How to use Primary and Secondary emails when syncing with Salesforce

[Jonnydk]

Hi, 

We are syncing HubSpot with Salesforce and I am receiving the following sync error "Primary Email Changed". Since HubSpot supports multiple emails per contact record, which is a good thing, is there a workaround I can use that won't affect the Salesforce sync? I am thinking of adding "Email 2" but how would I set this up for HubSpot to sync that secondary email to the correct field in Salesforce? What are other businesses doing?

[CarolineFortma]

@Jonnydk how do you manage this now?

[sharonlicari]

Hey @Jonnydk 

Apologize for the delayed answer and thank you for the information provided. 

Hey @Phil_Vallender @bradmin could you please share your thoughts with @Jonnydk?

Thanks

Sharon

[Jonnydk]

Yeah, I would offer users the ability to decide whether an email is primary or secondary and not do it automatically for them. We are using Salesforce, so any automation that HubSpot does affects our integration especially when it is emails... Maybe the product team can give users the option to automate this instead of adding the new email as a primary email address... Maybe its also better to add the additional email to an "Email 2" field instead of the same email field...

[Phil_Vallender]

Hi @Jonnydk 

I'm investigating the same issue at the moment as it happens, and I'm trying to understand all aspects of it before choosing a solution. 

What's actually triggering this issue for you? If contact updates their email address via form, the original address is pushed to secondary and the associated object is updated in Salesforce. But this error seems to indicate that a separate contact in Salesforce now has the original email address as there primary and cannot sync. 

Is this what you're seeing?

[Jonnydk]

@Phil_Vallender Yes, did you find a helpful solution or workaround?

[Phil_Vallender · Accepted solution]

Hi @Jonnydk 

Its a tricky one for sure. Email addresses as identifiers are great, until they aren't. 

In the case I was investigating, the root cause was reimporting of contacts that were already in the system after some had gained a new primary email address. So that was easy to prevent. 

I suppose the only other solution, rather than letting people update their email address in a pre-populated form, is to use the HubSpot setting to always create a new contact for an email address that does not exist in the system - unfortunately this mean no pre-population of form fields or smart questions, but it might be possible to target specific forms where this error originates and apply it there. 

Hope this helps.