Babelquest consultants often go through an audit process for our clients to gauge what should be included in campaigns, reporting and dashboards, and whether there are duplicate lists that could potentially lead to confusion for users. The Account Cleanup automation will help you streamline your portal, and assist in quickly flagging which items can be retired. If you don’t want to fully automate this, HubSpot has included a manual tool which can help identify these assets too.
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For Enterprise customers, HubSpot takes the hard work out of your hands and puts its robots to work. A tidy-up crew that visits your account once a month, to sweep up anything that’s been gathering dust.
Right now, automation focuses on two key areas that are notorious for getting out of hand: marketing emails and lists.
Unused Emails
With the new Account Cleanup tool, HubSpot will look for marketing emails that have been in Draft status and haven't been edited in over six months.
HubSpot has a "no-delete" policy for emails, which is a huge relief. Instead, it archives them. This means you can still get them back if you suddenly realize you need that long-lost draft after all.
To turn this on, you just need to navigate to Settings > Account Cleanup and toggle the "Marketing emails" switch on under Archive unused assets. HubSpot will then do a quick analysis and tell you how many emails are eligible for archiving. Click "Turn on ruleset," and any draft email that becomes six months old and untouched will be automatically archived on the first of every month.
Outdated Lists
HubSpot’s automated cleanup for lists is a little more aggressive, and for good reason. It looks for lists that haven't been modified in sixty days and, crucially, aren't being used anywhere else in your account (e.g., in a workflow, a form, or an email send). Lists that meet this criteria will be deleted. Deleted lists are sent to the Recently deleted view in the lists tool, where they hang out for up to ninety days before they're gone for good. This gives you a generous window to recover anything that was deleted by mistake.
Head to Settings > Account Cleanup, and under Delete unused assets, flip the "Lists" switch on. After a quick analysis, you'll see a dialog box telling you how many lists are candidates for deletion. Confirm by clicking "Turn on ruleset," and your account will start tidying itself up monthly.
The Guided Tour: Manual Cleanup
While the automated tools are fantastic for the low-hanging fruit, sometimes you need a more hands-on approach. That's where the Manual tab in Account Cleanup comes in. This is less about automation and more about providing a guided tour of your account's forgotten corners.
Think of it as a checklist that HubSpot creates for you. It will show you a list of different assets and tools that might be ripe for cleanup. This can include:
- Workflows: Have you ever created a workflow for a test and then forgotten to delete it? This tool can help you find them.
- Connected Apps: Remember that app you connected a year ago for a specific project? You can use the manual cleanup tool to review and disconnect it.
- Social Accounts: Is there an old social media account you're no longer using? This will show you.
- Forms with no submissions: The tool can even help you find forms that have been live for six months but haven't received a single submission, allowing you to review and possibly delete them.
For each of these categories, HubSpot provides a "Review [asset]" button. When you click it, it opens a new tab with an advanced filter already applied, showing you exactly what HubSpot has flagged. It’s a genius feature that saves you from the tedious process of building those filters yourself. From there, you can review the assets and decide whether to archive, delete, or keep them. It’s like having a personal data organizer whispering in your ear.
Why This Matters
This new Account Cleanup feature is more than just a convenience. It’s a proactive step towards better data hygiene. In the world of CRM and marketing automation, clean data is everything. It impacts your segmentation, your personalization, your reporting, and ultimately, your marketing and sales success.
Having a cluttered account can lead to:
- Slower performance: More data, more assets, and more clutter can potentially slow down your HubSpot experience.
- Wasted resources: Having a bunch of unused assets clogs up your account and can make it difficult for new team members to get up to speed.
- Reporting inaccuracies: Unused lists or workflows can skew your reporting and make it harder to get a true picture of your performance.
Increased confusion: Trying to find the right list or email when you have a hundred others in the way is a nightmare.
HubSpot’s new Account Cleanup tool addresses these issues head-on. By automating the cleanup of common offenders and providing a structured way to review other assets, they're empowering users to maintain a healthier, more efficient account. So, if your HubSpot account is starting to look like a digital junk drawer, it’s time to head over to settings and turn on the cleanup crew.
By Puneet Bola-Moore
