Clean Up Your HubSpot Portal

When was the last time you, or someone on your team dedicated time to reviewing and cleaning up your HubSpot Portal? When you first start using the platform, it's like having a shiny new toy! There are so many interesting, powerful features, and you're probably meticulous (no pun intended...) about keeping it highly organized and showing it off to others in your organization. Eventually, though, you run out of steam in keeping it clean and organized, and pretty quick the day-to-day maintenance of your HubSpot portal can slip away on you. Data maintenance tasks often get brushed aside for more urgent tasks, but keeping your contact lists, workflows and links accurate and up to date will not only save you money and improve your metrics, but can increase efficiency across your entire organization.

Eventually you realize just how filthy your car’s gotten and have to do a major cleaning. Okay, yes, my car is a complete mess, don’t judge me!

Unfortunately, the same thing happens with our HubSpot portals. We get in there and start setting things up and at first it’s easy (and maybe even enjoyable) to keep things clean and organized. But over time, life wears on our portals and they get messy and disorganized.

Before we get into a few of the major signs that you probably need to do some spring cleaning on HubSpot portal (i.e. audit it!), let’s talk about what we mean.

EVEN HUBSPOT NEEDS REGULAR MAINTENANCE

Not unlike regular car maintenance to keep the engine running smooth, HubSpot works best when it's at its most efficient. If you've been using HubSpot for a few years now and have not yet done a deep clean, now is the time.

Look at your most commonly used tools:

File Manager
Calls-to-Action
Forms
Emails
Contacts
Lists
Workflows

- Contact Lists, Landing Pages, File Manager, and CTAs

Just like with your car, things are naturally going to get a little messy over time. Even if you’ve set specific rules for how to use your portal, if you’ve been using HubSpot for over three years it’s time to give your portal that good deep clean.

It’s always valuable to spend some time looking at your most commonly-used tools and making sure you’re cleaning out all the dust gathering in the cracks.

A few of the most common tools that need to be audited and cleaned up after a few years on the platform are:

I’m sure if I told you to go audit and clean up your car, you’d have a pretty good idea of what to do next. But what about your HubSpot portal?

At the very least, auditing your HubSpot portal means taking a step back from your daily marketing and sales activities to identify areas for improved utilization and organization of the platform.

You can audit your whole portal at once (recommended if your portal is on the newer side, without a ton of active users, OR if you’ve got a big chunk of time you can set aside for it), or you can audit your portal tool-by-tool as time permits.

If you’re not sure where to start, here’s what I’d recommend:

Identify the HubSpot tools that are hardest for your team to use (whether it’s due to disorganization, complicated setups, or anything else)
Start with a single tool (let’s use Forms as an example)
Make sure assets are organized (for Forms, look at consistent naming conventions. Is it easy to find the form you’re looking for in the tool?)
Purge old assets (if you’re scared to delete them because you want to be able to see historical data on how those assets performed, most tools allow you to archive old assets. You’ll still have access, but they won’t clutter up the tool.)
Establish a process for keeping the tool organized going forward

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Bad Data - A problem you can't afford to ignore

One of HubSpot's biggest advantages is it's "closed-loop" reporting, allowing data to be shared and analyzed across many job functions, from marketing, sales and customer service teams. If your data is not up-to-date or is inconsistent, it's not just one team that takes the hit. The entire company can experience the fallout from bad data. Studies have shown that bad data can potentially cost companies as much as 10-25% of their revenue, and up to $3 trillion per year annually around the globe. It's impossible to avoid inconsistent data completely, but keeping on top of your data quality and cleansing processes can reduce bounceback rates, lower you data cost and reduce bloat.

Reduce Costs

Reduce Bounceback rates Lower your Costs and Reduce Bloat

Keep It Looking Professional

When leads and contact information can be inputted by 3rd parties (such as landing page contact forms, for example) the most common data inconsistency issues that you’ll find are formatting or case issues. Expecting all leads to use the same formatting or correct case when submitting information via a form on your website is simply not realistic.

You will want to look regularly for issues such as:

Duplicate entries
Names that aren't properly capitalized
Missing Fields
Incorrect address and phone number formatting
Extra white space and unwanted characters

The last thing you will want to do is send out an e-mail campaign with personalized fields that are pulling in incorrect information - not exactly a first impression you wan to give to a potential lead, or they may not even receive your e-mail at all! You might find a larger percentage of your emails bouncing or experiencing delivery issues, which can affect your company's reputation with e-mail providers. Depending on the size of your contact list, the task of data cleanup may seem quite daunting. Some organizations end up forgoing the task altogether and just delete inconsistent records, which could mean throwing away perfectly solid leads because of a simple typo or extra space in a field. If the tasks of data cleanup is overwhelming - for large organization it could take days or even weeks - there are solutions out there that can help, such as Insycle which has a specific data cleansing integration specifically for use with HubSpot.

Standardize your DATA & WORKFLOWS

Potential Leads

- clean up job titles / standardize for easier segmenting

- are all of your landing pages correctly linked?

Consolidating and standardizing similar job titles will make things easier for your marketing, sales, and customer service teams that attempt to engage with prospects and customers.

Review Your Workflows AND CONTACT LIFECYCLES On A Regular Basis

Do you have workflow reminders set to engage with neglected contacts?
Is your sales team following up on leads, and updated the lead status and lifecycle stage?

One of the biggest problems we see in a CRM are contacts that haven't been updated. Contacts without updated contact properties create a build up of lost and unqualified leads, and neglected customers. Check with your sales team to make sure that they are consistently updating contact properties.

They should be: