Streamline Segmentation with Hubspot Lists
Having quick access to fundamental prospect and customer lists is key to fueling mass outreach, reporting, automation, and more. This guide shares how to upgrade a segmentation setup in Hubspot.
Why reusable, segmented lists are important
They’re the foundation for mass outreach. Reliable, active lists are essential for sending targeted emails. Sending emails to lists that are built off the same data each time vs. cobbling them together for each send is one major difference between a professional email marketing program and one that needs some updating.
Reporting gets standardized. Instead of selecting individual data points when creating a set of reports, it’s often preferable to filter by list membership. I like building out reporting this way because it results in less troubleshooting and ensures the numbers are the same.
Building out automation is faster and more accurate. Workflows also benefit from fundamental lists, because similar to using lists in reports, you can just select the lists without needing to think about the data points needed for a particular graph or workflow action.
They enable more advanced marketing tactics. It may take some work before you’re able to segment by which product a given customer has vs. doesn’t have. However, this would be important if you want to eventually run upsell and cross sell campaigns and other targeted nurtures out of Hubspot.
What are the costs of ignoring quality segmentation?
The wrong content gets sent to the wrong contacts. Quality list building takes significant time, effort, and foresight. When teams quickly generate lists, the risk of these groupings pulling up the wrong contacts is extremely high. By ignoring the process of creating thoughtfully planned core lists, targeting tends to be inaccurate.
Incorrect information is shared and bad decisions are made based off reporting. If someone pulls together a quick one off report using the wrong properties and assumes they’re able to answer an important business question with it, there’s a significant risk of going in the wrong direction. I’ve found it better to provide all relevant teammates a list of important segmentation lists to build reporting off of.
Automation gets out of control. Workflows can be complicated enough and so if list segments can help simplify them, I’ve seen it be generally a good idea. Similar to the reporting issue, if the workflow is referencing different contacts than expected, depending on the workflow, there’s a significant possibility for unexpected and/or negative outcomes. Again, having a core set of lists drastically mitigates potential issues.
Great content becomes “good enough” content. I’ve seen Marketing teams get bogged down when they need to worry about the data used to target audiences, rather than simply focusing on who they’re targeting and what they’re saying to them. At best, one-off targeting is cumbersome, even for teammates in touch with the data in a Hubspot account. The best solution I’ve found is to create reusable prospect and customer lists.
The two ways to segment
In my mind, there are only two ways to segment in Hubspot:
1. Manually specify data points each time you want to send an email or report on something (in addition to all the other things needed for the campaign). This works, but it doesn’t standardize segments and predictably leads to accidental targeting of the wrong contacts.
2. Plan out and building a set of core list segments that can be reused so you can shift focus to things like delivering high-quality content and reporting on campaign outcomes. From what I’ve seen, this is the best choice for segmentation because it creates standardization. Once built, important lists can be re-used and re-shared by everyone in the business, again and again.
List membership is widely supported throughout Hubspot and can be used to standardize reporting and saved views
List membership can be used as workflow enrollment triggers and actions like if/then statements
List membership can be used as a filter in other lists to create lists within lists
Here’s how to pull up a set of always-up-to-date, reusable, targeted lists. These will set your marketing program in the right direction for years to come:
1. Assess current state of list segmentation
Determine what works well for your setup and where things might need to be improved
1.1 - Review primary segmentation capabilities by asking a few questions. Isolate the items you wish you could segment by, but can’t do so at the moment. Here’s a list of basic questions to get started:
Prospects - Can you quickly pull up a list of all prospects? If selling to different ICPs, do you have separate lists for persona or type of prospect?
Current customers - Can you identify all of your current customers? If selling to different ICPs, do you have separate lists for persona or type of customer? How do you define “current” - is it based off their contract end date or something else?
Disqualified contacts - Do you have a way to pull up all contacts that have been determined are not a good fit for your products or services? What data point is used to track this - Lead Status or some other property?
Former customers - Can you pull up all of your former customers? When does someone become a “former” customer? How do you track this?
