This episode we discuss:
Listen to the episode here: https://soundcloud.com/hubshots/217-hubspot-lists-hubspot-site-search-how-to-work-with-invalid-contacts
HubShots, the podcast for marketing managers and sales professionals who use HubSpot, hosted by Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found and Craig Bailey from XEN Systems.
Recorded: Thursday 27 August 2020 | Published: Friday 04 September 2020
We are finally giving the HubShots site some love.
In typical ‘cobbler’s children’ style we’ve neglected the HubShots site. This week we finally:
Our weekly notification email (ie what you are currently reading) is now the full, comprehensive show notes.
Please sign up (if you haven’t already) and tell a friend. Even if they don’t listen to the show, they can still get tons of value from the show notes.
Simply reply to any weekly email and it will go straight to Craig.
We’ve just added HubSpot site search to the HubShots site. It is very simple to do, and involves:
As usual the HubSpot documentation has this all explained very clearly:
Previously we had a cobbled together Google Custom Search function on the site. It was clunky and only gave (obviously) the results that were in Google. For a brand new episode, not yet indexed by Google, nothing would show up. Plus the results aren’t comprehensive - Google search results won’t find specific words way down in show notes.
But the HubSpot Site Search does. Search for anything and it will find it on the site. It’s fantastic.
Here’s give it a go on the HubShots site using this search for the word ‘cigarette’:
https://www.hubshots.com/search?term=cigarette
It will give the results for the two episodes where we discussed how Facebook was addictive like cigarettes.
Downside: doesn’t seem to support search operators eg word1 AND word2
We’ve reached out to HubSpot Support and they are investigating further for us.
Here’s how it looks on HubShots:
This started with a list we validated for a client using NeverBounce. (We discussed Neverbounce in previous episodes)
If you are new to HubSpot you may be confused by what the two types of HubSpot lists are:
Important understanding: consider lists as a filter across your full database of contacts. Lists are simply a way of filtering the view your contacts.
We predominantly use Active lists, and only have a handful of static lists.
We’ve both had excellent Support interactions this week. Always good to see that HubSpot Support continues its high standard.
Using the consent to communicate checkbox and choosing the right subscription type! Below is an example of 2 types. When we started we did not check the subscription type and when we came to create a list with people who had opted in it did not work!
If you then want to include them in marketing then create a list like this:
We’ve been using Quore Ads for a number of clients this past year. They are very cost competitive, can be carefully targeted, and are great for building retargeting audiences.
We’re finding the traffic quality to be reasonably engaged (ie not junk) but mostly top of funnel. Our clients are in the technology space.
As we usually say: test and measure
Useful reminder from Lily Ray, simply append the following to a URL:
#:~:text=your%20unique%20words
Use %20 to separate your words
Example link to Shot 4 in episode 215:
https://www.hubshots.com/episodes/episode-215#:~:text=Shot%204
Note: this only works in Chrome (ie doesn’t work in Safari)
Clearbit ran an experiment on their sign up page where they personalised the social proof (client logos + customer quote) based on the person viewing (eg a B2B enterprise visitor would see something different to a B2C marketer).
The results were incredible: a 84% lift in conversions
Example of personalisation for a B2B visitor:
“Many companies have forgotten they sell to actual people. Humans care about the entire experience, not just the marketing or sales or service. To really win in the modern age, you must solve for humans.” — Dharmesh Shah, CTO & Co-Founder, HubSpot
iOS14 (on iPhone) launching next month has increased privacy controls and will by default block IDFA tracking (here’s an overview of IDFA). As such, Facebook is warning advertisers that performance on the Facebook Audience Network (especially App install focussed ads) will be affected. Note that it won’t affect ad targeting on Facebook’s own properties (ie especially in App). This news has been blown a bit out of proportion by media outlets, so be wary of articles discussing it in relation to Facebook advertising in general (as opposed to just the Audience Network). If you are a Stratechery subscriber, Ben Thompson has a detailed write up (paywall).
Benedict Evans details the rapid rise in ecommerce in the UK and USA:
“The UK went from 20% ecommerce penetration to over 30% in two months, and the USA from 17% to 22%.”
Key takeaway: even as lockdowns have eased in the UK, the ecommerce penetration has stayed steady. Ecommerce is here to stay.
