Although the official AMA ran between January 23rd and 27th; I’m keeping eye out for your questions and comments beyond these dates.
Having been an active HubSpot user for nearly a decade, I think HubSpot Lists Tool might be the most underrated tool in the veritable swiss-army knife that is the orange, sprocketed, CRM platform. In this week’s AMA, I’m going to share my personal must-have lists, use cases, tips, and tricks and also invite all of you to share your “eureka” moment(s) and favourite HubSpot list that make slicing, dicing, and using your data easier. But before we dive in, let’s start with the “Why”.
Segmentation, Segmentation, Segmentation
Segmenting a database for marketing purposes allows a company to tailor its marketing efforts to specific groups within the database, rather than treating the entire database as a single entity. This can be more effective because it allows the company to speak directly to the needs and interests of each group, rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach.
There are many ways to segment a database for marketing purposes. Some common methods include segmenting by demographic information, such as age, gender, and location, as well as by interests or behaviours. For example, a company that sells outdoor gear might segment its database by activity, such as hiking, camping, or cycling, and then create marketing campaigns targeted specifically at each of those groups.
Segmenting a database can also help a company more effectively allocate its marketing resources. By targeting its marketing efforts at specific groups, a company can ensure that its marketing dollars are being spent on campaigns that are most likely to be effective, rather than spreading its resources too thin.
In summary, database segmentation is important for marketing because it allows a company to tailor its marketing efforts to specific groups within its database, making its marketing campaigns more targeted and effective.
FYI - these segmentation paragraphs are courtesy of ChatGPT, not a bad effort in my humble opinion.
Using HubSpot Lists in HubSpot
In order to highlight the important and central role lists should play in your HubSpot setup, let’s first look at the various features that “feed off” lists.
Email Lists
The most obvious and common one are your email distribution/subscriber/newsletter lists. Depending on your business and audience the details of those lists will inevitably vary but in essence you’ll be juggling a number of different lists to make sure your marketing emails reach the right inboxes.
Lead Scoring & Nurturing
With a Professional or Enterprise subscription you have the option to customise the existing HubSpot score property as well as build your own scoring properties. Lists are useful in two separate ways - one to actually set a score (i.e. a contact ends up on a product/service interest list = 15 points), and secondly to build lists based on the lead score (i.e. score between 50-100 warm leads) which in turn can be used for reporting and smart content.
Smart Content
This is the part where having a broad list/segmentation strategy in place will really pay dividends. You will be able to use lists to create smart content options across various HubSpot “assets” such as landing pages, website pages, blogs, emails and CTAs - show existing customers different content than “fresh” leads.
Reports
Lists don’t only come with their own performance tab which nicely charts a list’s growth over time, and which can also be saved as a report. They are perfect as the data source or inclusion/exclusion filter when building custom reports in HubSpot.
Views
The more data you have in the CRM, the more important is the creation of useful views for the various users in HubSpot. One downside, at least at the time of writing this, is that view filters are limited - both in terms of the object properties you can filter by and the logic operators for filters, i.e. in a contact view you can only filter by contact properties and multiple filters can only be combined with an AND logic. Lists are more powerful and can be used as view filter criteria allowing for a bit more flexibility.
Workflow Automation
Workflows are another HubSpot feature where lists can be used in more than one way, three actually. The most obvious one would be to use list membership as an enrollment trigger, either on its own or in addition to other criteria. We also have a workflow action to either add or remove contacts or companies from a static list. The third, and in my opinion most powerful use of lists in workflows, is the suppression option in the workflow settings. It means we should have simpler workflow enrollment criteria that focus on “positive” triggers and handle exclusions and exceptions via the suppression feature.
Ads Audiences
You can use contact and company list in order to create audiences for your connected ads accounts.
My Top 10 must-have “lists” for any HubSpot portal
Let’s look at some lists which I think should be in every HubSpot portal. I have to admit this list has been constantly growing since the first draft of this AMA and it is by no means a “complete” or “ultimate” list. I would love to hear from the community which lists you think are a must have.
