This knowledge base article sums up best practices on how to use lists within your HubSpot portal.
Available in all Hubs
Why use lists?
Lists allow you to create a list of contacts, companies, deals or activities. Lists improve your marketing and sales efforts and help you understand who are the contacts in your portal.
Types of Lists
HubSpot allows you to create two types of lists:
Active Lists: These are criteria-based lists and they update automatically. They are also always up-to-date.
Static Lists: These are also criteria-based lists but don’t update, they are set at the time the list was created. The main benefit is that contacts can be added or removed manually from static lists.
An example of using a static list is if you want to suppress a contact from receiving certain emails, you can manually add them to a list and then add the list suppression in your email or workflow.
Naming conventions
Before creating any lists, you and your team will need to agree on a naming convention for lists. Naming conventions are very helpful especially when you have hundreds of lists created in your account and/or lists used by different regions all in one portal.
Our advice is to be specific and concise when naming your lists. Know what the list does without having to click on it and check the filters. Below are some examples of popular naming conventions used:
• Department name - Function of list/Purpose - Description
• Marketing - Unengaged contacts - Bounced/Suppression
• Sales - Won Stage - Customers
Using folders
Folders help you and your team stay organized. They also make finding lists an easy and straightforward task!
You can divide your folders by region, department, industry or type of list.
Dividing folders by Regions: A folder for NA, LATAM, EMEA, APAC, etc. This is usually used when there are multiple teams from different regions using one HubSpot portal
Dividing folders by Department: Marketing folder, Sales Folder, Service Folder etc..
Dividing folders Industry: A folder for the Food industry, or Software industry, or Health and beauty industry.
If you sell different services or products to different industries, or send personalized content and outreach to each of your industries, then foldering by industry would make the most sense to you.
Dividing folder by Type of lists: Folder for Accounts/Companies. Or folders for Deals. Folders for Bounced Contacts. Folders for Contacts with no owner. Folders for Contacts for nurturing etc..