It’s so frustrating to visitors when you don’t show pricing, which means you’d better have a good reason for now showing it. If that’s your situation, then here’s a few ideas for at least easing visitor frustration.
Google is constantly improving maps, this time with better colour coding of natural elements (beaches, lakes, vegetation) plus also showing road widths, sidewalks, crosswalks and pedestrian islands.
Before and after example of Arizona:
Notable only because they have ‘officially’ confirmed that engagement (ie click throughs, bounce backs, etc) is fed into the ranking algorithm. SEOs have ‘assumed’ this to be part of both Google and Bing ranking for a while, but it hasn’t been confirmed as such until recently. See also this link.
Connect with HubShots here: HubShots YouTube channel - HubShots Spotify channel - HubShots Facebook group - HubShots Twitter - HubShots Instagram - HubShots LinkedIn
Connect with Ian Jacob on LinkedIn and Craig Bailey on LinkedIn
HubShots is produced by Christopher Mottram from Podcastily.
Please rate and leave us some feedback as this helps us improve and reach more marketers.
- Hi, everyone. Welcome to HubShots Episode 217. In this episode, we talk about HubSpot lists, site search and how to work with invalid contacts in sales. You're listening to Asia Pacific's number one focus HubSpot podcast, where we discuss HubSpot tips, tricks, features and strategies for growing your sales, marketing and sales results. My name is Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found. And with me is Craig Bailey from XEN Systems. How are you Craig?
- I'm well. And you know what? I'm feeling good that we've finally given the HubShots site a little bit of love.
- I know you said it's a... You aptly put it, It's a bit like a cobbler's child, isn't it?
- That's right.
- We've neglected that shoes
- That's right. Or the plumbers bathroom or mechanic's car and all that other thing. So we've neglected the HubShots site for so long, but we're finally getting around to improving it. I found a bunch of broken links on it. This is so embarrassing and I'm staging link. Oh my God. I'm almost too embarrassed to talk about them.
- This is us keeping it real. This is us keeping it real.
- Too busy doing client work. Yeah, that's right. And neglecting our own stuff. That's, yeah... Anyway, but look, we got rid of the crappy old site search and we put in HubSpot native search in the footer. So we'll kinda chat about that later in the show, we've got a proper signup page and we've improved our consulting page. So you can book in with either of us. That's all working better now. Just a reminder to listeners, if you haven't already signed up, so go to the sign up page, or it's up in the menu there, the Newsletter, we now send out the full show notes in the email. So you don't have to click through anything. You get it in your inbox includes all the screenshots. Plus includes a whole bunch of additional news stories and articles that we don't get time to go through in the show. So we are planning to build... Well, our goal is to build this show notes out to be a very valuable resource and it'll get better and better each week. So make sure you sign up for that. And if you haven't already, that is, and also tell a friend, we'd appreciate your referral. Referring us to your friends as well.
- Alright. Craig, onto our HubSpot marketing feature of the week. And this is following on from the HubSpot search adding to your site. So this is a feature within HubSpot, which you have implemented on the HubShots site.
- Yeah, that's right. Look, it's not a new feature. It's been there for a year or two now. And again, finally getting around to it. But I just wanted to mention this in the show 'cause it's very easy to implement. We used to have this kind of cobbled together Google custom search box up in the top right and it was problematic for a number of reasons. Anyway, we got rid of that and we've replaced it with the inbuilt HubSpot site search. Very easy. All you need to do to enable it in your own website, a HubSpot hosted that is, is create a search results template in design tools. Then you set that template in your settings page, and then you just simply add a search input module, which is a standard module. You just put that into your templates. So, I actually just put it in the footer. So the global photo. So it's on all the HubSpot's pages. We've got show notes which detailed the two links that you need to go to on the HubSpot Knowledge Base, explains it all, super easy. I got it done in about 10 minutes and you can go and check it out on the show on the site rather, do a search and see how it works now. The thing about the Site Search it's so fast and it picks up everything. I was searching from skew a little words in past episodes, pick them all out, much better than Google in terms of, well, indexing all the site content. And we've got an example there. I mean just search for the term cigarette on our site. Why that term? Because I remember there were these two obscure references when we actually talked about Facebook being a bit like cigarettes. And would you advertise on the cigarette pack? It's trying to find them bang straight in and that's what Site Search there. They are came up quickly. So it's really good. And the only downside though of the site search is that currently it doesn't seem to support search operators. So you can't go this term and that term, but check it out are well worth it. And yeah, I think it works pretty well. What did you think, Ian?
