Insycle Blog

How to Save Time By Automating HubSpot Contact Exports & Delivery

Written by Ryan Bozeman | Sep 17, 2020 2:21:22 PM

Your organization exports HubSpot contacts all the time — to share among your teams, deliver them to vendors, import into another software, or to analyze and report on them.

With every new internal project, vendor partnership, or new software used, your need to export data regularly grows. While filtering and exporting data in HubSpot is simple, the manual task of going into the system, opening the view, exporting it, and delivering it to the intended party can start to demand a lot of time from important members of your team.

With dozens of exports, each requiring daily, weekly, or monthly exports, it can quickly become difficult for a single person to manage in a spreadsheet. Then, if they fall behind and exported data begins to be delivered late, it can slow down other processes within your business. A late export for updating data might ultimately slow your sales team down. Or without fresh data, a marketing vendor might not be able to launch new campaigns.

But there is no way to easily export contacts automatically, on a set schedule. If you wanted to, for example, share a list of contacts with a vendor every week, then you would have to manually generate the export each week. The simple task of sharing data ends up pulling your teams away from more important priorities

That’s a chunk of your time and attention being taken away every single week. Now multiply that across all of the different exporting tasks that you have on a regular basis.

If your exporting needs are persistent and taking up too much of your valuable time, Insycle is here to help. Insycle makes filtering and segmenting data on the fly easy. You can customize every export using advanced filtering capabilities, then schedule those exports to run on a regular basis and be automatically shared with the right person who needs them with a custom message. With Insycle, you can automate and put all of your HubSpot exporting under one roof.

Why Exporting HubSpot Contacts Is So Common In Every Aspect of Marketing Day-to-Day

Today, customer data is finding more uses than ever before. Companies need to have processes in place to ensure that their data is effectively shared among their teams, vendors, and for third-party software to keep their operations running smoothly.

There are many reasons why exporting HubSpot contacts in marketing teams is an important, ongoing task in most organizations, including:

Data Collection and Collaboration Within the Marketing Team

Your marketing team requires consistent access to your customer data to deliver effective, personalized messaging across all campaigns. When your CRM is filled with accurate, standardized, and organized data — your organization will run more smoothly and effectively as a result.

But maintaining quality data in your database requires constant maintenance. Often, you’ll have to share HubSpot data cleansing and update assignments with members of your team to fix mistakes that require human review, identify data exceptions, enrich records, and manage data update assignments internally.

But all of those use cases require the ability to effectively slice and dice your data so that you can deliver individualized assignments, and do so on a consistent basis. Even in simple cases, where say, your marketing team is responsible for fixing and updating records in a single export that was assigned to them, a team of seven would require seven different HubSpot contact exports, generated as often as you hand out the assignments — which might be weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. That can mean dozens of unique exports every month. How much time does that take away from the person in charge of managing the exporting process?

That kind of data collaboration is critical for ensuring that your database is organized and that data is complete, accurate and standardized in your CRM. Data that isn’t consistent makes segmentation, personalization, and conversational marketing less effective. But managing that exporting and sharing process can be time-consuming for the person in charge of managing it.

Sync Data With other CRMs, Finance systems, and In-House Databases

Another common reason for regularly exporting data is to ensure that all of your systems —whether they are other CRMs, finance systems, or customer databases — are synced and consistent.

HubSpot will not be the only critical system where you store customer data. Ensuring that all of those systems are properly synced and sharing data is not always possible through native integrations. Additionally — you may not want a full sync between your systems. For instance, if you had a separate CRM that was integrated with your PPC marketing campaigns, you probably would only want that CRM to include records that were relevant to those campaigns.

Sharing customer data with finance teams is also a consistent, ongoing task in most companies, and is so critical to the health of your business. When exporting data for use in finance systems, timeliness is even more critical. If these systems aren’t fully integrated, this can quickly become a task that eats into the valuable time of critical members of your teams.

Working With Vendors and Agencies

If you work with outside agencies or vendors, you will likely have to export HubSpot contact data and share it with them regularly so that they can launch campaigns or deliver services. For example, when you need to create an audience for an ad campaign, you’ll need to filter down your data to very specific subsets in order to share it with the relevant campaign managers.

But there are some concerns with that. You don’t want to grant a third-party company blanket access to your database, even if they are only allowed to view and not change any data in your contact profiles.

Even then, many vendors will need the ability to deliver data back with updates and changes. If you worked with an outbound sales partner, for example, they would need to log conversations that they have had with your prospects so that your team see them and use them for context. This means that your collaboration with them results in a consistent loop or exporting, sharing, and re-importing new data into your system.

Working with marketing agencies relies on your ability to deliver critical data to them in a timely fashion as well. This requires either access to the data or consistent HubSpot contact exports to keep things moving forward. If you are a few days late with customer data, that means that the campaigns that they run on your behalf will likely be launched a few days late as well.

Another common example of exporting contact data for vendors is webinar and event registration. You’ll want to send them invitations to the event, and later, may want to engage with that group again for post-event marketing.

