As a HubSpot user, you're probably familiar with the concept of custom properties. These allow you to store and organize data in a way that makes sense for your business. But when it comes to choosing the right type of property, it's important to consider the limitations of each option. One property type that you should be cautious of using is the "single-line text" property.
In this blog, we'll explain the nature of this property, and why you should avoid using it in your marketing and sales processes.
Summary:
- How single-line text properties impact your database
- What are those impacts ?
- What to do ?
- These situations when to use single line text
- Endnotes
Single-line text properties in HubSpot are a type of custom property that can only store one line of text. This property type is often used to store simple information such as names, email addresses, or short descriptions.
While single-line text properties may seem like a convenient option for storing basic information, they can actually limit the efficiency of your data management within HubSpot. Some native HubSpot properties, such as “Country/Region”, are single line text properties by default. However, using single line text properties for these types of data can lead to difficulties in segmenting and analyzing your data effectively.
To illustrate this article, we will analyze the impact of using the native HubSpot property Country/Region.
How single-line text properties impact your database
Single-line text properties will, most of the time, lead to bad data generation and no data consistency. Think about that, when you ask a lead to fill a “single-line text” field in a form you created, you basically give him the opportunity to write anything on that field.
And even if the question might be simple for you, you can not anticipate how the lead will react. Let’s take the Country/Region property. Let’s say you include that field in your form and you wisely renamed that property “Country” to reduce the possibility for the lead to fill it with its region.
After few submission, there is a high chance that your database will look like that:
Taking into account all the different ways to name a country and the typos, you will end up with an infinity of different versions for the same information. It looks ugly and not consistent but actually, the impact on your database goes way beyond its aesthetic.
What are those impacts ?
The direct impact of using the single-line text property is the segmentation! And segmentation is the most primordial asset of a CRM. Without segmentation, you can’t run efficient Marketing campaigns, create useful lists, build precise reports or automate your sales process.
Let’s take our UK case described above:
You’ve run your campaign for a week now and you generated 200 leads apparently from the UK. You’ve been asked to launch an email campaign to nurture those UK leads. How will you do that ?
With single-line text property, you have to go the hard way…
- Export all the form submission
- Identify manually all “UK related” values
- Copy/paste them into your list filters
You will end up with a list criteria like this one:
Now, imagine repeating this action everytime you need to target the UK, or for any other country or single-line text property you set up.
And, what if you forgot a value? What if a new submission with another new value happens? It’s safe to say that you will never be at peace with this kind of system.
Then, you’ve been asked to create a report on how many UK leads were generated… Same issue…
And how will you manage to assign all UK leads to your UK Sales Rep automatically ?
There is always a way to make it work, like I show on my list example. However, you will never manage to keep your database clean and efficient. Especially if you need to migrate your database at some point.
What to do ?
How could we make your life way easier?
When it comes to CRM and data management. You should always have in mind that the information you ask or collect on a lead is meant to be used for your operations. You need to ask yourself:
- Why am I collecting this data?
- How will I use it?
- What is the best way to organize this data?
The good thing about HubSpot is that it provides numerous ways to store data with different field types. You can fill almost all your data management needs with them:
In the case of the Country field. Why not create a “Dropdown Menu” property named “Country” to let the lead pick from a defined list?
That way you will guarantee Data consistency, effective segmentation that will result in efficient campaigns, reporting and sales automation.
These situations when to use single line text
Most of the time, avoid it. However they are useful to collect information that are unique to each lead (names, email addresses, comments etc.) Those properties are qualitative and do not aim to segment your database.
You can use it when it comes to identify the beginning or the ending of another property value by operating a property copy. One practical exemple is the recopy of the record ID on a single line text property to create an automatic round robin lead assignment.
The other situation is when it comes to integration with third party apps. It might happen that single line text is easier to map with some other tools.
Endnotes
If you want to organize your Data in a better way and learn how to automate your Data Management, I created a private webpage referencing all the workflows I have been presenting: the “Workflow Box”. You can access it immediately for free by clicking here.
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