- I think it was great, Craig. And again, listeners just think if your site has a lot of content and you don't have this feature enabled, it would be definitely worth enabling it on your site. And I know like people that have gotten a lot of content over the years, we're coming up to our five years. Right, Craig?
- So there is a lot of content on the HubShots site. So having a feature like this just makes it easy to find what you want quickly. All right, Craig. Onto our HubSpot sales feature of the week. And this is... I'll put together a little process about how to work with invalid contacts. Now, you might get invalid contacts based on incorrect emails, people have actually moved jobs, emails have bounced. And sometimes if people have moved, you might be lucky enough to get a reply back saying this person has moved and this address is no longer monitored and this is their new address or this is the new person in charge. So it's a great way to do that. So was working with a client and we just go, well, how do we put a process together to make this a possibility to keep it clean? And initially what we had done. So this kind of included results from we use NeverBounce to validate contacts and also context that have bounced previously in emails. So I was showing someone relatively new and I said, "Oh, look, let's do this." So I'm just gonna quickly talk you through the process. We go to the contact. So firstly, we create the contact view with all the contacts that had bounced or there had never bounced status of invalid or anything that had bounced before and went through that list. So the first thing we did was we clicked on the contact. Now, a lot of people don't realize in the search and the actions, many there is a search in Google option. So, do that. So click that, it'll open up a new tab. You can search for the person. Look, if they've got a LinkedIn profile or any other results. So the LinkedIn profile was really good to validate who they were because we were able to track back and see, Oh yeah, that is the person. It was like his two jobs ago was, he was at this particular company. We then disassociated the company from the contact record to make sure that he's not associated with that company any longer. Then what we did, we added the LinkedIn bio field into the contact page. So the person who was going through this could cut and paste the LinkedIn bio into that field. Once they'd done that, another thing they could have done is use a tool called Lusha to see whether they can collect their new contact details if it was readily not available. So that's a tool that we use often to just verify details. The next thing we did after that was create a task to the contact owner, to either reconnect with them over LinkedIn, or to call them up and re-engage them in a discussion over the phone and update their details essentially. And that was it. But it was a clear process of what needed to happen to get these invalid contacts re-engaged and clean again.
- So that's a really good process. Let's just recap. You've covered a few tools, NeverBounce, which by the way, we've covered in previous episodes, we'll include links in the show notes. If you wanna use NeverBounce.
- Just use the Site Search Craig.
- Yes, that's right. We use it and recommend it, then you've searched for them from this list. And then you've used another tool called Lusha or Lusha. Do you wanna quickly explain what Lusha does?
- Yes. So that works. I think there's a Chrome plugin and it also operates when you're in LinkedIn, it'll be a little icon on the top right hand side, and it can generally validate contact details. So it might know their phone number or their email, or it might say that this might be a close match based on this company email format, but it's a really good indicator. And a lot of the time it's pretty good at picking up and getting right contact details. So it's like a data enhancer in essence.
- Right. So good tool. And I think they have a five free credit tier it's it's pretty good. So you can check that out. And then you basically are using LinkedIn to find them and set a task for sales rep to follow them up. I really like this because I think it's quite contrarian for people to do this. You know what most people do when someone... Well, so they bounce and they go, Oh, they go, Oh, well, we'll delete them out. Then they're like can't. But keep in mind a lot of the time, this is a contact that you've worked hard to get into your funnel. You've probably used paid advertising or outreach or anything to get them in. So you've done a lot of hard work and yet when they move on, you think, Oh, it's too hard to just check what their new location is. Here's the thing, instead of trying to reacquire a new contact, why don't you follow these up? So I think this is a really good process you've got, it's not that hard for the sales reps to do, reach out, connect on LinkedIn, stay in touch because they've been in touch with you before that's a warm contact rather than cold outreach, update their details. And perhaps you're actually building a relationship into a brand new company. So, well worth the effort.
- Absolutely. Now, Craig, this process is actually being done by somebody who is doing marketing and sales support and not the actual sales person.
