How to find duplicate contacts in HubSpot without merging the wrong people.

Duplicate contacts are so obvious once you have noticed one. Bulk cleaning of these then proves to be very difficult and requires a very safety conscious approach. Note that two records with identical email address can have very different notes, owner history and activity. A review queue is much safer than a big merge button.

Start with a copy of your contacts

When copying a list of contacts to review for possible duplication for HubSpot Cleanup, export contacts first as a CSV. Be sure the export includes a field for record ID, and email address. Then other fields like name, company, etc will aid in reviewing for differences between duplicates, but should not be used to make decisions on which contacts to delete or merge to duplicate contacts in HubSpot CRM.

The recommended file would contain the organization’s specific contact information (i.e. name, company, owner, etc.). In addition, a sample export would be very useful for testing the application with the organization’s specific data prior to uploading the full file.

Separate an exact match from a decision

An exact-email match is a useful candidate signal to look at all the rows with exactly an email address that appears in other rows. But it does not tell you which contact is authoritative for that email address. Shared inboxes, imported data, and even changes in a contact’s owner can all muddle up these kinds of duplicates.

The Duplicate HubSpot Contact Finder app takes in the CSV you brought to the call and spits out a CSV and/or JSON review queue of the exact-email matches. For the simple cases of duplicates the app will include simple proposed corrections to the contacts. The app never connects to HubSpot to change/merge/delete any contacts. It simply reports out what it found in the CSV that was brought to the call.

Evaluate each set of duplicate contacts against your exported version of the contacts to determine which record holds the history for the contacts in your organization that will be using the information from the duplicated contacts. Determine whether the differences are verifiable. Decide whether the proposed change(s) to the contacts will disqualify information that cannot be re-stored.

Make the cleanup repeatable

Then, in your regular HubSpot approval process, approved changes get made to the CRM contacts for the accounts and persons in the reviewed emails and their corresponding records. You would then export another sample (such as ‘duplicate_contact_emails_exports_120_days_after_cleanup CSV’). Run this through the same process in order to complete a one-time HubSpot duplicate contact removal audit.

After reviewing duplicate contacts in HubSpot, export a small test set and recheck the same email addresses. The earlier CSV duplicate-finder app has retired. Browse current task examples for the private tool workflow. Review any proposed CRM change separately before applying it.