The relationships feature provides a centralized profile to communicate efficiently and effectively with related contacts.Â
đ Think: Spouses, business partners, father, son, etc. You can start conversations with more than one person and all communication with these related contacts will show on the same profile. Now it's easy to see the conversation and keep everyone in the loop.
âď¸ Tip: Merge two test contacts before going ahead and merging a lot of people into relationships!Â
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How Relationships Work
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When to Use Contact Relationships
The best practice is to use contact relationships for the people that you want to follow up with as a unit. The main benefits of adding a person as a contact relationship are:Â
- Itâs faster and easier to communicate with both of them from one profile (such as group texts, emails, and appointments).
- A cleaner database - each relationship only appears on your smart lists once.
- A better grasp on communication and the âbig pictureâ conversation with all related contacts.
Here are some questions to ask yourself as you're deciding whether to use the relationship feature:Â
- How many relationships are we talking? Is it a large number, or just a few?Â
- Are most of the relationships married couples, or other kinds of relationships?Â
- Do you want to follow up with the contacts as a unit, or as individual people?
- What integrations are you using? How do they interact with contact relationships in FUB?
Most people end up doing a hybrid model, depending on how they work with that contact and their partner/spouse. This is especially beneficial if you are marketing to some relationships as a unit (such as spouses) but others as individual people (roommates, family members).Â
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Use Contact Relationships if: | Keep Separate Profiles if: |
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Creating a New Relationship
1) Go to the primary Lead Profile you wish to add the relationship to
2) Click the + under Relationships to add a relationship, including name, email, phone, and relationship type > Save Relationship
3) Once a new Relationship is saved you can add address details
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Merging Existing Contacts to a Relationship
Mass Actions
1) Go to People > Filter to the desired contactsÂ
2) Select the contacts you wish to mergeÂ
3) Click Mass Actions > Merge People
4) Select the main person to merge data to
5) Check Merge people as relationships > Yes, Merge 2 People
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Contact Profile
Another way to merge is to go to the primary profile for a person you wish to add a relationship to.
1) Go to the main Lead Profile
2) Under Relationships, click the Merge Existing Person icon
3) Search by name, phone, or email for the contact > Select the desired contact > Merge
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 Future Roadmap Considerations
Here are some known items the team is looking into addressing in a future release. As always let us know what you think.Â
- Custom Fields (birthdays and more): Currently an automation can only send an email to the primary contact, not to a related contact.
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Third-Party Systems (Ylopo, Zapier, Active Pipe, etc.): Our existing person endpoint will return phone and email details of the related contacts under the primary, but if a 3rd party system wants to directly work with relationships they will need to utilize the relationships endpoint.
- Mailchimp syncs only the primary lead's email address.
- YLOPO uses the lead's email address to link to Stars and if the lead has multiple email addresses, the Stars link will update with the one for the email most recently online.
- Zapier - relationships canât be added via Zapier.
- Active Pipe - syncs only the primary lead's email address.
- Smart Lists. Relationship contact information is not available to view on smart lists. You can search by Relationship's names though.
- Unmerge contacts: When you merge contacts into a relationship, we presently do not have a function for unmerging the contacts.
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FAQs
We do not recommend using the contact relationship feature to track additional contacts such as vendors, the referring agent, or title company. The reason for this is that all communication with relationship contacts will be copied to the main lead profile. If the same vendor or partner appears on multiple contacts, the communication history on the profiles will quickly get messy.Â
Instead, we recommend using Custom Fields to track vendors, referrals, title company, and other partners related to the lead. The benefit of using Custom Fields for tracking is that information inside Custom Fields can be used as a filter on the People page.
Historical communications will remain on the original contact record, so itâs a good idea to copy the URL of that profile and add it to a Custom Field, Note, or Background on the new profile for easy reference.Â
We will add a way for you to trigger a Birthday Automation for related contacts but currently, you can trigger a Birthday Automation for the primary contact only.