The HubSpot property that ruins your automation when it goes stale

Good Morning {{first_name}}!

It’s Wednesday - and that means it’s time for your Property Playbook - an issue where we talk about common CRM fields and how to better use them in reporting, email marketing and performance.

This week’s theme is that pesky lifecycle stage field. If paired with the “became a customer date” field, it tells you not just where a contact is today but when they got there and how long they have been sitting there untouched. Could this be a retention issue? Probably.

Grab your coffee. Open your contacts. Let us see how bad it actually is. (Spoiler: it is probably not great.)

Let’s dive in.

One of the more powerful moves you can do in your CRM is to pair the lifecycle stage with different fields. Cross-laying them for better segmentation and personalization.

Pairing this field with “Became a Customer Date” (a contact object), you get both the current label and the precise timestamp of when they crossed the customer threshold.

We often think about the sales acquisition - and then everything goes dark. This will tell you just how “bad” your company is at staying top of mind for a new customer.

Ouch.

The lifecycle stage is often something that people see as descriptive, when it is actually the backbone of your entire infrastructure. You populate it, and it goes stagnant without the proper processes and automations.

And yet, your team continues to rely on this field to justify your numbers, your efforts and worse - your revenue numbers.

In marketing, we often just think about getting the lead to sales. And then it stops. But marketing is about relationships, and that really continues after a sale is made.

In pairing “Became a Customer Date” with “Lifecycle Stage” of “customer,” you can now see customer tenure, trigger anniversary-based touches, and see activities (good and bad) that may have influenced potential churn and lifetime value.

Do they sit for too long without any interactions?

Do they get too many emails based on their true needs and unsubscribe?

Could you do better at segmenting to keep them engaged while serving them valuable content as a customer?

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Busy bees working on email strategies that help give you more personalization, better performance and better ROI - because that’s all we want at the end of the day.

Hit reply if you want to share something you’re struggling with because I’d love to help!

TL;DR

Here’s the thing about effective email marketing - every campaign, including re-engagement campaigns, depends on it being accurate.

If your automation is underperforming, audit this property before you touch your copy, your cadence, or your subject lines.

Nine times out of ten, the stage is stale, and that is the whole problem.