What’s best practice when two contacts share the same email address? (i.e. a husband and wife) Do we link the contacts or keep them separate? How would linking the records affect communication with them?
Hi Alison. That is a great question. There is an Additional Information field in the contact record that you can use the for Spouse name.
You can then use Merge fields to capture the Spouse Name
If you wanted to also keep track of the Spouse information you can create Custom Fields within the contact record
Create Custom Fields Help Guide
http://help.infusionsoft.com/userguides/get-started/create-custom-fields/create-custom-fields
Thanks for the quick reply! What if we need to track the husband and wife separately? They need their own record. Would linking them be appropriate or no?
The best way to link two contact records would be using Tags however I recommend looking into create a Spouse Custom Field within a contact record to make things easier. Are there specific reasons why they would need their own contact record?
We are a wealth management firm and we track items specific to each person - employment, notes, marketing. If it’s best to keep them separate and just know they would show as a duplicate record if we ran a data cleanup, then that’s fine. I was looking to see if I was missing another solution.
Got it. Since they have the same email address they would already be “linked” it only becomes an issue if they had different emails. Then you would need to apply a tag so you could locate both contacts.
However if you want to to only see if the Contact has a wife/husband when you are in the contact record you can use the “Linked Contact” tab.
http://help.infusionsoft.com/related-articles/understand-linked-contacts
It’s a legacy feature so you wouldn’t be able to use it for anything else.
Thanks!
@Alison_McLaren, if your business relies a lot on connections between contacts (family members for example) you might be interested in checking out Macanta.