HubSpot Lists Explained: Creating & Utilizing Active vs. Static Lists Effectively

Are you new to HubSpot and don't know the differences between active and static lists? The truth is that there's two types of lists that you have to keep in mind when you're using the HubSpot tool. One are active lists. These are automatically updated with contacts joining it whenever they meet a specific criteria. They're dynamic, so you will see them ever changing. Static lists, in turn are a snapshot of a group of people who met a certain set of requirements when the list was created and saved. They generally require manual updating and most of them have to do with imports. Now if you want to take a look at how to create those, an active or a static list and what they're used for, or what they can be used for, check this out.

In the HubSpot portal you're going to go your contact section and you're going to hit list. Once you click that, you're going to get to your list section and on the right hand side you're going to hit Create list in this orange button. Now here's where you're going to choose to either have an active or a static list. For this video, I'm just going to do a quick active list to show you contacts whose name starts with the letter J. I'm going to first create it as an active list. We're going to choose contact based. We're going to hit next here and we're going to add a filter here. Contacts whose name starts with the J. And I'm just going to filter by first name, hit first name and starts with any of input the J letter. So it's going to populate and we'll just hit save. You will see 312 contacts that meet this criteria. So that's an active list, but we're going to replicate it as a static list and show you the fundamental differences between them. I'm going to refresh and here's the active list populating in the meantime going to create a static list. We'll choose contact based and we'll choose static. In this particular example, contacts with a J, we'll just have to rename it differently so that they don't overlap. Since we cannot have two lists have the same name, we'll hit next. We'll put a filter and the contact property is going to be firstname and then we'll choose starts with any of the letter J. Once we have that, we'll wait for it to load and afterwards we'll just hit save the list. See that? The same 212contacts met that criteria. But now what is the difference between these? As we mentioned, if we go back to lists and we see that these are populating, this is the static list and this is the active list. We'll just do a refresh and now we have the exact same context. The only difference between these two is this static list is going to remain the same forever. It's not going to change in its size unless we delete the context eventually, but it's going to remain exactly 312 contacts. In this particular case, the active list is actually going to change if a new contact joins whose name starts with the letter J. So the active list is dynamic. It is going to change over time as people meet the criteria or not meet it. And then static list is going to remain the exact same throughout the ages. Now that you know how to build.

An active and static list, I'm going to show you up next where and how you can use them. You want to use them for a specific marketing purpose. One could be a marketing email and another could be a marketing workflow.

Check this out. So now we have created our static and our active list and we can see them right here. What's next? You will go to marketing and you would hit email. In this part you will see that I crafted two types of emails. One is regular and one is automated. Regular is usually used for newsletters and automated is to be used in workflows. Let's start with the regular email. In the regular email, if we decide this is good to go and we have checked the settings to be ok, we'll go to send or schedule. In here we can actually do this. As you can see here in the recipient section, you would have to choose a list. Right now I chose context with J, the static list as the list to send it to. And I chose contacts whose name starts with the J, which is the active list as a suppression list. You can do that if you want. You can add a suppression list if certain contexts that meet the criteria here you wouldn't want them to send the email to. But for this purpose, since it's this exact same contact list, we'll just remove it and you could proceed to review and send your marketing email. Now I'm just going to show you how that would work in a workflow. You would go to the automation section of HubSpot, go to workflows and you will choose the workflow that you want to work on here. I created a sample workflow. In this case, what I did was I started with the contract enrollment trigger which is list membership that it is a member of the list context whose name starts with the J. I'll delete this and show you how this was done. So basically I would set up the trigger right here. I would choose when filter criteria is met and I would choose list membership as the option. And then what I would do is filter and choose my list. There we go. So I would apply the filter and save. Now that that is done, I have set up another trigger to delay maybe two days after they join that list. Well, since this is static, the they wouldn't join. They would have actually been part of it since the beginning. If here we would choose the other list which is whose name starts with J which is the actual active list. Now that's where it would apply. So we would see that today's delay and then they would be sent the new marketing email. We just created the new example new email example automated and we would save. If we wanted further actions to be taken after this or activity based triggers, we would actually just wait for contacts to whose name starts with the J to receive that email and then we will see how they would react. But for the purposes of this particular example and this very simple workflow, this is how you would add in the list there.

So you now know the differences between an active and a static list. You also know how to create them and how to insert them in an email or in a HubSpot workflow. Remember, education is great, but the execution is where it's at. So go ahead and be the hub hero that your organization needs. See you on the next video.