- Just try to reach out on LinkedIn.
- Oh yeah. The person who is the contact owner. Who was the original contact owner.
- Yeah. Cool.
- Yep. Alright. Now we're gonna talk about our HubSpot optimization of the week, Craig. And this is about keeping your lists in order.
- Look, if you're new to HubSpot, this will be useful. If you've been using HubSpot for ages, you'd be like, Oh, this is pretty one on one stuff, very basic, but let's talk about it 'cause we've had clients, both of us have had client experiences recently where the client, and in my case, a long time, HubSpot user didn't really understand the power of active lists. They were doing everything with Static lists. Do you wanna talk about your situation first and then I'll talk about mine?
- Very identical Craig, where they were extracting contacts and then reloading them into separate static lists to do email marketing and where they could have actually used an active list to get the same result. So we're gonna just recap on what the lists are and why you would want to use the list in a particular manner. So firstly, there are two kinds of list types. Let's start with the one that is most commonly used, if people would think of would be a static list. If you've come from some other email marketing system and you've just gone, I just need to create a list. I'm gonna load some contacts in there and market to them. That is a static list. So it's something that doesn't change. And generally we will be used for things like event attendees, staff lists or internal newsletters, or maybe you were at a trade show, probably not a trade show. Maybe you were at webinar for example, right? And you wanna just talk to those people. So that's a static list. Doesn't change. It needs to take an action to send, put someone into that list. You've got to manually add them in and manually take them out. Now the next kind of list is an active list. And some people might know this as smart list as it was known previously. But I think active's a great name, Craig, because it's telling you that it's living and it changes based on criteria. Right? So a really good thing. And we'll talk about this further down in understanding. You might actually have a active list, which are people that are going to hear from you from a HubShots' email on a weekly basis. So that will be an active list where people could potentially get enrolled and maybe meet some other criteria. Okay?
- Yeah, I think that's right. So active list and why they used to be called smart lists is because it's exactly that. You just put criteria. A static list there's no criteria you manually add or take away from them, but active or smart, they do it themselves. It's always working in the background based on criteria, filtering criteria.
- I'll give you a scenario of one that we had this week. They have contacts that have been assigned to salespeople that are no longer part of the organization and they haven't reassigned them until they get new salespeople on to the team. So when the email goes and because we send it from the sales person, as the contact owner, we didn't want that to happen. So what we did was not create a static list, but we created an active list and we said, put everybody in this list that have these contact owners that have left. So we created that list. And then essentially what we're doing is we're gonna send a separate email to that list from a generic address, not from a contact owner essentially. Does that make sense?
- Yep.
- So that's one of the ways you would use it in a really simplistic way. So tell me who the people are that belong to all the people that have left and the rest can go to the people that are active and have active salespeople against them.
- All right. Well, that's quite a very specific case there, but I think what you're highlighting is it's just based on criteria, right? You're filtering and that's what active lists do. They're continually updating the lists. That's why they're active, based on filter criteria. And the reason I think this is confusing for some people is because they've come from another platform. Might have come from MailChimp or another system where they talk about audiences or they talk about lists with a different kind of definition. So then they come across the HubSpot and they don't understand this idea of active lists. So for example, in MailChimp with audiences, they have segments. I some ways, segments in MailChimp are the same as active lists in HubSpot. It's just a way of filtering down. Now, I'll tell you the situation I had because we had a client looking in their portal this week. And what they've done is they had a workflow that had criteria and it was about who registered. Actually, it doesn't matter what it was, it was criteria for doing some behavior.
- Action,
- Some action. And the workflow just had the people based on that criteria come in. And then the first action in the workflow was to add them to a static list. And we were like, why would you do that? And so then we showed them, you don't need a workflow and then add them to a static list, replace all of that with an active list that has the exactly the same criteria as the workflow entry. And they're like, "Ah, now I get it." It's active list. It just works in the background, it's not moving or deleting or anything like that. It's just always being updated. So, listeners, if you've been long time HubSpot users, you probably know this since like, wow, that's really simple. If you're new to HubSpot though, this is a very powerful feature on HubSpot that you just might have completely missed. So check it out. We've got it in the show notes, the Knowledge Base article that talks about active lists versus static lists, check that, use it. I would say 95% of all the lists we have in the portals that we manage are active lists. We hardly ever use static lists. Active lists are...
