Best Practice in Managing Duplicate Contacts
When managing duplicate contacts in HubSpot, we should review before making the decision to merge any duplicates.
Warning: It is not possible to unmerge records. This action can’t be undone
Here are some categories to break it down:
1. When two contacts have the exact same name but different email addresses
- Check the two email addresses.
- If one email address is a personal email address and one is a business address (but it must be obvious that it is still the same person), and the contact says which one they prefer we send emails to, then you can merge them with the preferred email address as the primary one
- If there is no indicator of what the contact prefers, they should not be merged...There's good reasons not to:
- multiple touchpoints (they can decide their preferences as mentioned)
- personal continues (if they leave the business)
- ad audiences
2. Typos in email
eg typos in emails gnail.com yaho.com
- Definitely merge these into the correct version
3. Updated email
Personal emails on hotmail and gmail
- Probably merge these into the one with most recent activity
4. User errors
- @bigpond.com and @bigpond.com.au emails i.e. a contact has entered both options when previously filling in forms.
- Look at both contact records. If we have successfully sent emails to one of these email addresses, that is probably the correct one. The best evidence is if we can see the contact Opened the emails we sent. We would merge and keep the info for the contact record that has seen/opened our emails.
- If we haven't sent emails to either of the contacts, we don't know which one is the correct email in this case. I wouldn't merge these ones because we aren't 100% sure.