HubSpot is a fantastic tool for gaining business insight that can help inform your marketing efforts. Since onboarding clients on to HubSpot we have been able to open up their customer and sales data using HubSpot custom reporting to help both us and them understand what is really working for their business and where planned marketing efforts should focus.
The easiest way to demonstrate the true value of custom reporting for gaining business insight is to take you through a real example of where we applied this for a client. We also have another post on the process you can run through if you want to try this for yourself.
Example case: What is the true value of returning business?
One of our clients came to us with the hypothesis that returning customers were driving no value for their business. We sought to prove or disprove this theory with HubSpot custom reports since none of the standard reports covered this and since we knew there would be some data anomalies to consider.
The first step in solving this problem was to adapt their hypothesis into a question that we could use custom reports to answer. We formulated a question that included a metric, timeframe and dimension (see our recommended process for why these are important) and agreed this question with the client:
What percentage of revenue in 2022 came from returning customers?
Key: Date Filter / Comparison Dimension Metric
We decided on the properties that would best give us this info from the client’s HubSpot portal based on what was relevant and which properties held the most data:
- Percentage of revenue = ‘Amount in Company Currency’ (revenue with exchange rates between markets applied)
- 2022 = ‘Deal Close Date’ (the date that the order was closed)
- Returning customers = ‘ ‘Number of Associated Deals’ (the number of orders a contact has)
As the revenue property and order close date would need to come from the order data in HubSpot (Deal object) and the returning customer dimension from the data we held on the contact (Contact object) this suggested that a Multi-Object report (or the custom report builder) would be best for creating this report. See our step by step process for more information on determining the correct type of report.
Here is a wee demonstration of how we set-up this report using our own test data:
What value did we glean from this report?
We disproved the client’s hypothesis that returning customers were of no value to the business and showed that 27% of revenue was coming from repeat purchasers. This meant that we could make a good case for some of their ongoing marketing budget and efforts to be spent nurturing their existing one time purchasers to become repeat buyers.
This also caused us to ask more questions. For example: What are the key markets that repeat revenue is coming from? This in turn led us to start the process again and create some new custom reports.
These additional reports gave us further insights that could help us inform our 2023 marketing efforts:
- France has the highest proportion of revenue from 3 and 4-time purchasers so we should focus more marketing effort into nurturing these 1 time purchasers to buy again as they will be more likely to buy a third and fourth time.
- Belgium have a high proportion of returning revenue although overall revenue is not significant so we should focus on driving more contacts in from this market in the hope that that return rate continues.
This use of custom reports to answer key business questions was highly beneficial both for the client and ourselves and has helped inform our marketing strategy for 2023 with much more focus on returning customers. Stay tuned for the results later in the year!
If you would like any help from our HubSpot reporting experts on creating custom reports to gather business insight to inform your marketing approach get in touch today!
