How do I sync email campaign contacts to HubSpot?

Last updated: April 29, 2026

Context

When running email campaigns, you may want to automatically sync the targeted contacts and companies to HubSpot to track their website activity and maintain updated records in your CRM.

Answer

To automatically sync contacts from your email campaigns to HubSpot, you'll need to:

  1. Ensure your HubSpot integration is properly configured:

    • Go to Settings > Integrations > HubSpot

    • Verify your field mappings are set up correctly

      • You can map custom fields to track play and sequence attribution by clicking "company mapping" and scrolling to view available custom fields

      • Available Unify fields for tracking include: Unify Initial Play, Unify Most Recent Play, Unify Initial Sequence, Unify Most Recent Sequence, and their associated timestamps and status fields

      • First create the corresponding custom properties in HubSpot, then map them in your HubSpot integration settings

      • This allows you to see which play or sequence each contact originated from in HubSpot

    • Make sure the "Enable writing to HubSpot" toggle is enabled (this controls whether Unify can write data back to HubSpot at all)

  2. Add the "Write to HubSpot" or "Sync to HubSpot contacts" action in your play

    • This action can be added at any point in the play

    • It's recommended to add it at the end of the play to ensure all data is collected

    • The sync will create new records or update existing ones based on your mapping settings

    • Allow up to 60 minutes for the complete sync process (30 minutes to sync from Unify to HubSpot, then another 30 minutes for the records to link back and appear connected in Unify)

    • Unify can populate blank/empty fields in existing HubSpot contacts

    • Existing field values in HubSpot that already contain data will not be overwritten

    • Changes made to existing fields in Unify (such as ownership assignments) will not sync back to HubSpot if those fields already contain data in HubSpot

    • Email activity (outbound emails and replies) is automatically logged to HubSpot even without this action. However, the "Write to HubSpot" action is required to push contact/company records and field data beyond email activity logging.

Best Practice: Place the HubSpot sync action at the end of your play to ensure all campaign data is included in the sync.

Important: If your play modifies existing fields that already contain data in HubSpot and you need those changes reflected, you'll need to export the affected records from HubSpot and re-import them into Unify to override the existing values and enable proper syncing. Note that Unify can populate blank fields in existing contacts without this workaround.

Additional Contact Syncing and Identification Methods

Automatic Contact Syncing Behavior

Contacts themselves are automatically synced to HubSpot when emails are sent from Unify sequences, not just the email activity – this happens even without adding the explicit "Write to HubSpot" action to your play.

Identifying Unify Contacts in HubSpot

You can easily identify which contacts in HubSpot originated from Unify sequences by looking for [Unify] in the email subject lines within their activity history.

This identification method provides a quick visual way to distinguish Unify-generated contacts and activities when reviewing contact records in HubSpot.