Marketing email with a form - contact updates and forwards

[bw-ipim]

Hello,

I've just sent out a marketing email for a webinar invitation. In it, I created a link to a HubSpot form, which collects first name, last name and email to register for the event. Overall worked well, but I have two questions:

1. Some of the contacts entered a different name (e.g. "Mike Smith" where the contact in my CRM was "Michael Smith"). This has now updated the contact record to the name they entered. Is there any way to prevent this? To prevent overwriting issues from forwarded emails, I enabled "Always create contact for new email address," but this means I can't pre-populate the form. Any ideas?
2. Some of my emails were forwarded and new contacts then registered through the form. Is there any way of tracking who the original recipient was? If a client forwarded my email to potential prospect, I want to know which client that was, so I can assign the prospect to the same salesperson.

Hope that makes sense and thanks in advance.

[Phil_Vallender · Accepted solution]

Hi @bw-ipim 

1. The only way to prevent an existing contact from updating or overwriting an existing property value, is to not include it in the form. Really, I think, you want people to update their records with preferred/accurate information rather than leaving it incorrect or creating new records

2. In my experience, forward tracking in email marketing tools has always been an issue. Currently you can not see who forwards your email when a new contact is created this way. 

Hope this helps.

[bw-ipim]

Hi @Phil_Vallender , thanks for your reply.

Re the information. We tend to have pretty 'clean' information, and in a couple of cases we had people overwrite existing information with incorrectly formatted names or with typos.

John Smith became "JOHN SMITH" or "john smith". In one case we had someone enter a different letter at the end e.g. "John Smim". There were also nicknames e.g. "Jonathan Smith" becoming "Jonny Smith", or "J Smith".

I guess the ideal solution would be to be able to have both "create new record for a new email" and "pre populate forms". That way a user would only enter something if it was a correction.

All noted on the forwarding. Since the link to the form in the marketing email should be unique, I would have thought the system could capture this and report. E.g. contact1 was created from a form submission, directed from the marketing email sent to contact2. Maybe in a future version.

Thanks again!

[Phil_Vallender]

Hi @bw-ipim 

One more thought, you could always replicate your clean version of the data using custom properties and then put those versions in forms - that way, users can update or overwrite them, but you can preserve your original version and only update if you want to?

[bw-ipim]

Hi @Phil_Vallender , thanks for the suggestion. I think that would work but just makes it all a bit manual.

I've faced another issue - a custom field called "Contact Source". Typically this might be "Met at X event" or "Introduced by customer X", but on the form, I wanted to include the Contact Source as a hidden field set to "Signed up via form X". The problem is, this would overwrite the original source if the contact was already in the system.

Came across the below idea which would solve the issue (i.e. stop certain fields from being overwritten) but it doesn't look like it will be implemented unfortunately. Will have to stick to workarounds for now.

https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Update-Overwrite-Append-Data-Options-for-Contact-Prop...