A full Hubspot Audit Check List to help you establish a more organized contact database, easier segmentation, cleaner data for analysis and better overall performance.
Our ultimate Hubspot audit checklist will help you review, analyse and build your marketing and sales pipeline and adopt practices for a well oiled Hubspot CRM.
While every portal is different and audits are not 100% one-size-fits-all, there are certain areas that, from a starting point, we always inspect when we’re taking a look under the hood. If you’re looking to audit your HubSpot portal, feel free to use this checklist to make sure you’re covering all your bases.
1. Contact & Company Clean up
Regularly cleaning up your contacts and companies will improve reporting accuracy, minimize graymail and optimize email deliverability. It will also ensure your reporting is as accurate as possible.
- Check for duplicate contacts and purge duplicates.
- Use a list to manage hard bounces. Purge the list.
- Are your contacts accurately tagged with their current lifecycle? (Subscriber, lead, MQL, SQL etc.?)
- Have all leads been assigned owners?
- Is there a standard set of filter/views to manage your contacts efficiently
2. Buyer Persona Implementation
If you’re not using Buyer personas and segmenting your lists based on interest, behaviour, then you’re probably not personalising your content and therefore compromising your inbound marketing efforts and conversion rates.
- Create Buyer personas in Hubspot. Personas can be interest based, based on role or personality or a combination. Don’t over do it and create too many. Assign Your Contacts To Personas.
- Create lists for each Persona and split out each Persona into the 3 Buying Cycle Stages. So if you have 3 Personas, you will need 9 Lists. Persona 1 – Awareness Stage, Persona 1 – Consideration Stage and Persona 1 – Decision Stage.. and so on for each Persona. Only then can you really personalise your approach to where prospects are in the buying funnel.
- Create automated workflows to assign a Persona to a contact. Other workflows will assign them to a personalised Email nurture Campaign.
- Are your personas still representative of all the target audiences you’re trying to reach?
- Are there any new personas that should be added?
- Have you updated your personas with any new demographic and psychographic insights you’ve gained since you last developed them?
3. Check Your Lead Generation Marketing Campaigns
It’s the bottom line that counts. How much is it costing you to generate x amount of leads. What’s the cost of generating x amount of leads from your different channels (Paid search, Paid social, organic, display marketing, retargeting etc). If your KPI’s are not performing as well as you expected, then review your ad copy, marketing campaigns, content types and assets.
Ensure you are reporting on the following:
- Average Leads Generated on Daily, Weekly, Monthly Intervals
- Click Through Rate, Conversion Rate
- Cost Per Lead per Channel
4. Leads to MQLs Conversion Rate Performance
This reiterates how important the reporting Dashboard is in Hubspot. Look at the Number of Follow-Up Touches/ Engagement, Percentage to Sales, Time to Sales, and Close Rate.
To improve conversion rate of Leads to MQLs:
- Outline email nurture path(s)
- Build X (number) of emails
- Create workflow to trigger nurturing
5. Email Health Check
Email quality and deliverability plays a big role in your marketing and sales efforts. HubSpot provides a number of helpful ways to analyse your email open and click rates to ensure you’re getting the most from this channel. If you’re not using GDPR effectively, over emailing, purchasing marketing lists, then you are likely effecting your Email reputation and deliverability.
Hubspot have just upgraded the Email heath check features and is currently in Beta -a useful tool and worth delving into.
You can also use a 3rd party tool to get a more detailed Email health: Content, Infrastructure, Reputation and Compliance. Send Forensics is one such tool.
Example Infrastructure checks:
- MTA/IP Reputation (incl. black/white/grey-listing)
- Forward/Reverse DNS & Received-chain Validation
- SPF, DKIM, & DMARC Authentication
- Received-route Analysis
What you should be doing?
Connect Your Email Sending Domain to Hubspot: ensures your email links are branded to your domain.
Database cleanup (see above): maintaining clean contact and company records
Keep your email engagement high: by creating a Sunset Policy and continuing to remove stale contacts.
