When a visitor submits a form in a browser with tracking cookies tied to an existing contact record, the submission will update the existing contact record and not create a new one. Learn how HubSpot deduplicates contacts and how to turn off cookie tracking in your form.
If form submissions have inadvertently overwritten a contact record multiple times, you can restore the original contact record and recreate the form submissions as new contacts.
1. Restore the original email address in the overwritten contact record
- In your HubSpot account, navigate to Contacts > Contacts.
- Click the name of the overwritten contact record.
- In the About card, hover over the Email property and click See history.
- In the right pane, view the history of changes to the Email property. Note the correct email address before the value was overwritten by the form submissions.
- After you've identified the correct email address, in the right pane, click Close.
- In the About card, hover over the Email property and click the pencil icon .
- Next to the correct email address, click the Actions dropdown menu and select Make primary.
- Next to each of the other email addresses that have come from your form submissions, click the Actions dropdown menu and select Delete. These email addresses are recorded in your form submissions and will be reimported as new contact records.
This restores the original email address in the overwritten contact record, and ensures existing information in the contact record remains associated with the correct email address.
2. Restore the other properties in the overwritten contact record
- In your HubSpot account, navigate to Contacts > Contacts.
- Click the name of the overwritten contact record.
- At the bottom of the About card, click View all properties.
- Hover over a property overwritten by the form submissions and click See history.
- In the right pane, view the history of changes to the email property. Note the correct value in the property before it was overwritten by form submission data, then click Close.
- Hover over the same property and click the pencil icon .
- In the property, update the current value to the correct value.
- In the bottom left, click Save.
- Repeat this for every property affected by the form submissions.
Once you've corrected all the properties affected by the form, the overwritten contact record should look like the original contact record.
3. Re-import the form submissions to create new contacts
- In your HubSpot account, navigate to Marketing > Lead Capture > Forms.
- Export the submissions for the affected form. You'll receive a CSV file with the submissions data.
- Import the CSV file containing the affected form submissions. Ensure that the columns are mapped correctly to the properties.
If a contact with the email address does not exist, HubSpot will create a new contact. Since these email addresses were deleted in the overwritten contact record, a new contact record will be created for each of the affected submissions.
Please note: if you have existing contacts with email addresses matching any of the form submissions, importing the full CSV file may overwrite their property values. It's recommended to ensure that the CSV file only includes net new contacts that don't already exist in your database.