Marketing contacts are precious in any CRM, and cost money if you go over your marketing contact tier in HubSpot. Not only that, marketing to the wrong people is a bit of a waste of time. So thats why I created a dashboard you can use to monitor whats going on in your CRM and make sure your marketing contacts stay healthy and up to date.
Now before we start, I know there is a basic email health dashboard in the email tool, but this report is designed to dig a little deeper and get a bigger picture on your email health.
First step, a few lists need to be built
There are a few lists that you need to build so you can create a bigger picture on your dashboard. The lists you need to look at creating are:
- Two separate lists for Marketing Contact status is Yes/No
- One list for Marketing Opt in is unknown
- A list each for your subscriptions, we have 3 for example.
You could incorporate contacts that match the criteria above into each report in the report builder, but I find it easier to create the lists and add this as the report criteria - less margin for error. All of these lists are created purely off of basic functionalities within HubSpot itself so should be easy enough to build - and they are ones you should be looking at as standard.
Let's get creative
First you want to create your dashboard so head over to Reporting > Dashboards and then click create dashboard and name it accordingly. Once you have done this then click to create report, you may have some of these built already but we will build the basic one's from scratch based on a single object and select contacts.
The bones to the basic report
As you can see in the image above there are a few things to think about.
1. Data: This is where you're going to select which data to report on, this could be bounce reason, email fatigue (for those who have Seventh Sense) and any other piece of data you might want to include.
2. Filters: This is for filtering on timelines such as this quarter only, or contacts after or before a certain period and it's also where you add in your lists that you build earlier.
3. Summary; This is the type of report you're going to use for your subscriber numbers, Fatigue, Unsubscribes and to get a number for your subscriber lists.
4. This is where you drag and drop your data. The main component you're going to use here is count of contacts. But later down the line we do drag in lifecycle stage.
There are a few basic reports we are going to start off with for our dashboard such as:
- Subscribers: This will be built off of your lists head to filters > add list and save. Then report on "count of contacts" > summary report.
- Bounces Reason and numbers: Use the data sources "count of contacts" and "Bounce Reason" > Summary report and
- Unsubscribes: Using the data sources "Unsubscribed from all email" and "count of contacts" > summary report
- Email marketing Fatigue: This is based off of data you can pull from SeventhSense, so you can only use this report if you have access to this. Data sources "Email Marketing Fatigue" and "count of contacts" > summary report.
Depending on if you want to report on it or not you could also add in reports for invalid email addresses and report on personas too break down your contacts to figure out the balance and adjust content accordingly.
The purpose of these reports are to get a basic feel on the starting health of your marketing efforts and can help you make a few decisions. Like clearing out hard bounced contacts, nurturing high fatigued contacts, addressing any unsubscribes or gaps.
All these decisions can help you clean up your data, potentially adjust your marketing strategies and create a better base for your marketing efforts.
But, lets go further into the rabbit hole...
Let's break down your marketing contacts, non-marketing contacts and even flag up areas for potential contacts that could be marketed to. The reports are using the remainder of your lists you built earlier and the same basic dashboard.
Non-Marketing
To create this report you will need to filter by your list and then on the data sources drag in "count of contacts" and "lifecycle stage" and the report will create itself.
The purpose of this report is to highlight the contacts in your CRM that you can't market to, and also gives you a starting point to dive into who the contacts are and why they aren't marketing contacts.
Marketing/Marketing Unknown
These two reports are the most important one's as they flag up crucial gaps in your contacts that could be marketed to. Build it the same as the report above but using the two other lists.
Once you have built these reports and looked at the data there are a few things that you can action from this:
- Are all my marketing contacts subscribed? If not, then how can I target these contacts to get them to subscribe?
- If there are marketing contacts that aren't subscribed, where are they coming from? Is there a gap in the subscription process when a marketing contact is created?
- Missing marketing data, this is a big one. Why are there contacts with no marketing data, where did they come from and how can this be addressed to avoid it in the future?
There are many other things to be taken away from these reports but these are the basics to kick start your marketing contact health. After all, dirty data does no one any favours.
Note: Make sure with other teams such as sales who may be getting external contacts and adding to your CRM if they can mark these and exclude them from your reporting, you dont want to end up with crossed wires and office fights!!
