How to Add Multiple Domains to a Company Record (with Caution)

Many companies (including HubSpot!) have multiple domains that represent their business. Companies can have multiple domains for many reasons. Maybe they operate in more than one country, or maybe they have acquired other companies. Or, maybe they just didn’t like their original domain and changed it, but they still keep the old domain for their email.

Just as contacts can have several emails, it’s quite common for companies to have several domains.

Last year, HubSpot broke the paradigm of having one domain equal one company by introducing Company Deduplication and Company Merge ⁠— two tools that make it possible for a company to have one primary domain, then a number of secondary domains. For example, if hubspot.com and developers.hubspot.com are merged in HubSpot and hubspot.com is set as the primary domain, all activity associated with developers.hubspot.com will move onto the company record associated with hubspot.com, and future activity will be logged there too.

Merge and deduplication are great — but they’re reactive. You can only merge two (or more) companies when duplicates already exist. There was no way to proactively add multiple domains to a company, much like you can add multiple emails to a contact.

Company Objects Can Now Have More Than One Domain

But now, HubSpot supports adding multiple domains to a company to help you keep your CRM clean and make sure that all the activity associated with a company is attached to the right company record.

You can see this for yourself by going to any company record and clicking on the “Company domain name” property. When you do, you’ll be able to add as many secondary domains to a company object as you like.

Adding secondary domains to a company means that when contacts associated with those secondary domains perform any activity, it's recorded by HubSpot, and all of that data will be automatically associated with that company record. All of those contacts’ activity (or deals, tickets, etc.) will now be viewable on the primary company timeline and available for use in Automation or Reporting, as if they were associated with the primary domain.

In the case in the GIF above, any contacts with an email name@us.hubspot.com will be added to HubSpot and will be seen in the Timeline, Automation, and Reporting as if they were name@hubspot.com contacts. It just works, which is great for you and your records.

Adding Multiple Domains Has Some Important Guardrails, Though

What you can do with multiple domains is powerful and exciting, but what you can’t do is almost as important. Here are some important guardrails for using multiple domains successfully.

1. Multiple domains are not a substitute for using company merge. If a domain is already attached to a company record and you add that domain as a secondary domain, the system will not prompt you to merge those records (yet) and data will continue to be written to the first record associated with that domain.
2. Multiple domains are not parent-child relationships. Adding a secondary domain(s) to a company does not create a parent/child relationship. It will simply aggregate data to that one record across Marketing tools, Sales tools, Reporting, and Automation.
3. Secondary domains cannot be exported. For now, if you export a list of companies, the secondary domains will not be included in the export.
4. You cannot update secondary email via the API. For now, secondary domains can only be updated manually via the UI.
5. You cannot bulk edit secondary domains. Secondary domains need to be added or removed one at a time from the record they are associated with.
6. Secondary domains cannot be synced from Salesforce (or another integration). If you have secondary domains in Salesforce or another integrated tool, they’ll have to be added manually for now.

Keeping those limitations in mind, adding multiple domains is still an immensely powerful feature, particularly if you’re selling to multinational businesses or businesses with integrated subsidiaries. This is especially true for companies using an account-based growth strategy, in which it’s crucially important that marketing and sales teams have a clear picture of what’s happening across all the contacts associated with a company. Multiple domains does just that. It gives the team the ability to proactively make sure that data starts clean and stays clean. Why not try it out for yourself?

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