Have you ever heard someone joke about wishing there was enough space to park a car in their garage? Despite the fact that garages are meant to be reserved for cars, it's almost second nature for us to use them as storage sheds - stowing away items we are not ready to part with, but also might not have plans to use again.
The more items we pile into the tiny space, the more challenging it becomes to find the items that still hold value to us when they are buried underneath the junk.
That’s exactly the case with HubSpot.
HubSpot holds a treasure trove of features to help organizations thrive, but after time it usually needs a spring cleaning. Whether it's from team members coming and going, businesses changing strategies, or unveiling new campaigns, without consistent maintenance of your HubSpot account, the portal can get messy.
When HubSpot gets too messy, it has some notable disadvantages. For example, HubSpot charges based on contacts in your database. So, with an unruly contact list, full of disengaged contacts, you’re likely wasting resources.
While finding and removing invalid contacts, spotting undelivered and bounced emails, and merging duplicate contacts are important, there are other hidden costs of messy HubSpot portals that you may not realize (but worry not, driveway parkers, a HubSpot account audit can set you straight!).
1. Plummeting email sending reputation
Your email sending reputation is a score that an Internet Service Provider assigns to your organization, which determines your organization’s email deliverability. A high score implies a higher chance of the ISP delivering emails to the inboxes of recipients on their network.
Image source: HubSpot
However, if your score falls below a certain point, the ISP might send your organization’s emails to recipients’ spam folder or block them entirely.
There are a variety of factors that determine your sender reputation, and one of them is the number of recipients who engage with the emails. Different forms of engagement with your emails are:
- Opening the email
- Replying to the email
- Forwarding the email
- Clicking the links in the email
With a disorganized HubSpot portal, you might end up sending emails to invalid contacts and disengaged users. Doing this over and over creates high bounce rates: a bad signal in the eye of the ISP.
Consequently, you’ll find your email sender reputation taking a dive and your future messages not even getting inboxes with your more active subscribers. A dive in reputation is costly, especially as research shows that email marketing has a return on investment (ROI) of $42 for every $1 spent.
2. Sloppy business decisions
Another hidden cost of a shoddy HubSpot portal is business decisions rooted in inaccurate data.
When HubSpot is in order, HubSpot portals make it easier to map marketing efforts to key performance indicators. KPIs are essential metrics that ensure that business targets are reached. They help you make heads or tails of the status and strength of your business and give you ideas on how to adjust accordingly.
When your HubSpot portal is in shambles, there’s a huge probability you’d end up measuring and reporting on the wrong KPIs, or not collecting the correct information. You might be unaware of the source of your leads or how they connect to your marketing efforts. Maybe you’re unable to pull reports displaying the ROI of your marketing activities altogether.
Failure to link your content strategy to KPIs leaves you in the dark about the effectiveness of your content, who’s viewing your content, where they’re getting it, and how much time they spend with it. You’ll also miss out on info about how well your content resonates with your audience, and how invested your audience is in your content and brand generally.
With poor tracking, you may end up making business decisions on immaterial information. Consequently, your business might stagnate or, even worse, recede.
3. Errors by users
Another hidden danger of messy HubSpot portals is that they could give your users unfettered access. The distorted portals could avail your users of exceedingly broad permissions to take any manner of actions and decisions. Some instances of what can go wrong include:
- Accidentally or maliciously delete contacts, permanently
- Having access to posting blogs, publishing social media, or updating website copy without permission to do so
- Adjusting workflows so they are no longer targeted in the way your strategy suggested
At the end of the day, HubSpot is brilliant but complex. And mistakes happen, whether malicious or not, but the likelihood of something going awry increases tenfold when someone who isn't familiar with the system takes the reins.
The threat lies in the fact that your users might end up taking actions that they lack the necessary training for. Such moves could trigger reactions that will prove detrimental to the general business goals of your company.
4. Waste of time
With so many users having a say in everything from the naming conventions to the folder structure within HubSpot, it's easy to spend time wondering what workflow is connected to what or what CTAs, lead form, or other collateral is the most recent.
Taking time to reverse engineer strategies and tactics implemented in Hubspot takes a lot of time and effort.
Some assets that deserve a proper naming system and folder structure for a seamless organization include:
- Landing pages
- Emails
- Files
- Workflows
- Lists
- Forms
- Calls-To-Action
In the words of Orison Swett Marden, "a good system shortens the road to the goal."
In the same light, a bad system wastes time that could be dedicated to more productive activities. Unfortunately, this can be triggered by cluttered HubSpot portals.
5. Uncertainty around what’s performing well or not
A disorganized HubSpot portal presents another subtle threat. That’s the cost of not knowing how your SEO strategy, blogs, lead forms, emails, and CTAs generally are performing, which ones among them are converting, and which ones among them are underperforming.
Once your portal is jumbled, it makes it difficult for you to get the necessary data on the conversion rate of your offers. Conversions play the role of health checks that give you the heads-up on whether your marketing, promotional, lead nurturing, or conversational marketing strategies are performing as expected.
With no idea of how your offers perform, there is virtually no way that you’d make the necessary changes. You can't deploy effective strategies like A/B testing to continue optimizing your content. Instead, you're left playing a guessing game wondering why things are underperforming.
Thus, the offers that are underperforming will keep underperforming, and the offers that are converting might even lose steam after a while due to the lack of the necessary touch.
6. Uncertainty of the status of your leads
Another hidden cost of messy HubSpot portals is the uncertainty of the status of leads. An untidy portal keeps you in the dark about the leads you have and the stage in which they are.
There are different stages in the default lifecycle, and they include:
- The lead: A contact who has converted through interacting with your organization beyond subscription signup
- A marketing qualified lead: A contact that the marketing team has deemed qualified for the sales team
- The sales qualified team: A contact that your sales team has marked as a potential customer
- An opportunity: A contact associated with a deal
- Evangelist: A customer who has advocated for your company
Tracking and effectively nurturing your leads through the various sales pipeline stages is crucial to growing your business.
While cluttered portals are natural and happen to the best of us over time, it doesn’t make it any less important to stay on top of maintenance. The more frequently you conduct HubSpot audits, the fewer issues you’ll have along the way.
To find out how to deal with disheveled HubSpot portals, learn more about HubSpot audits. The MTR Marketing team is chock-full of experts at everything HubSpot. If you need an audit but don't want to do it yourself, then contact us right away.
Featured photo by todd kent on Unsplash
