Within HubSpot, there are a few different ways to segment your contacts. Learn about the differences between saved filters, active lists, and static lists below.
Saved filters
Saved filters are available in all HubSpot accounts. They allow you to quickly view a segment of your database right from the contacts, companies, deals, or tickets dashboard. You can use any default or custom property in your HubSpot account to segment your contacts using saved filters. Contacts will be added or removed from saved filters automatically based on whether or not they currently meet the criteria you've set.
Lists (Marketing Hub only)
Lists are available in Marketing Hub accounts only. In addition to contact property values, lists allow you to segment your contacts by using other filters, such as page views, form submissions, and email interactions. You can use lists to send marketing emails to a specific set of contacts or to enroll contacts in workflows (Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise only).
You can create two different types of lists: active and static.
Active lists are dynamic, meaning that they automatically update and contacts will join the list whenever they meet the criteria and leave the list when they no longer meet the criteria. For example, an active list would be valuable when you have an email campaign to a particular subset of your contacts running over time, and always want the list to update with new contacts who meet the criteria.
Common uses for active lists include:
- to send unique marketing emails based on each contact's behavior and properties. If you send out a regular newsletter, you can use an active list to automatically manage the continually changing list of subscribers.
- to place outbound calls to contacts based on contact behavior and property values.
- to group your contacts by lifecycle stage and to identify behavior and properties for contacts in each stage. These active lists help you quickly see how many contacts are in each stage.
- to segment contacts based on properties that change frequently over time, such as HubSpot Score.
Static lists do not update as new contacts meet the criteria. Instead, they are a snapshot of a group of contacts who meet a certain set of requirements at a certain time. Contacts can be manually added and removed from static lists. A static list can be helpful to gain an understanding of contacts who met a certain criteria on a particular date. Then, you can look back at that static list later and see contacts who may no longer qualify for the criteria.
Common uses for static lists include:
- as criteria for creating other static or active lists.
- to manually add contacts to a workflow.
- to send one-time email blasts, email campaigns that you don't run often, and for a list of contacts that doesn't change frequently (e.g., event attendees, staff lists for an internal newsletter, or lists from a trade show).
- to manually group contacts that may not have a shared list criteria.
- to segment contacts to bulk delete contacts from your account.
Learn more about creating lists.