So, if you want to let a contact update their phone number, their address, or nearly any other detail about themselves you can do it by sending them a link to a landing page or a web form, right?

And if you use a hidden field for Email address then they won’t even see their email address and the system will automatically know which contact to update with the new info.

A common example of this is building an email preferences center for your subscribers (here’s a demo on how that one works).

But this method has one glaring restriction: It doesn’t allow your subscribers to update their email.

You could expose the email address and let them change it, but because Email acts as the unique identifier in Infusionsoft this means when they click “Submit” Infusionsoft would notice the new email and would create a new contact record – giving you the original contact with the original email, and a second contact with the new email address.

Not ideal, right?

So, the solution – well, if you have a membership site you can normally create a profile or “my account” page and let them update it there.

But Infusionsoft also offers a built-in option for handling this – it’s under the Marketing >> Settings section.

Because this section is largely considered legacy it seems to remain undiscovered to most people.

This handy feature also includes options for triggering automation, and giving the subscriber access to a few extra fields to update (Billing Address and Phone Number).

Check it out:

One caveat to this feature is that you can’t really edit/adjust which fields they are able to update – you can choose “email only” or “contact info”, and if you select contact info it will let them update their First and Last Name, Billing Address (Street, City, State, and Post Code), Phone Number, Email and Language.

The reason I point that out is because I don’t see a way to adjust these options, or to add custom fields, or even add an option for Country.

That’s it folks – tuck this little trick in your bag of tri – er, I didn’t plan that sentence very well.

Anyway, if you use this in your business (or plan to) leave a comment below and let me know.