1. Lifecycle Stage Lists - you might not need it for all lifecycle stages, but I highly recommend having individual lists for at least for the stages of lead, opportunity and customer. Assuming the HubSpot default setting for associated contacts and companies when a deal is created is active, associated contacts and companies will become an opportunity. We might want to exclude those contacts from some/all marketing emails or remove them from lead nurturing workflows to not interfere with ongoing sales negotiations.
2. Lead Status - this very much depends on your use of the lead status property (I’ve held another AMA about this a while ago), but if your lead status options are well defined having a few lists will help with reporting and accountability of sales reps.
3. Lead Scoring Ranges - in a nutshell, think about this like a traffic light approach to lead scoring. There is an ultimate threshold that will make an unqualified lead a marketing qualified lead, but happens on the way there? If we assume a score of 100 = MQL, we could have the following: 0-35 = cold leads, 35-60 lukewarm leads, 60-80 warm, and 80-99 hot leads. Having those lists would allow us to target specific groups, enrol them into lead nurturing campaigns, serve smart content and run reports, i.e. how is the size of these lists shifting, how long are contacts in those lists, etc.
4. Good Fit/Bad Fit lists - I’ve worked in B2B marketing for nearly 10 years, and I know one thing that is hard is ruthlessly weeding out bad fits. Whatever makes a really good fit, and more importantly, a really bad fit - create a list for it. A frequent conversation I’ve had with B2B customers was “what about students who sign up or download something”. By all means, keep them in the system but put them on a “bad fit” list because **bleep** will freeze over before they buy your six-figures per year IT solution.
5. Email Health Lists - I didn’t want to list all of these individually but having unsubscribed, bounced, bounced reasons, subscribed/opted-in lists for your subscription types should be the norm if you frequently send marketing emails via HubSpot. Of course HubSpot’s email health tool shows most of that information, having your own lists that grow or shrink over time will give you flexibility when it comes to reporting and building dashboards.
6. DOI Confirmed List - Creating a list of those contacts who have their DOI status confirmed. This in turn allows the use of smart contact on a thank you page, if you are on the list you get the content for download, if not a prompt to check your emails to confirm your DOI status is presented instead. Thanks to @RomyFuchs1 for this recommendation
7. The Losing Interest List - Thanks to @Jnix284 who said “in addition to the unsubscribed, bounced, etc. lists to keep your CRM healthy, the “don’t send to unengaged contacts” is a great feature, but having a list to warn you and automate workflows before they become unengaged can help you better classify your leads before you lose contact altogether.
8. Data Hygiene Lists - from something as simple as all contacts without a phone number or postal address to something more complex like missing object ownership or object association. Creating lists for properties or data associations which are important to your business, simply means you start measuring the problem and easily create reports and dashboards based on those lists.
9. Product or Service Interests/Purchase - whether you sell services or products, you’ll want to capture and analyse what is the interest in those and who has bought what already. I feel this alone could be its own AMA - should interest/purchase be two different properties or one, how granular do I go, where and how do I set those values - but the bottom line is you will want to have some (even top level) segmentation and understanding of what products/services a prospect is leaning towards.
10. Personas - saving the best to last! You should be working with personas. Remember less is more. If you have more than half a dozen personas, this would be my reaction:
But all joking aside, you should have lists for your various personas. Of course reporting is the obvious choice but this is also the prime use case for smart content.
Now it is your turn! What do you think of my short list overview? Anything you wholeheartedly agree or disagree with? What are your must have lists that you can’t work without? I’d love to hear from you.
Frank
PS: I mentioned smart content a few times. Personally, I think it’s one of HubSpot’s most powerful features. But as we all know “with great power comes great responsibility”, so my advice on using smart content is this: start small. Maybe use a smart CTA in an email or landing page, or have a smart banner or paragraph in an email, and see how it goes.
) 