- Great Craig
- Your foundation...
- Friend It's your friend.
- There're your friend.
- All right, I'll do a HubSpot extra of the week. And this is a shout out to HubSpot support again. And we've both had excellent support interactions this week. And I just wanna say thank you because honestly, HubSpot support you make our lives a lot better.
- The reason that I wanna call it out in the show as well is because it continues to be really good. I think every three months or so we jump on and talk about how good and HubSpot support is and it continues to be good. It hasn't degraded. They've grown massively over the last year. Their support has not degraded. It is still exceptional. So well done to whoever's heading up that team. And then this team and the investment they put behind it, it is a differentiator for sure.
- All right. On to our gotcha of the week, Craig, and this is using the consent to communicate check box gotcha on forms. And we were using this with a client of ours and they added it. I didn't really check the subscription time. I was like, hi, it's cool. I try to create the marketing list off it. And then I realized, hang on, there's something not right here. Now, just so you know, we don't turn on GDPR for this, but we use this check box in a particular way to get consent on certain things on certain forms that we have on the site. Now, when you do this, you can have multiple check boxes based on obviously the different subscription types that you have. And one of the ones that we had, and we had accidentally chosen, which is the first option was we have a sales email, which is the one to one interaction. And that's what we had chosen as the communication preference. Now, when I couldn't figure out what was going on, I was like, hang on. It says that I've got a hundred percent opt in here. I'm like, that doesn't sound right. Anyway, I realized there were two things happening. If you don't have GDPR turned on all the time, it's gonna have in that particular field that you have free consent to communicate with someone. So you can't look at that as being the identifier of have they checked this check box. What we had to do, which I found out from support was there is a subscription types. There were two things we had to do. We had to make sure we had the subscription type correct and then later on this week, we've added a second subscription type. One was, do they wanna hear from sales. And the second one was, did they wanna get marketing material from us. So there were two check boxes there. And then what we did was to put the people into the, who had given consent for marketing, we created an active list and we said, look, they had opted in for marketing information and they had filled out that particular form. And that's the part that we got wrong and then we fixed it this week. But, just be aware that this can take place because you think you're using those that concentric box. And it might work in a particular way, but it doesn't if you haven't got obviously GDPR turned on, so this is the way you would dissect it. And that's why it's the gotcha.
- Wow. That is a gotcha. And also that's a complex little thing. A lot of people don't really understand subscription types. But one of the wonderful things about HubSpot is when you sign up, you can have different subscription types. You can say, I wanna get the blog posts, or I wanna get marketing information, or I wanna get event information. Or..
- Products.
- Correct.
- Or sales to contact me. So you can have all of these. And then when you get those emails, when send out there's down the bottom, there's an unsubscribe link, but there's also an update preferences link. That preferences takes you to a page where you can choose which of those subscription types you're opting into. This is a very powerful feature of HubSpot, but of course the flip side of great power is this complexity. And in this case, it caught out your client. And yeah, good screenshot there showing how you actually fix that issue.
- All right. Craig, on our marketing tip of the week using Quora ads. Tell me more.
- All right. I just thought I'd mentioned this very briefly and if people are interested in more information, just reply back lemme know I replied to the show notes and we'll talk about it further because I think this is very powerful. We're using Quora ads. We've been using it for about a year or so. And for clients, particularly we deal with more technology clients. It's been very powerful in driving inexpensive clicks and yet engaged traffic. So it's not like the cheap clicks you get on the Google display network in apps, which are just junk. A hundred percent bounce rate and all of that stuff, the Quora ads are working really well. And you can... I've got a screenshot from one of the campaigns for a client. You can see there's like 14 cent clicks, 17 cent clicks and stuff like that. We're using this, it's engaged, driving it through to the site. And it's also... I think what our main goal to build retargeting audiences. So on Quora ads for people who don't know, that's a question and answer site, people ask questions and people answer them. So it's very much a top of the funnel piece. Although some of the questions could be lower the funnel. What do you think of this vendor and it's such but it's normally top of the funnel questions and it drives ... The hands of driving people through. We're putting them through to blog posts as content and in some cases to landing pages, although, because that's more of a sign up gated content piece, they're less effective. So it's really to content which they do engage with and then re-target through on other platforms like LinkedIn and et cetera, Facebook. So just wanted to mention that we're finding it useful. I think that's one of these untapped resources. I mean, I'm not sure why more people aren't using it. Maybe they're not aware of it. So listeners, if you haven't tried it, as we always say, test and measure, and we've got quite good at it now, and we even have got lookalike audiences and everything. So if you'd like more details on that, maybe hit us up with a comment or reply to our show notes and yeah, we'll talk about it more.