Related articles

Declutter Your CRM By Purging Low-Quality Data Automatically

Find & Fix Customer Data Issues with Insycle’s New Health Assessment

How to Become a Customer Data Wizard Using the ‘Transform Data’ Tool

Exporting HubSpot Contacts Can Be a Huge Time-Sink

Despite the fact that most companies are consistently exporting HubSpot contacts to distribute among their teams, partners, and software — it is rare for those same companies to stop and evaluate just how much time their employees are dedicating to the task of managing exports and delivering them to the right person.

It’s often seen as a task that “just has to be done.” and don’t put much thought into how that process could potentially be improved on an organizational level.

One option that many companies fail to consider is automating the filtering, exporting, and delivery of those exports. This would require the use of a third-party solution, as it is not possible to automate exports in this way directly in HubSpot, but would save valuable team members potentially dozens of hours every single month.

Let’s start by looking at the process of filtering data, creating views, and exporting those contacts in HubSpot. As you read along, consider how much time it would take if this same process was applied to dozens of different exports every month.

The Process of Filtering Data, Creating Views, and Exporting HubSpot Contacts

First, navigate to Contacts > Contacts in your main menu.

On this screen is where you can export your contact data.

Exporting all of your contact data is simple.

Make sure you're in the “All records” tab and click the tab name. In the dropdown menu, select “Export view.” There, you can export all HubSpot contacts in one fell swoop.

Alternatively, you can export a filtered view of your data, using contact data fields that you choose when you first build the filter.

You can add a filter to your contact data on the left side of your contacts screen.

Then, click on the “+ Add View” button above your list of filtered contacts.

Then, you can export the view by clicking on the “Custom view” dropdown, and clicking “Export view.”

And you're done!

Generating a single export from a custom view in HubSpot is relatively simple and straight-forward.

But there are some limitations for filters. For example, if you wanted to identify contacts that were missing one of a number of fields — such as state, country, or job title — you couldn’t filter your contacts in HubSpot down to records that are missing one of three, only records that were missing all three.

Currently, HubSpot does not allow you to use an “OR” operator, which can make it easy to filter data targeting multiple options in a specific field and more generally, some flexibility to your filtering processes.

Another example would be finding contacts that include “CXO” in their job title, which would surface CMO, CTO, CIO, CEO, etc. in Insycle. In HubSpot, you’d have to filter your results for each of those positions one at a time.

But with the added complexity of many use cases necessitating many different views that need to be exported on a regular basis and delivered to specific people, it’s easy to see how the process of managing these exports could quickly become overwhelming.

Exporting Data is Often for Time-Sensitive Tasks

Often, the underlying reason or task behind exporting your data is time-sensitive.

As an example, if you are exporting data to share with your internal teams for updating or assignments, each of those individual assignments will have their own due dates, and every day wasted is another day without the task being complete.

This means that the team members that are responsible for exporting data need to be on the ball.

Delaying exports for data correction assignments ultimately means that they get the corrections back later, and campaigns may have to be delayed as a result. If you share data with marketing agencies or vendors, there is a high probability that they will not be able to move forward with their work until they receive the data.

Exporting HubSpot contacts might be viewed as a simple, straight-forward task. But when your teams fall behind, it can have big implications on how your business functions.

Many Data Exports Are For Ongoing Tasks

A data export can be a one-time activity, but most often, it is a recurring task that will need to be done at set regular intervals.

Monthly reporting necessitates a monthly export, for example. You may have many different reports that you want to generate each month, and as those numbers add up it can quickly become a time-sink for your managers.

Sales teams are another good example. They are constantly updating records, fixing data issues, and standardizing. This is an ongoing task that requires consistent exporting. In companies that attract a lot of leads, even taking a few weeks off from managing your sales data can be problematic.

Marketing teams also have ongoing data export requirements for launching campaigns, cleaning their marketing data, sharing with vendors, and enriching the data internally.

All of these are examples of ongoing tasks that are never going to just go away — these are recurring needs that necessitate the need for data exports and take up valuable time from your teams.

The ongoing nature of many of these tasks mean that they take up a significant amount of your team’s time. It may not be obvious at first, as each individual export task may only take ten of fifteen minutes. But if you had a dozen of these tasks every week, that’s nearly fifty in a single month. That’s a lot of time that your team is wasting.

How Insycle Helps with Exporting HubSpot Contacts

Are you tired of having to manually filter data, create HubSpot views, generate your exports, and then deliver them to the right teammate or third-party partner? Do you wish that you could automate the process so that your team could focus on bigger picture issues, and not spend so much time wading through customer data and spreadsheets?

Insycle allows you to remove repetitive data filtering, exporting, and sharing processes from your to-do list, completely.

Using Insycle, you can:

  • Create advanced, multi-variable filters for slicing and dicing your HubSpot contacts to:
    • Segment customers for your campaigns
    • Generate exports of exact customer personas
    • Target campaigns and reach specific audience slices
  • Automate CSV export generation and deliver exports through email to those who need it
  • Include a custom message in the CSV export email
  • Make sure that recurring exports always contain the latest HubSpot data
  • Collaborate with your teams and improve data maintenance processes

Let’s take a closer look at exactly how Insycle does this.

