The property missing from every win-back campaign that fails

Good Morning {{first_name}}!

It’s Wednesday - and that means it’s time for your Property Playbook - an issue where we dig into the objects, properties, and emails based on properties. Properties galore!

This week, we’re continuing our email discussion about B2B strategy. And the win-back is currently the most prominent one, given that the cost of lead acquisition is going up.

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What I see most often is that companies send out a mass email to everyone to “win them back” after not doing business with a company for a certain amount of time.

But instead, let’s pull up the ‘Last Activity Date’ field and see what’s actually happening on the account. Just because they haven’t bought doesn’t mean they are dormant.

This field logs the most recent call, email, meeting, or note tied to a contact or a deal. It already exists in your portal.

HubSpot fills this field automatically, so you just have to keep the record up to date with notes, calls, etc.

100% filled. For every contact across the entire ecosystem.

Here’s the thing - that same object doesn’t fill in the same way on the deal object timeline. It doesn’t move at all.

So, you have 100% fill-in rate on the contact, but not on the deal. So when you are looking at dormant accounts and whether someone has purchased, you can’t rely on the activity feed alone to determine whether it’s a truly dormant account with zero deals.

A 100% fill rate with zero automation built on top of it tells me your team can see who has gone quiet, but has no system that tells them when. The feed will only show when the last activity was, which is when the last internal activity was documented.

Win-back campaigns are getting sent on gut feeling, a launch on the calendar, or someone finally noticing a client has not replied in a while. That is not a retention strategy, but rather a reactive guess wearing a strategy's clothes.

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Here are three things to keep things moving and accurate:

Go to Contact and Deal properties, create a calculated property using “Last Activity Date” as the source, set it to output the number of days elapsed, and confirm it recalculates daily rather than at the time of edit. This one setting is the difference between a property that ages with reality and one that just sits there looking accurate.

If this is the conversation you have been putting off, 44fjord works with teams to build the foundation that makes these numbers trustworthy. If you want to talk about what a partnership could look like, reach out to the team using the contact form on 44fjord.com/contact

TL;DR

While HubSpot does fill in some fields by default, others are not. And this is where effective email could be a game-changer. Take a step back and think about how to best segment for dormant reactivation, and then figure out how to best manipulate the data in your favour.