- And Craig, here's a good example of understanding your audience and where they're hanging out. So clearly in that B2B technology space, people are going to Quora to get answers. And I think you've found something that's pretty interesting that people might be missing on a daily basis. So well done. Alright. A quick tip of the week, Craig. Easy link to a text phrase in a URL.
- I've been seeing this, I got this on from Lily Ray on Twitter and she reminded me that you can basically use a hash. And then we've got the actual symbols that you use to link through to certain bit of texts on a site. So we've got one you can just think through them shop for on an episode. So check it out. Only works in Chrome unfortunately, it won't work in Safari or other browsers but little tip there. Try it.
- And you know what, Craig? I don't know whether I accidentally came across this with that for some reason, Google are manipulating search results when you're looking for particular things like this, because I remember clicking a link and I got to page and it was highlighted exactly like you have shown in the show notes.
- Oh, you're talking about search results snippets, that's actually different. This isn't purely a URL modifiers. I know what you're talking about now. Yeah, Google is basically sucking all the content in and just showing you the specific part of a page that answers your question. That's supposed to just pointing it to the page in its entirety.
- That's right. All right. Craig, a resource of the week.
- Oh the power of social proof. You've gotta check this out. Clearbit ran an experiment on their signup page. This is a request to demo signup page. And they were like, what kind of proof signals will we give? And they used to just have a bunch of generic client logo's. What they did is they personalized it. So first of all, I switched out the logos they used based on the type of visitor, because they've kind of got reverse proxy identification. If this person came from corporate B2B environment, we'll show you corporate B2B logos. And then what they added was, Oh, we'll show you quotes from people that are personalized for you as well. So if you're an enterprise B2B, they show in the show notes where they've actually got a quote from Dharmesh talking about Clearbit and they thought, Oh, we'll just test this to see if personalizing these social proof signals impacts conversions. And it was astounding, 84% lift in conversions in,
- Wow!
- It's staggering.
- That's interesting
- So check out this experiment. I've got the link in the show notes and my head was just buzzing with ideas after this. I was like, wow! We should use this on all pages. We shouldn't put it next to an ebook sign up or anything as much as well As long as they can't personalize as well as Clearbit's intelligence can. If we know the kind of traffic that we're sending to the landing page, very different campaigns, we can probably personalize it more that way. So yeah.
- All right. And on to our quote of the week, Craig. And this is from Dharmesh Shah, who's the CTO and co founder of HubSpot. And it says, "Many companies have forgotten they sell to actual people. Humans care about the entire experience, not just marketing or sales or service. To really win in the modern age, you must solve for humans." And well said. And you know what, Craig? I'd even need to say. I didn't see this screenshot before you'd put, which actually had a Dharmesh quote on it. Now, this is at a whole bunch of bonus links in the show notes. So please subscribe. Go to HubShots.com and subscribe to the show notes. There are lots of good things about maps, iOS 14, e-commerce and Binge. Craig, why are you laughing?
- It's almost like you were wondering what's this Binge thing? As if your content..
- Now there's an untapped avenue for people in B2B, Binge. All right. So there are lots of great resources in the show notes. I encourage you to subscribe. And if you would like to connect us over LinkedIn, please connect with us over LinkedIn. Also tell us you listened to the show so that Craig will accept your request. Else, it won't be accepted and we would love any feedback or anything you would like to say. And listeners, we love questions that we get about things that you're trying to solve because as we help you and as we help each other, we all grow better together. Well Craig, until next week.
- Catch you later, Ian.
- Hey there. Thanks for listening to this episode of HubShots. To get the latest show notes, HubSpot tips and resources, sign up at HubShots.com. You can also book time with us to help you grow better with HubSpot.