Validate contact emails in your CRM

Overview#

Keeping your CRM contacts validated becomes very important as you scale your demand generation to ensure that your sales team is only spending resources on the most relevant prospects. Use Hubspot webhooks with Cargo to set this up.

This guide will show you how to automatically validate emails for HubSpot contacts in batches based on a specific time interval.

Get started with Hubspot webhooks in Cargo#

Step 1#

Set up your input variables to the workflow

Inputs used in the workflow are set up in the variables node at the beginning of the workflow. This node is used to define the parameters that will be passed through the rest of workflow as inputs to the rest of the nodes.

To power this workflow, the following variables are needed:

• emailVerificationDate: The date of the last email validation, by default this is set as today's data
• inputEmail: The email address of the contact that needs to be validated
• inputEmailDomain: The domain of the email address that needs to be validated
• contactFirstName: The first name of the contact that needs to be validated
• contactLastName: The last name of the contact that needs to be validated
• contactJobTitle: The title of the contact that needs to be validated

Step 2#

Receive contacts that are due for validation from Hubspot

You will also require a field in the Hubspot contacts object that stores a date of the last validation per contact. This field will be used to filter contacts that are due for validation.

Create a new workflow in Hubspot that sends a payload to Cargo when a specific condition is met.

At this stage, define a rule for this workflow to trigger when the date of last validation is older than a pre-defined time interval (for example every 6 weeks).

Step 3#

Validate contact emails

When you receive a list of potential contacts from HubSpot, it's crucial to ensure that the email addresses are accurate. In Cargo, choose an email validation node (Zerobounce, Neverbounce, etc.) node to check each email's validity directly from your workflow.

Next, if the node above indicates that an email might not be valid, use the Scrubby tool to double check emails that fall under the 'catch-all' category. This two-step process helps ensure that you're reaching out to valid contacts, optimizing your outreach efforts, see here for a detailed explanation of how Scrubby works.

We recommend employing two branch nodes in tandem, one each for basic email validation and catch-all email validation, for this purpose.

Step 4#

Enrich the contact email, when required

In case that either of the first or second branches identifies an invalid email, you should enrich the contact for a valid email.

Select your favorite enrichment provider from the node catalog to find valid emails for the contact.

When selecting this node, you can use an enrichment tool that you're already subscribed to (e.g., Zoominfo, Cognism, Apollo, Clearbit) or choose new providers available with Cargo credits (e.g., PeopleDataLabs, Waterfall.io).

Step 5#

Update the CRM

Your workflow should converge at this point to a Hubspot node which serves to update the contact object.

Within the Hubspot node, map the email field to reference either the original email or the enriched email addresses, whichever is the valid one.

Additionally, you will need to update the date of last validation column in the Hubspot with today's date to avoid it unnecessarily re-enrolled into the workflow.

In case an enrichment was required in the step above, you can also update other fields in the contact object to retain the most relevant information for the contact (such as job title, current company, etc.)