Automatically Generate & Delivery Always-Updated HubSpot Data Pulls & Get Away from Redundant Processes

Insycle allows you to filter your HubSpot data in advanced ways that are not available in most CRMs.

You can do this using pre-built templates, or by creating custom templates from filtering your HubSpot contacts. Insycle’s automatic exports are always updated with the latest data in your database.

Using Insycle, you can use a single variable or multiple variables to slice and dice your HubSpot contact data down to very specific segments.

For instance, you can:

  • Filter records with similar matching. For instance if one contact had their position listed as “CEO” while another as “C.E.O.” — you’d want to ensure that those records ended up in the same bucket.
  • Filter using regular expressions. For instance, if you wanted to filter contact records down to those that were just executives, you could use regular expression filtering to identify anyone with a job title like “CXO,” which would surface CEOs, CMOs, CTOs, COOs, etc.
  • By names that are in uppercase or lowercase. Surface records that need to be fixed for personalization improvements.
  • By free email provider. Surface all of the contacts in your database with personal and free emails, which are generally lower value for B2B companies.
  • By geo-location using zip code structure. Identify all of your customers in very specific areas using zip code-structure based filters.

Then, you can combine these advanced filters to create a very specific advanced HubSpot contact export.

Let’s look at an example.

Let’s say that your marketing team was going to start a direct mail campaign to re-engage with prospects that have stopped reading emails. To do this, they need accurate addresses for each prospect. But your database has many errors in the zip code field — some records have too many or too few numbers. Others contain letters, symbols, or don’t resemble a zip code at all.

You have to get this fixed before the mailing campaign can start. Otherwise, your marketing team will blow through their budget sending direct mail materials that will go undelivered due to a bad address.

Simply identifying the records with errors in the zip code field isn’t enough, because you still need to correct the data before the mailing can begin. This could be done using data enrichment services or manually researching the correct zip code on their own. If you choose to handle it manually, you may quickly find that what seemed like a simple task is actually more complicated and time-consuming than you originally thought.

But Insycle can help.

Using Insycle’s “Grid Edit” Tool, along with the pre-built “Invalid Zip Code” template, you can identify all of the prospects in your database with erroneous zip codes, based on the criteria defined in the template.

Here’s what the template looks like inside of the “Grid Edit” tool:

Then, you could export this data and share it with a member of your team for data enrichment.

That’s a basic example, but your filters can get more powerful.

Here’s an example of using multiple variable filters to slice and dice your HubSpot contacts.

This template would create an always-updated, automatically generated CSV export for HubSpot contacts that:

  • Use a company email domain (and not a free email provider)
  • Are located in California using zip code range 900-961
  • Hold an executive-level job title (CXO could be a CMO, CIO, CFO)
  • Industry field contains the word "marketing" or "sales"

It’s easy to see how a regular export like this could be extremely powerful for monitoring potentially important deals or prioritizing activities for higher-value prospects. With advanced filters like this, there is no end to the number of interesting ways that you can slice and dice your HubSpot CRM data to improve your marketing and speak more directly to specific customer segments.

When you click the “Search” button, your data will be filtered and will generate a list of all corresponding records at the bottom of your screen.

Then click the “Export” button, which is available in every Insycle tool. That will pull up our exporting process prompt, which will walk you through three quick steps to set up your export and sharing of the generated CSV.

In step one, you’ll be asked to choose whether you would like to generate a new export file or update an existing file.

In the second step, we’ll tell Insycle where to send the export. You could have it delivered to your own email, to a teammate, or a third-party partner — or all three if you wanted. You can personalize the email message, subject, and recipients.

 

In the third and final step, you’ll decide when you would like the export to run. It can be run as a one-time export by selecting the “Run Now” tab. You can also schedule the expert to run on a set schedule — either hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly — and put future recurring exports on autopilot. You also have flexible scheduling options to choose from to ensure that each export runs at the right time, every time.

With this scheduled HubSpot contacts export in place, you will continuously receive a fresh export with the most updated data in your CRM.

Insycle is your exporting power tool for all of your exporting needs, and those exports are always updated with the most recent HubSpot data.. Your HubSpot contact data is exported automatically, on a set schedule, and delivered to the person who needs it — all under one convenient roof.

Insycle Helps Organizations Take Control Of Their HubSpot Data Maintenance 

Insycle makes it easy to schedule advanced HubSpot contact data exports and deliver them to the right teammate or third-party partner on a set schedule.

But Insycle is helpful for much more than exports. It benefits teams that waste too much time on repetitive data management tasks in the CRM. Using Insycle, you can cleanse, standardize, deduplicate, import, update, and export your CRM data in bulk, on a set schedule.

When you aren’t spending so much time on mundane data management tasks, you are free to focus on big-picture issues that drive growth for your organization.

Unlike other data management apps, Insycle directly integrates with many of the most popular CRM systems in use today, including HubSpot, Salesforce, and Intercom.

Want to save time and frustration on filtering HubSpot contacts, exporting them, and delivering them to the relevant person? Click the button in the top right to start your free Insycle trial today.