Hey all,
Just wondering how many contact lists do you work with in Hubspot? How many campaigns do you work with? How many is too many - ie when things become unreportable and not meaningful?
Just wondering what is your function to number of leads/ contacts? E.g. with 20,000 leads do you aim to put them into 10 lists or aim to have x leads per list?
Hi @Ros100,
The number of lists varies a lot in the Professional and Enterprise portals that I’m managing. In general I’d say you want to have as many as necessary, as few as possible. Especially smart lists can start to slow your portal eventually.
Here is an overview of types of lists I use most in my day to day:
Lists of contacts eligible for marketing communication (potentially multiple ones for specific subscription types)
Campaign-specific or segmented lists**
Suppression lists (as an added layer of security for GDPR, for language management, excluding unengaged contacts etc.)
Lists needed to filter contacts by criteria not available in workflows**
Lists for data quality / HubSpot hygiene
Lists for reporting*
Lists needed for integrations
For the ones marked with *, you might need a new one here and there. The ** lists, these are the ones that you’ll probably create on an ongoing basis and should review from time to time, see here.
If the above list comes out at ~50 lists, this number will of course be multiplied in companies with multiple branches, regional marketing teams etc.
Generally, I’d also say that the number of your lists is not a function of the number of leads. You do have the option to segment but you don’t have to. If those 20,000 contacts signed up to receive an email about your content offer once a week then there’s no need to split this list into smaller lists. However, if you want to personalize your content and segment your list, I’d stop at around 10. More lists than that will become impractical and unmanageable.
Hope this helps!
Hi @Ros100
I suppose the number of lists you use depends on the actions you are performing and requirements of those lists.
If I gave the number of lists we had you mimght have a heart attack! haha
On a day to day basis - we have our FY lists that break down into about 10-15 lists 9
Our “black list” of competitors and Employees to ensure that we don’t send marketing content to those folks.
Static lists of invites for varying event invitations and product launches.
For our organization, we are a large technology company that has 6 business units/product lines specializing in different things (sometimes they cross over) so we create lists to ensure we are marketing to the correct people for specific lifecycle and interests.
For reporting we try to use contact properties more than lists, but this year we are taking a list approac as contact properties change through the year and not everywhere supports the “has ever been” functionality in order to reference the history of a property value.
long answer short, with a good naming system to manage your lists/reports and organization there is no right number of lists, each organization uses them so differently. if you are just getting started, I would write out a list of metrics you want to report on and categories that you want to group together with their purposes to plan out your lists.
Good luck!
Cheers.
LOL on your comment about having a heart attack at the number of lists. Totally agree. I have a lot and use them a lot.