CRM

alexagatiss
Contributor

Building Strong Segmented Lists for Marketing

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I work for a small business and one of our biggest marketing challenges is creating strong list for email sending. Our industry has a lot of turnover so lots of bad data in HubSpot. Can anyone share a list of best practices for building email lists that are solid?

 

I have worked at other companies where segmented lists were already established, but have less experience building lists from scratch that perform well. 

 

One specific question is would be great to have a list that contains the main points of contact within each account. As emails are exchanged since they have sales extension/connected inbox, a lot of times accounting contacts, etc are added into the account and there is a long list of contacts in each account, but not all of them should receive the email. What are some best practices for this?

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karstenkoehler
Solution
Hall of Famer | Partner
Hall of Famer | Partner

Building Strong Segmented Lists for Marketing

SOLVE

Hi @alexagatiss,

 

If you have a lot of turnover and haven't cleaned up your list in a while, you could consider the use of a list validation tool like Neverbounce, Zerobounce, Emailhippo, Verifalia – some of which integrate directly with HubSpot. These tools check whether an email address is still valid and can protect your reputation by avoiding a hard bounce.

 

Beyond that, the main best practice is to make sure that only contacts are added to email lists that have a legal basis for sending emails (a documented opt-in in a subscription type) and, if necessary, a confirmed email address.

 

https://knowledge.hubspot.com/records/manage-your-subscription-preferences-and-types

 

In lists, you can filter for this here:

 

karstenkoehler_0-1736401267463.png

 

It sounds like you're currently building lists not based on the consent / legal basis of a contact but via other criteria. While you might be compliant doing this, it's still best practice to maintain the opt-in for eligible contacts (see previous link) and then filter for that opt-in. That will solve the issue of your list inflating with contacts were simply added to the CRM because of sales touchpoints and which did not provide their consent or where there is no legal basis.

 

Additionally, once filtering for an opt-in is taken care of in a recipient list, you can further segment depending on your business needs. If you're doing business in multiple regions, you would add additional filters for preferred language or country, for example. For more specific advise, I would need a bit more context about how you're going about email marketing in general, what you're selling, who your target group is.

 

In general, there is however no such thing as a general setup of segmented lists that works across the board. It's always a combination of requirements within that particular company along with data privacy legislation requirements.

 

Best regards!

Karsten Köhler
HubSpot Freelancer | RevOps & CRM Consultant | Community Hall of Famer

Beratungstermin mit Karsten vereinbaren

 

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karstenkoehler
Solution
Hall of Famer | Partner
Hall of Famer | Partner

Building Strong Segmented Lists for Marketing

SOLVE

Hi @alexagatiss,

 

If you have a lot of turnover and haven't cleaned up your list in a while, you could consider the use of a list validation tool like Neverbounce, Zerobounce, Emailhippo, Verifalia – some of which integrate directly with HubSpot. These tools check whether an email address is still valid and can protect your reputation by avoiding a hard bounce.

 

Beyond that, the main best practice is to make sure that only contacts are added to email lists that have a legal basis for sending emails (a documented opt-in in a subscription type) and, if necessary, a confirmed email address.

 

https://knowledge.hubspot.com/records/manage-your-subscription-preferences-and-types

 

In lists, you can filter for this here:

 

karstenkoehler_0-1736401267463.png

 

It sounds like you're currently building lists not based on the consent / legal basis of a contact but via other criteria. While you might be compliant doing this, it's still best practice to maintain the opt-in for eligible contacts (see previous link) and then filter for that opt-in. That will solve the issue of your list inflating with contacts were simply added to the CRM because of sales touchpoints and which did not provide their consent or where there is no legal basis.

 

Additionally, once filtering for an opt-in is taken care of in a recipient list, you can further segment depending on your business needs. If you're doing business in multiple regions, you would add additional filters for preferred language or country, for example. For more specific advise, I would need a bit more context about how you're going about email marketing in general, what you're selling, who your target group is.

 

In general, there is however no such thing as a general setup of segmented lists that works across the board. It's always a combination of requirements within that particular company along with data privacy legislation requirements.

 

Best regards!

Karsten Köhler
HubSpot Freelancer | RevOps & CRM Consultant | Community Hall of Famer

Beratungstermin mit Karsten vereinbaren

 

Did my post help answer your query? Help the community by marking it as a solution.

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alexagatiss
Contributor

Building Strong Segmented Lists for Marketing

SOLVE

Hi @karstenkoehler ,

 

Thank you for these tips.

 

One follow up question - the preferred language property is not populated for any contact. Is there a feature that can help us to jumpstart this? Can HubSpot review the language used in sales emails? Is there any AI that can be used to automatically update this for all of the contacts in our system based on the language we previously addressed them with?

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karstenkoehler
Hall of Famer | Partner
Hall of Famer | Partner

Building Strong Segmented Lists for Marketing

SOLVE

@alexagatiss I'm not aware of a feature but typically you can determine this information by:

  1. Starting to add it as a hidden field in forms, setting it up so that it passes a default value corresponding to the form (German form -> preferred language German)
  2. Use lists or workflows to capture all contacts who ever submitted a form in a language, then bulk edit them accordingly
  3. Continue with other fields, like Country/Region, IP country, the email domain ending (.de, .ch etc)

If you have workflows, you can come up with a hierarchy (country selected in forms, form language, IP country, email domain ending) and use a workflow to set the preferred language accordingly.

Karsten Köhler
HubSpot Freelancer | RevOps & CRM Consultant | Community Hall of Famer

Beratungstermin mit Karsten vereinbaren

 

Did my post help answer your query? Help the community by marking it as a solution.

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