Create contacts in your conversations inbox

There are two ways to create contacts directly from your conversations inbox:

• Create a contact manually: ask for a visitor's contact information while chatting, and create the contact manually in your inbox.
• Email capture setting: after initiating a conversation, visitors will be prompted to enter an email address so you can follow up via email if they close out of the chat widget before you can reply.

Create contacts manually

While chatting with a visitor, you can ask for their contact information and create a contact record for them directly from the inbox.

Please note: if you're using Facebook's chat plugin on your website to chat with visitors, visitors that send a message as a guest without logging in to Facebook Messenger will appear as unknown visitors in the inbox. You'll need to manually enter their information to create a contact record in HubSpot following the steps below.

1. In your HubSpot account, navigate to CRM > Inbox.
2. In the left sidebar, click a chat conversation to open it.
3. In the right panel, click + Add Contact.

4. In the right panel, enter your visitor's email address. If a contact is found in your database with a matching email address, you can click Save to associate your visitor with the existing contact. If the visitor doesn't exist, click the Create new tab enter their email, first name and last name, then click Create contact.

If you've connected a Facebook Business Page to HubSpot but are using Facebook's built-in messenger widget to chat with visitors, visitors that send a message as a guest without signing into Messenger will appear as unknown visitors in the inbox. You'll need to manually enter their information to create a contact record in HubSpot.

Create contacts with the 'Email capture' setting

If you have a chat channel connected to your conversations inbox, you can turn on the Email capture setting so that visitors can enter their email address while waiting for a reply. A visitor will see a prompt to enter their email address either right after the chat is sent or after a minute with no response. If they enter their email address and click the send icon send, they'll be created as a contact.

Learn more about turning on the email capture setting in chatflows. 

Please note: if the chat launcher is set to display an away message, a default email capture message will display instead of the custom Email capture message in your settings.

Automatically create a contact

Visitors cannot be added to your HubSpot contacts database automatically simply by starting a chat. They're still associated with an anonymous tracking cookie until you receive either an email address from them or manually add them as a contact.

If a visitor leaves your site before they're added as a contact, they will still have a unique cookie associated with their browser. If a visitor you have previously chatted with later returns to your site in the same cookied browser, the chat widget will load their conversation history.

If the same visitor returns to your site after deleting their browser cookies or on a different device, the cookie will not be the same and their conversation history will not be loaded.