1.2 - Review secondary segmentation capabilities that let you break down by key characteristics. Here are some examples:
Product breakdown - Do you know which products a contact is using or potentially interested in? Are you using Hubspot Products/Line Items?
Industry - How are you determining what industry a contact belongs to? Hubspot’s Industry property or some other way?
Persona - How are you specifying personas? Hubspot’s Personal property or some other way? Is this different than the ICP or does it refer to the same thing?
Company Size - Revenue - Is this useful for your company to know? If so, where is this revenue number coming from - Hubspot Insights or some other place?
Company Size - Number of Employees - Is this useful for your company to know? If so, where is this employee count coming from - Hubspot Insights or some other place?
1.3 - Write down the lists that you have vs. ones that may need to be built out. Some useful lists include:
Example customer lists
Current and Former Customers, by Audience
Current and Former Customers, by Product
Current and Former Customers, by Content Interest
Any other customer segments you plan to market to, report on, or build automation for
Example prospect lists
Active and Recycled Contacts, by Audience
Active and Recycled Contacts, by Product
Active and Recycled Contacts, by Content Interest
Any other prospect segments you plan to market to, report on, or build automation for
2. Optimize one segment at a time.
Use these steps to optimize a given list and share it with the relevant teams.
Here’s an example of how I’d go about reviewing a list of all customers, but the same general process can be used for prospect and more niche lists:
2.1 - Review the properties that are being referenced in a given list.
2.2 - Review the filters used to refine those properties.
2.3. - Search duplicate properties and plan for their removal. It’s very common for multiple data points to be referring to the same thing in a Hubspot account. You may have to talk across to teams to get answers on why a data point is being used and if it can be removed. This is a critical step if you have duplicate properties.
2.4 - Remove duplicate properties that are not needed. For each duplicate property determined to be irrelevant, it should first be replaced with the correct property in every form, report, automation, page, etc. that is referencing it. Then it can be deleted.
2.5 - Simplify the list - The less properties used to generate the list, the better.
2.6 - Add to a “core lists” folder - It’s a good idea to keep the core audience lists (e.g. customers, prospects, etc.) organized and accessible for quick reference.
2.7 - Share the list with all relevant teammates - Insist that this list be used for all targeting and segmentation-tasks related to the given segment.
3. Shift from a property-based approach to a core list-based approach
If segmentation is set up well, the cobbling together of data for lists and reports should become a thing of the past.
While it won’t eliminate the need for data points entirely, core list segmentation is so powerful because it organizes collections of data that can be used in places outside of just email targeting, namely, reporting and automation.
3.1 - Use these lists in mass outreach - Most Marketing teams are already comfortable sending mass emails to lists. The upgrade here is making sure all relevant lists are optimized and in a clearly marked folder.
3.2 - Use these lists for building reports - Foundational lists can have a profound effect on reporting. Reporting becomes easier to build and it’s less likely decisions will be made off bad data.
3.3 - Use these lists in automation - While lists won’t be the best choice for enrollment triggers 100% of the time, they will undoubtedly simplify actions like if/then statements.
3.4 - Use these lists in saved views - Many teammates won’t have access to the lists tool. But they can still reference and save these lists to filter contacts using the “list membership” filter in the all contacts view.
Takeaways on list segmentation
It’s been my experience that spending a little bit of focus to build re-usable, always up-to-date lists results in enormous benefits across sales, marketing, and customer success operations. Here’s a quick breakdown of how to do so:
Understand the scope of what’s possible to segment on and identify what marketing wants to prioritize. Generally this centers on customer and prospect segments, broken down by audience and product interest.
Get down to as few properties as possible. If current lists reference too many properties, it’s a good idea to see how those can be simplified. If there’s duplicate properties that refer to the same thing, condense down to one.
Extend these lists outside of mass-emailing. I like to use lists because of how they standardize and simplify everything they touch. This includes not just email targeting, but also report, saved views, and automation.
