid This issue has caused a lot of grief with Sales. When it was just Marketing using HubSpot, we'd clean up dupes and contact overwrites as we encountered them. We noticed overwrites for event registrations so we disabled cookies on those forms but kept the others active so we could track metrics. 

 

When we interfaced with Salesforce, it became a much bigger problem. If form browser cookies were enabled on a form and someone filled out for someone else, that contact not only got overwritten in HubSpot but it was then overwritten in Salesforce as well. Reps were not happy with us when their contacts "disappeared". Our only options were to disable browser cookies on all forms or not allow contact updates in HubSpot to update Salesforce. We disabled form browser cookies but aren't getting any of the metrics associated with the contacts. It's a real messy situation. I'm hoping the fix HubSpot is working on is available soon so we can enable form cookies and make everyone happy. .   

kaburke
HubSpot Employee

Hi @whartwell !  I am hoping that I may be able to assist with some of the queries you have.  With regards to finding all of the current duplicate email addresses, you can gather a list of contacts that currently have more than one email address by exporting the Email property history. To do this, navigate to the email property settings page (Settings > Properties > Email) and then click on the "Export property history" button. This will produce a spreadsheet of every contact's email history.  These email changes may contain contacts who have had an email entirely replaced by another and consequently have only one email, but most of the contacts with two or more email updates will also have multiple emails on their record.

 

While the above solution to finding the duplicates is not ideal and does involve a lot of manual work as per here we are working on the ability to export secondary email addresses with the export.

 

As we don't have the functionality to create lists/emails based on secondary email addresses (which I completely agree would be an awesome feature!) I have posted in the below link how you can trigger a notification when a contact's email address is changed so that going forward (after you have done the initial clean up) you will be able to resolve the issue manually straight away.  I hope that you find this helpful!

 

https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Trigger-a-notification-when-contact-s-email-address-i...

IRVendor
メンバー

When a client sends a link with a cookie inside the URL, the two people get combined into one corrupting the contact. In order for us to understand the scope of the problem we need a easy way to pull list that not only shows the primary email but also any secondary emails associated with our contact base. 

 

As a secondary note, it would be nice if we didn't have to edit each corrupted contact and re-enter them with ID number to fix them which adding the extra contacts into a new list to fix our list. This problem of duplicate contacts is missing out on sales and future promotions/interactions with our company. 

TheMarketer
メンバー

We really need to be able to know what are the contacts who have 2 or more email addresses and what those email addresses are. It's not even possible to get this information from downloading the field history as many email addresses are not on the contact anymore and that there is no way to know which ones are still existing or not. 

 

Ideally, I would like the 2nd, 3rd email addresses to be on a different field that would have the same properties as the main email address (online activity associated with 2nd and 3rd email addresses would still be associated with the contact). At least, make it possible for us to build it from workflows which isn't possible because email field can't be used in workflows. 

 

Currently, Hubspot is poorly designed to handle contacts with multiple email addresses.  

 

 

gescober
参加者

We have a problem where an external form allowed multiple users to submit the form multiple times which appended email addresses to a single Contact record. We disabled the cookie tracking on the external form but we now have a big mess to clean up with no Filter to identify these records and Support is unable to give us a report.

mikedupuy
投稿者 | Gold Partner

Just like HubSpot's list of duplicate records, it'd be great to have a system default tool to find all contacts with more than one email address. Exporting and parsing spreadsheets works, but it's a pain—native functionality would be way better, especially for my clients that have Salesforce integration turned on.

philipB
メンバー | Solutions Partner

I agree with Mike. HubSpot added multiple email addresses on a contact record two years ago but still haven't provided a way to surface records with more than one. This jacks up our Salesforce integration on a daily basis, and is a colossal waste of time. We have to dig through HS records to find those that aren't syncing, then go to Salesforce to find the correct primary email address, then remove the secondary from the HS record, then paste it into a separate property, then resync the record. It's such a shoddy implementation. We expect better. At the very least, give us a way to identify the list of records with multiple emails. Please!

gescober
参加者

I don't recall if it was support or similar thread but one way to get the information is by exporting the Email property history. Go to Settings > Properties > Search for Email > More > Export property history.

 

The history shows changes and additions. I haven't spent much time with the data yet, but I hope to be able to weed out changes vs multiples and then automate the process.

philipB
メンバー | Solutions Partner

I've seen that thread and tried that approach. Here's why it doesn't work:

  1. It returns records who have EVER had multiple email addresses, rather than the ones who currently have multiples. There's no way that I can see to distinguish between the two circumstances, meaning this approach gives us at best a more limited set of records to have to dig through manually.
  2. This is itself a manual approach, requiring us to export the data regularly, massage it, and winnow down the list before more manual work begins. Having to pull data out of a software platform to manipulate it on another platform just to get at information that is VISIBLE IN THE ORIGINAL PLATFORM is mind-numbing.

HubSpot does a lot of cool stuff, but some of these decisions are just bafflingly ill-conceived. 

 

gescober
参加者

Thanks for saving me hours going through it philipB. Very disappointing.

udayanw
参加者

How can we turn off secondary emails altogether? Is that possible?

Ccassidy440
参加者

I am disappointed it has taken HubSpot so long to remedy this situation.