How to use Contact Lists effectively and efficientlly?

[bmsfox]

I am currently auditing a client's Lists and proposing some best practices and organization structure to help them keep their portal clean, useful, and efficient.

The bulk of their current lists (not many, about 160) have been created for either:

• Sending an email
• Testing something
• Produced by an email or workflow

As I have started my audit and am making suggestions, and doing research to how others think about this, it brings up some questions, in particular, how long should we keep a list for an email send? It is somewhat useful, and probably has an expiration date. The other list types can definitely be killed.

I have proposed the following categories, but am really curious about how other people think about lists?

My suggested approach:

Lists should be seen as building blocks. You want to have as many as necessary, and as few as possible. Too many lists, especially active lists, in addition to providing clutter, can actually start to slow your portal eventually.

Lists should primarily be used for:

• Understanding how many contacts meet a certain criteria and displaying additional data for each record
• Building a segment of contacts to send an email (or drip or other  campaign) to (using combined lists or lists to exclude contacts)
• Building reports based on list membership
• Triggering a workflow or filtering a workflow based on list membership
• Cleaning data, updating data, importing data, and keeping track of data changes

Category/Folder	Use
Marketing Status	Segment by marketing subscriptions and preferences and who you want to exclude from communication
Engagement Status	Segment by recency of engagement
Lead Status	Segment by contact status
Contact Types	Segment by contact type
Markets	Segment by market
Renter Lists	Segment by key renter criteria
Homeowner Lists	Segment by key homeowner criteria
Imports	Track imports into the database
Campaigns	Build segments for email and drip campaigns, and other types, and track engagement
Form Submissions	Segment by form submission
Data Hygiene & Updates	Clean data, update data, and keep track of data changes
Testing	“Sandbox” for building lists
User Specific (for each user)	Users can create their own lists and keep track of them

[jolle]

Hey @bmsfox , thanks for sharing! 

You definitely need to check out/share your thoughts in this awesome AMA on HubSpot lists from @franksteiner79!

There are a bunch of awesome insights there around best practices, when to use lists, when not to use lists, you name it! The general consensus aligns with your thoughts — lists have a bunch of important, often underutilized uses, but, like anything else, having too many of them does more harm than good.

Are you able to share a bit more about the HubSpot portal slowdowns you've seen from excessive amounts of lists? I have a couple Enterprise clients whose accounts load a bit slower, and I've love to hear if clearing out some lists could help speed things up a bit. 

Thanks again!

[bmsfox]

That's a great post, thank you!

My client is a very small business, for context they have 9 regular users and around 6,000 contacts on Professional Edition, and only around 160 lists, most of which are Active Lists. Sometimes Lists and Reports do load slowly but I can't imagine this quantity of Lists is affecting that, I have just read that it could. I would report back after cleanup, but I think we will actually end up with more lists when it is all said and done, but with more utility.

[franksteiner79]

Hi @bmsfox 

6,000 contacts und 160 list aren't numbers at which I have seen sluggish performance, if we were talking about 6,000,000 contacts and 10,000 lists it would be a different story.

Having said that, one thing I have seen impact load times is "complex" and nested lists. By that I mean lists that have multiple AND/OR rules, or lists that reference lists which reference lists.

Frank