Managing Contacts & Creating Lists in HubSpot

Resources:

A guide to your contacts home:
https://knowledge.hubspot.com/contacts/a-guide-to-your-contacts-home

Create contacts:
https://knowledge.hubspot.com/contacts/create-contacts

Create and use lists:
https://knowledge.hubspot.com/lists/create-active-or-static-lists

Import contacts, companies, deals, tickets, products, or notes:
https://knowledge.hubspot.com/crm-setup/import-objects 

Full Transcript:

First let’s take a look at the contacts interface so we can learn all the ways we can manage existing contacts.

To get started, simply click contacts and then contacts, in the main menu. From there you notice several distinct sections. Let’s start with the main contact listing area. Here you will find a list of  ALL of the contacts in your database, typically organized from newest to oldest. You will also notice that several columns of data are displayed, to give you a basic overview of the contact. If you want to change these columns of data, simply click the actions dropdown and click edit columns. From there you can add or remove properties as you so choose. Just don't forget to click save when you’re done!

Keep in mind that when adding or removing columns of data, pretty much anywhere in HubSpot, the newly added/removed columns are only visible to you. Any other user using your HubSpot account will have their data view unaffected.

Other options available under the actions dropdown is editing properties (which we will cover in a separate video), manage duplicates (which will give you suggestions on contacts to merge and allow you to do so), and restore contacts (which will allow you to restore any contacts deleted within the last 90 days.

If you select one or more contacts you will also find several more options, including…

1. Assign, which lets you assign a contact a contact owner
2. Edit, which allows you to quickly update a contacts property
3. Delete
4. Create a task reminder to take an action regarding that contact
5. Add to static lists
6. Enroll in a workflow
7. And Edit communication subscriptions

Remember though, when editing a contact's communication subscriptions, your updates will only take effect if that individual user has not updated their communication preferences themselves. This is in place so that individual users have total control over whether or not they receive emails from you.

Next let's explore the filters area. This area will behave similarly to lists but is better used for quick, one time segmentation of contacts. To apply a filter to the contacts list, you can either select one of the saved filters, or create a new filter by clicking “add Filter” and then filtering by one or more contact properties. This section also lists your database's total number of contacts and has an options dropdown, which most importantly, allows you to export the contacts in your database (or in your filters view), to an excel spreadsheet.

Finally, before moving on to lists, let's take a look at the inside of an individual contact. There is a lot to go over here so we won't be covering it all in depth, but lets cover the main points.

First, right under the contacts name, you will find a set of tools that you can use to directly communicate with that contact or make notes to yourself. Some tools require a bit of setup (such as email and phone) but it is all worth it because then you can see your entire communication history with a contact over in the activity area. 

This activity area includes all of the communication tools entries I just mentioned and also the history of actions that the individual contact has taken, lists they’ve been added to, emails they have received, and a whole lot more! You can include or exclude certain events by clicking this filter and checking or unchecking any of the options. Another way to filter events is by clicking these tabs up top. Each one of these tabs corresponds to their associated tool.

Next let’s explore the contact properties. On the left hand side, just below the tools, you will find a short list of the most prominent contact properties, such as name and email. Here you can both review and edit this information as you’d like. To view or edit other contacts properties, simply click “View all properties”, and from there you can use the search bar to find the exact property you want. You can also click details to view the property value history, or click “add to view” in order to add the property to the main about section we were just discussing.

Lastly, on the right hand side you will find all of the objects, lists, workflows, and more that this contact is associated with.

Next, let’s explore the lists tool. Here is where you’ll be able to create complicated filtered lists called “”Active Lists” or the more simple “Static List”. These lists can be used to send emails, track total subscribers, find out who your most qualified leads are, and much more! 

To get to the lists tool, click the contacts tab again, and then select “Lists”. From there you will be taken to a full list of all your, well…, lists! In the main interface, you will find all your lists, organized from most recently updated to last and it will give you a rough overview of each list's details. Their name, how many contacts there are, the kind of list, and so on. Lists can also be organized into folders by simply selecting a list and clicking “Move to folder”. To view these folders, simply click the folders tab. This is also where you would create new folders if needed.

Now lets try creating a list. To create a list, simply click “Create list” and then give your list an appropriate name. Then comes your big decision, do you want this list to be an Active list or a Static list.

Active Lists are lists that are constantly updating the included contacts based on the parameters of the list, while static lists are initially set by the list parameters but then their list of contacts never changes. Take this example….

Say you wanted to create a list of all contacts who were created in the past week. You can do this using either an Active list or Static list, but if you want that list to be up to date, you will need to use an Active list. If you want that list to always reflect those contacts that were created in the past week of when you initially created this list, use static.

After choosing the list type, the process is mostly the same. Select from one of the filters, select which specific property you want to filter by, and keep adding more filters until you have reached your desired result. There are a ton of filters here but let's take a quick look at some of the most prominent.

Contact properties contains all the properties a contact can have and it is this filter you will use most often. List memberships allow you to add contacts from another list you have created. Marketing emails allow you to pull in those who performed an action in a specific email. And Imports allows you to create a list of people who were part of a specific list import (more on that later).

Lets try the example I gave earlier of creating a list of contacts created in the past week. To do so, click contact properties and then search for the create date. Then select “is less than” and input 7 days ago. Apply the filter and you're done! If you want to break down this list even more or include other types of people, simply click “and” or “Or” and add another filter.

The last kind of lists we are going to discuss today, are imported lists. Now you can import many different kinds of lists but today, we are going to focus on a simple contact list.

You can start an import from either contacts or lists by clicking the “import” button.  From there we are going to select import, file from computer, one file, one object, and then contacts. Next you will choose an excel file to upload. Make sure your file has an email column and that each contact has an email. Without it, they will not be uploaded to HubSpot.

After uploading the list, you will probably find that some properties have been mapped automatically to HubSpot. If any havent, you can either choose not to upload those properties, or you can search for a HubSpot property to map to. Finally, you can rename your import if desired and then click the agreement. You can also click the “create a list” option, if you want the contacts in this file to appear in a static list.