Personalising is Key: make sure you are personalising your subject and previews as well as the email body/content
Lowest performing emails: These emails are decreasing your overall email health in the last 30 days. Review these emails and try different headlines
Use Smart Content: Create dynamic content in Landing pages and Emails for different Personas
Use a Hubspot Dedicated IP Address: this comes at an extra cost but can assist with maintaining your email reputation
6. Workflow Audit
Workflow Performance: Workflows should be revised and checked based on performance: engagement, email stats. Sort workflows by ‘total enrolled’ and review the workflows that are most active and view the performance tab. Check the errors and that certain actions aren’t failing like a failed contact property copy command or any other gaps.
Set Workflow Goals: this is often missed out when creating automated Hubspot workflows. It’s good practice to remove contacts from workflows when the goal is met, otherwise it’s difficult to measure the success of your workflow in nurturing contacts.
Organise and use a Naming Convention: Use folders to organise workflows by function.
7. Review Forms and CTAs
Reviewing the performance of your lead enquiry forms, popups, slide forms and CTAs provides a view of how well your lead capture assets are optimised for conversions.
Use your HubSpot analytics tools to analyse performance of both your forms and CTAs and make note of where performance needs the most improvement. For example, organic search conversion rate is usually between 1-2%.
- If you’re under that, consider adding CTAs and/or gated content to high-traffic blogs and pages to convert more visitors
- For underperforming forms, consider removing unneeded fields to remove friction
- For underperforming CTAs, create a plan to test and measure different iterations of the CTA by tweaking the color, copy and placement (one variable at a time)
8. SEO Strategy and Topic Clusters
You should definitely be using HubSpot’s pillar page/topic cluster tool to build authority for topics of relevance. If you don’t have Hubspot Marketing Professional, you can still create clusters but by using other free keyword research SEO tools.
Then principle is based on creating a number related posts based with a main parent post (A pillar page) with sub posts linking back to the main post. Simply start off with keyword research and look at keyword volume of say around 500-750 searches per month for a suitable pillar page. I find it’s best to choose a less competitive niche or newer topics as there will be less competition.
Then write 4 to 5 sub pages which contain related topics/sub topics. Make sure you set relevant title and description tags for all pillar and sub topic pages. It’s best to write over 1000 word articles to enhance visibility in search engines and drive organic traffic.
Regularly review your Topic Clusters performance and document any recommendations – especially those tagged high impact.
9. Review your Sales Emails and Sequences
Look at the stats for your Sequences and analyse sequence engagement and top enrolments. You can analyse the following metrics:
- On the Overview tab, you can review at a high-level how contacts are engaging with your emails and review which contacts are the most engaged.
- At the top of the page, use the dropdown menus to filter data by specific companies, sequences, statuses, users who enrolled contacts, or enrolment dates.
- Total enrolled: the total number of contacts enrolled in the sequence.
- Open rate: percent of enrolled contacts who opened any email in the sequence at least once.
- Click rate: percent of enrolled contacts who clicked a link in an email sent from the sequence at least once.
- Reply rate: percent of enrolled contacts who replied at least once to any email sent from the sequence.
- Meeting rate: percent of enrolled contacts who booked a meeting while enrolled in the sequence. To count towards the meeting rate, the contact must book a meeting using a HubSpot meeting link that is included in one of the sequences emails they received.
- Unsubscribe rate: percent of enrolled contacts who unsubscribed from the sequence.
- Bounce rate: percent of enrolled contacts whose email address bounced while enrolled in the sequence
- Look at improving or disabling the poor performing sequences or improve the email content/copy and carry out Sequence A/B split testing.
- Ensure you have added sequence reports to your reporting dashboard
10. Check Your Lead Scoring Triggers and scores
As you revise your marketing campaigns, content, create new nurture campaigns, ensure you update your Lead scoring triggers. Your Hubspot lead scoping system should accurately rank prospects according to their sales readiness.
- Check the score weightings are correct and add in new score triggers for any new campaigns.
- Create a MQL workflow trigger to flag hot leads to sales.
- If you’re using video, score based on number of watches or how much they have watched. Wistia video platform tracks these stats very well in Hubspot.