Clean Contact Country

Challenges with the HubSpot country property

The country property on HubSpot contact records have the problem that they are a text field. This means that users can enter country names in various formats and spellings. Importing contacts from other sources often also have country data in different formats. This leads to inconsistent country data, making it difficult to accurately segment and target your audience.

For example: running a mailing for all contacts in the United States would be possible by creating a filter to select all contacts that have a country "United States". But often there are other contacts who have "u.s.a.", "USA", "United States of America", or even other languages like États-Unis. This means you will not be mailing your whole target list and missing on valuable opportunities.

Another common use case where this is an issue is sales reporting. Your sales managers will probably use the HubSpot reports capabilities to analyze their pipeline, deals, contacts, and territories. They will not be familiar with all the problems and different spellings in the country property, making them look at partial data. This often leads to confusion where they share reports with numbers that don't match other reports, because they simply didn't account for all the ways "United States" is written in the country field.

Options to solve country inconsistencies

One of the best options is to change the Country field to a dropdown field where it can only have a predefined list of countries. This way ay data stored in the property will be forced to follow the normalized values.

The difficulty with this approach is that you need to create a new Country property, migrate all your existing contact's data to the new format, and also make sure the new property is used everywhere you have dependencies. Often the country field is used in many other areas such as your data warehouse integration.

Additional complexity is that the original country property can't be renamed or archived, making it challenging to make sure all your users are using the new field. Hiding the values of the default country field is an option, but not ideal because the fact that the property exist will still keep showing up for your users, resulting in endless questions and confusion why they don't have access to the field, overloading your revenue operations or sales operations teams.

Simple solution solving country property inconsistencies

A simpler solution is to always normalize any text value in the country field. This way any data in the default country text property will be checked against the allowed list, and updated to follow the allowed normalization.

For example, "United States of America" would then automatically be changed to "United States", so it's always consistent across all your contacts. Here are a few very common examples, and their normalized value:

1. "u.s.a." -> "United States"
2. "USA" -> "United States"
3. "États-Unis" -> "United States"
4. "royaume-uni" -> "United Kingdom"
5. "deutschland" -> "Germany"
6. "spian" -> "Spain"
7. "Itlay" -> "Italy"
8. "Russia" -> "Russian Federation"
9. "uae" -> "United Arab Emirates"

This solution will work if we have the following things in place:

1. Always normalize any incoming country name to the allowed list. Please look at switching this setting on under App Settings -> Configuration Options
2. Run the Contact Country Properties Job to clean up existing values.

This ensures that all country names are consistent, making it easier to segment and target your audience effectively.

Unrecognised country values

The job type will run all country values through a manually verified list of common misspellings and variations. This helps to catch any inconsistencies and ensure that all country names are standardized.

When a value is not recognized, it will use AI to suggest the most likely correct value. If the AI is not confident, it will flag the value for manual review. We will not change the value in the field in case we are not confident in the correct value.

Normalized Country list

The Contact Country job will format the country data for all your contacts into the following final list.

It's mostly based on the ISO 3166-1 country codes. Countries are listed in their English names.

Where ISO names were long, they have been shortened for ease of use in HubSpot forms and reports. For example, "United States of America" has been shortened to "United States".

Where possible, we have also aligned as much as possible with the Salesforce standard country list.

