Automated Cross-check of Contacts before Uploading them in HubSpot

[RiccardoPisani]

Hi there Hubspotters,

sometimes marketers  perform conatct uploads only for the purpose of creating a static lists against wich we perform marketing activities. Sometimes they are not able to target lists usiing HS properties so that they work on them offline (Vlookups with other lists etc...).

Problem : Imagine the case of a CSV file with only e-mails, no names, no surnames etc... it happens all the time!  Your colleague wants to run a marketing activity and somehow a new list of contacts is there 🙂 It is super urgent and the upload should be made ASAP + the colleague is 100% sure that all these contacts are already in HubSpot .

Only when the upload has been made you realize that 50% were new contacts! I have been there many times!

In this scenario the contacts won't have name, surname..etc... they are just useless. 

Suggestion:

Would be great to have a pre-upload check or a tool that let you perform a check on the list you would like to upload with 2 simple info:

- # of contacts already in HS

- # of new contacts 

Also would be great to have # of errors 

I hope this feature will be released  

Cheers,

Riccardo 

[shearn · Accepted solution]

While this does seem like a helpful feature (which you should consider posting on the Ideas Forum for others to Upvote), I think the onus should be on who is permitted to upload lists to ensure the data within those lists is correct and up-to-date. Your most valuable asset in HubSpot is your contact data.

I don't believe the new data uploaded is useless because you can always create a temporary list or use contact filters that shows newly added contacts using the List Membership and Create Date filters. At least this will let you know that the new contacts are associated with the criteria of the original upload. You could even create a temporary custom field to tag them with a campaign, event, etc. From there you can implement ways to build out their contact profile (assuming you have their consent to email them).

[RiccardoPisani]

Hi there Shearn,

Thanks for your reply It gives tons of insights.

In our company only selected people from the data-quality team and the marketing automation team can upload contacts. We do believe in what you mentioned above: our contact data is our most valuable asset. And, yes, we are talking about consent to e-mail them in all the cases.

My request is laser focused on a specific scenario: the upload healthy check.

The value and activities you can perform on contacts with no data available/collected from an import and their value is super important but that is another story that occurs only after the upload.

I know I can play with those contacts in a second time, I do it every day: enrich them, delete them, etc. But these are recovery strategy, b-plans in my scenario.

In a perfect world, the list you upload in HubSpot are perfect, in the real world they are not, people do mistakes: insert wrong e-mails within lists, misuse the the characters format. And even though these cased are few, I would like to see this number dropping to zero. As mentioned, in my scenario, marketers play a lot with lists out of HubSpot.

I would like to have the power to see how many contacts I am going to upload in HubSPot and fully decide on those uploads. To date I don’t have any instrument that let me understand the healthy level of my lists before uploading them in HubSpot, I can get the clue only after and this is smth I would like to avoid.

I hope I managed to give you a little bit more of details and I did really appreciate your feedback on this topic.

I look forward to hearing from you/other HubSpotters on this!

Have a great day.

Cheers,

Riccardo