Time Between calculated property displays only milliseconds in personalization token

[pkopp]

I wanted to create a message where we acknowledge the amount of time someone has been engaging with our organization, specifically, how long they have been a member. Using two date contact properties (let’s call them “membership join date” and “Today’s date”, a fancy property I set up following what I learned at https://community.hubspot.com/t5/CRM/How-to-create-a-Today-s-date-date-property/m-p/389836), I successfully created a Calculated contact property “years since membership join”. When viewing the property in a contact record or contact list, values displayed as 7 months, 1 year, 4 years, etc. I was thrilled (and proud)!

Then, I added that property as a personalization token to a marketing email. Thank goodness I sent myself a test message, because it--and every attempt after, using any contact’s information--displays the correct value, just represented in MILLISECONDS. So, rather than saying something like “George, you’ve been a loyal member for 17 years”, as the value appears on George’s record, it would have said “George, you’ve been a loyal member for 536,479,200,000”.

Someone helpful from Hubspot created an additional calculation property that referenced that value, and rounded off to the nearest year. That solution only got me partway, though, because I can’t use that property as a personalization token and easily add the proper time word (eg. month, months, year, years). That would take creating several contact lists and apply smart content groupings to any message in which I plan to reference “years since membership join”.

For now, I have altered our messaging to say “you’ve been a loyal member since (insert membership join year, a different property)”. But I’d prefer to use the Time Between calculated property that Hubspot [almost completely] set up for this purpose.

Would anyone find value in Hubspot updating their time between calculated property to show values in terms of weeks/years in both contact records, lists, AND personalization tokens? Or does anyone have other ideas for how to accomplish this?

Thanks,

Pete

[DStaat]

Hey @pkopp,

Have you heard of Tick Tock Today? It’s an app that creates a today’s date property for your objects. It’s available on the HubSpot Marketplace.

I’m not sure what’s causing your time between property to display in milliseconds. But this blog post demonstrates creating the same property without that happening.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. I’d be happy to hop on a call with you!
Best,
-David Staat

[pkopp]

Hi @DStaat , thanks for the suggestion! The Time Between calculated property I created displays the value I’d hoped to see (years) when viewing it in Hubspot. It’s when I reference that contact property through a personalization token (eg. in a Marketing Email) that it is automatically rendered in milliseconds in the body of the email, which Hubspot’s customer service confirmed, but said they either can’t or won’t be addressing that bug anytime soon. They recommended I suggest this idea that they resolve it.

[DStaat]

Ahhh gotcha! Thanks for getting back to me so quickly!

[Katrina_Growth]

I was prompted to vote this idea by HubSpot Support.
We are using a calculated property to display student age. Age is displayed correctly in years on the record, but when used as a placement token, the age is displayed in days. See example below.
Until this is resolved, users should be made aware that calculated properties shouldn’t be used in personalization tokens.

[VictorSanz99]

It will be good have the automatic convertion to minutes, hours or days in Reports, when you create a property that add two dates expresed in minutes, hours or days