• Afghanistan
• Albania
• Algeria
• Andorra
• Angola
• Antigua and Barbuda
• Argentina
• Armenia
• Australia
• Austria
• Azerbaijan
• Bahamas
• Bahrain
• Bangladesh
• Barbados
• Belarus
• Belgium
• Belize
• Benin
• Bhutan
• Bolivia, Plurinational State of
• Bosnia and Herzegovina
• Botswana
• Brazil
• Brunei Darussalam
• Bulgaria
• Burkina Faso
• Burundi
• Cape Verde
• Cambodia
• Cameroon
• Canada
• Central African Republic
• Chad
• Chile
• China
• Colombia
• Comoros
• Congo
• Congo, the Democratic Republic of the
• Costa Rica
• Cote d’Ivoire
• Croatia
• Cuba
• Cyprus
• Czechia
• Denmark
• Djibouti
• Dominica
• Dominican Republic
• Ecuador
• Egypt
• El Salvador
• Equatorial Guinea
• Eritrea
• Estonia
• Eswatini
• Ethiopia
• Fiji
• Finland
• France
• Gabon
• Gambia
• Georgia
• Germany
• Ghana
• Greece
• Grenada
• Guatemala
• Guinea
• Guinea-Bissau
• Guyana
• Haiti
• Honduras
• Hungary
• Iceland
• India
• Indonesia
• Iran
• Iraq
• Ireland
• Israel
• Italy
• Jamaica
• Japan
• Jordan
• Kazakhstan
• Kenya
• Kiribati
• Kuwait
• Kyrgyzstan
• Lao People’s Democratic Republic
• Latvia
• Lebanon
• Lesotho
• Liberia
• Libya
• Liechtenstein
• Lithuania
• Luxembourg
• Madagascar
• Malawi
• Malaysia
• Maldives
• Mali
• Malta
• Marshall Islands
• Mauritania
• Mauritius
• Mexico
• Micronesia
• Moldova, Republic of
• Monaco
• Mongolia
• Montenegro
• Morocco
• Mozambique
• Myanmar
• Namibia
• Nauru
• Nepal
• Netherlands
• New Zealand
• Nicaragua
• Niger
• Nigeria
• North Korea
• North Macedonia
• Norway
• Oman
• Pakistan
• Palau
• Palestine
• Panama
• Papua New Guinea
• Paraguay
• Peru
• Philippines
• Poland
• Portugal
• Qatar
• Romania
• Russian Federation
• Rwanda
• Saint Kitts and Nevis
• Saint Lucia
• Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
• Samoa
• San Marino
• Sao Tome and Principe
• Saudi Arabia
• Senegal
• Serbia
• Seychelles
• Sierra Leone
• Singapore
• Slovakia
• Slovenia
• Solomon Islands
• Somalia
• South Africa
• Korea, Republic of
• South Sudan
• Spain
• Sri Lanka
• Sudan
• Suriname
• Sweden
• Switzerland
• Syria
• Tajikistan
• Tanzania, United Republic of
• Thailand
• Timor-Leste
• Togo
• Tonga
• Trinidad and Tobago
• Tunisia
• Turkmenistan
• Tuvalu
• Uganda
• Ukraine
• United Arab Emirates
• United Kingdom
• United States
• Uruguay
• Uzbekistan
• Vanuatu
• Holy See (Vatican City State)
• Venezuela, Bolivarian Republic of
• Vietnam
• Yemen
• Zambia
• Zimbabwe
• Anguilla
• Antarctica
• Aruba
• Aland Islands
• Saint Barthélemy
• Bermuda
• Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and Saba
• Bouvet Island
• Cocos (Keeling) Islands
• Cook Islands
• Curaçao
• Christmas Island
• Western Sahara
• Falkland Islands (Malvinas)
• Faroe Islands
• French Guiana
• Guernsey
• Gibraltar
• Greenland
• Guadeloupe
• South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands
• Heard Island and McDonald Islands
• Isle of Man
• British Indian Ocean Territory
• Jersey
• Cayman Islands
• Saint Martin (French part)
• Macao
• Martinique
• Montserrat
• New Caledonia
• Norfolk Island
• Niue
• French Polynesia
• Saint Pierre and Miquelon
• Pitcairn
• Reunion
• Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha
• Svalbard and Jan Mayen
• Sint Maarten (Dutch part)
• Turks and Caicos Islands
• French Southern Territories
• Tokelau
• Türkiye
• Taiwan
• Virgin Islands, British
• Wallis and Futuna
• Kosovo
• Mayotte
• American Samoa
• Guam
• Hong Kong
• Northern Mariana Islands (the)
• Puerto Rico
• United States Minor Outlying Islands (the)
• Virgin Islands (U.S.)