Merge contacts

In your HubSpot account, you can merge two contacts into one record. Before you merge your contacts, understand what happens to the data on the contact records.

Please note: once you've merged two contact records, it is not possible to unmerge them. Learn how to create a new contact with the merged secondary record's email address.

Merge contacts

• In your HubSpot account, navigate to Contacts > Contacts.
• Click the contact name that will be kept as your primary contact.

• Click the Actions dropdown menu and select Merge.

• In the dialog box, click the dropdown menu and search for the contact to merge into the primary contact. Once you've selected your secondary contact, click Merge. The email address of the secondary contact will be added to the resulting contact as a second email address.

Please note: if you merge contacts while on a call, the call will be automatically disconnected.

• You'll be notified that the merge is in progress. It can take up to 30 minutes for all of the contacts' activities to sync.

If your merge fails, it may be due to a merge limit. You cannot merge contacts if they've been included in a combined total of 250+ merges (e.g, Contact A and Contact B have been involved in 130 merges each). Once this limit is reached, you need to either create a new contact or manually edit the contact record instead of merging.

What happens when I merge two contacts?

Contact properties

In general, the most recent value for each property is adopted by the primary contact. However, there are some exceptions to this rule:

• Email: the email address of the primary contact is maintained as the primary email address. The secondary contact's email address will be added as a secondary email address.
  • The resulting contact's Email property history will only show Merge contacts as a change source for the email value when the secondary contact has a more recent email value than the primary contact.
  • 
  • If the primary contact has a more recent email value, the resulting contact's Email property history will show the original change source, and not Merge contacts.
  • 

• Lifecycle Stage: the stage furthest down the funnel is maintained. For example, if one contact is a Lead and the other is a Customer, the merged contact will have a Lifecycle stage of Customer.
• Create Date: the value for the oldest contact is maintained.
• Number of Conversions and Number of Unique Forms Submitted: these are added together with the values for each contact. For example, if the primary contact has submitted three forms and the secondary contact has submitted two forms, the value for Number of Forms Submitted will be five.
• Marketing contact status: if your account has marketing contacts, the most marketable status is kept. For example, if one contact is set as Marketing and the other as Non-marketing, the merged contact will be set as Marketing.
• Analytics properties: these properties are resynced and you will see the total number of pageviews for both contacts combined.
• Analytics - Original Source Type: the oldest value for the original source property is kept, unless the source has been manually updated. In that case, the manually updated value will remain.
• Email Information properties: the primary contact's values will remain for these properties, including the opt-out properties.
• Legal basis: the most recent values from both contact records are kept. 

Associations

• The associated company of the primary record will be maintained.
• All deals or tickets associated with either contact record will be associated with the primary contact after the merge. Deals or tickets will remain associated with the original company with which they were associated. For example:
  • The primary contact is associated with Company A and Deal A.
  • The secondary contact is associated with Company B and Deal B.
  • After the merge, the merged contact record will retain the association with Company A and will be associated with both Deal A and Deal B. Company A will retain the association with Deal A and Company B will retain the association with Deal B.

Engagements

All timeline activities of both records will be merged and will appear on the primary contact record. A merge event will also be added to the timeline. To check if a contact has been merged before, click the Filter activity dropdown menu and select the Merges checkbox.

List memberships

• The secondary contact is removed from all static lists.
• Active list memberships may change as a result of data changes that happen during the merge.

Communication subscriptions

This only applies if you have GDPR settings turned on. The contact record will have a set of subscriptions for its primary email address, and another set of subscriptions for its secondary email address.

Sources

Visits from the secondary contact are kept in sources; however, they will be linked to the primary contact.

Form submissions

• If the secondary contact submits a form from a device it had previously submitted on, the submission data is deduplicated and associated with the primary contact.
• The secondary contact's email address is permanently associated with the primary contact. If the contact submits a form from a device they have never submitted from but uses email address from the secondary contact record, this submission will be reflected on the primary contact's record.

Workflow enrollments (Professional and Enterprise only)

• The secondary contact will be unenrolled from all workflows.
• By default, the primary contact will not automatically enroll in any workflows as a result of data changes that happen during the merge. You can choose to allow merged contacts to enroll at the time of the merge in your workflow settings.
• Moving forward, the primary contact can be enrolled in workflows due to property changes or actions unrelated to the merge. 

Salesforce sync (Professional and Enterprise only)

If you have the HubSpot-Salesforce sync enabled, merging contacts in HubSpot will have an impact on Salesforce.

Please note: if both of the records you merged in HubSpot were syncing with Salesforce, it’s recommended to merge the records in Salesforce. You will want to keep the Salesforce record that’s syncing with the primary contact record in HubSpot.

• Since each HubSpot record can only link to one Salesforce record, following the merge in HubSpot, only the primary contact will continue to sync to the Salesforce record.
• If the secondary contact that was merged into the primary contact was syncing to Salesforce, that record in Salesforce will no longer sync to HubSpot because the record no longer exists.

Can I unmerge contacts?

It is not possible to unmerge contacts. You can delete the second email address in your merged contact and create a new contact with that second email address.

• In your HubSpot account, navigate to Contacts > Contacts.

• Click on the name of the contact.

• In the About card, hover over the Email property and click the pencil icon edit.
• In the dialog box, next to the additional email address that was merged into the original record, click the Actions dropdown menu and select Delete.

You can now create a new contact with the deleted email address.