Tagging Logged Emails in HubSpot: Workarounds and Solutions

The Challenge of Tagging Logged Emails in HubSpot

HubSpot is a powerhouse for CRM, sales, and marketing automation. However, even the most robust platforms have limitations. One common frustration for HubSpot users is the inability to directly tag logged emails. Imagine wanting to categorize emails as 'urgent', 'awaiting response', or 'completed' for better organization and reporting. While HubSpot excels in many areas, native email tagging isn't one of them.

A recent discussion in the HubSpot Community highlighted this exact issue. A community member sought a way to flag logged emails with high or low priority tags for easier filtering. Unfortunately, as it stands, HubSpot doesn't offer native support for creating activity properties or tags specifically for logged emails.

This can be a significant hurdle, especially for teams managing high volumes of email communication. Manually sifting through numerous logged emails to identify key interactions is time-consuming and inefficient.

Understanding the Limitation: Why No Native Tags?

HubSpot's design focuses on associating activities (like emails) with contact records. The platform prioritizes tracking engagement on a per-contact basis. While this approach is powerful for understanding individual customer journeys, it doesn't readily lend itself to tagging emails across multiple contacts for broader analysis.

The absence of native tagging forces users to seek alternative solutions to categorize and prioritize their email communications effectively. This article explores some of these workarounds and considerations.

Workaround 1: The 'Dummy' Contact Method

One suggested approach involves creating 'dummy' contacts to represent email tags. For example, you could create a contact named 'High Priority Email' or 'Awaiting Approval'. When logging an email, you'd associate it with the relevant dummy contact in addition to the actual recipient. This essentially uses the contact record as a tag.

Pros:

• Simple to implement.
• Leverages existing HubSpot functionality.

Cons:

• Reporting becomes more complex. You'd need to filter and analyze data across multiple contact records.
• Can clutter your contact database with numerous dummy contacts.
• Difficult to scale and maintain as your tagging needs evolve.

Workaround 2: Leveraging Internal Properties and Workflows

A more robust solution involves utilizing internal properties and workflows. Here's how you can implement this:

1. Create a Custom Property: Create a single-select or multi-select property on the contact record called something like 'Email Tag' or 'Email Priority'. Options could include 'High Priority', 'Needs Follow-up', 'Completed', etc.
2. Manual Updates or Workflow Automation: After logging an email, manually update the 'Email Tag' property on the contact record. Alternatively, you could explore using workflows triggered by specific email content or sender addresses to automatically set the property value. This is where integrations with tools like ESHOPMAN can come in handy, allowing for more sophisticated automation based on product views or purchase history.

Pros:

• More organized than dummy contacts.
• Enables better reporting and segmentation.
• Scalable and maintainable.

Cons:

• Requires more setup and configuration.
• Manual updates can be time-consuming without workflow automation.

Workaround 3: Using Notes and Naming Conventions

While not ideal, a very basic approach involves adding notes to logged emails using a consistent naming convention. For example, you could start each note with '[HIGH PRIORITY]' or '[FOLLOW-UP]'. This allows you to quickly scan the activity feed and identify key emails. You can then search for these terms to filter emails.

Pros:

• Very simple to implement.
• Requires no configuration.

Cons:

• Not scalable or maintainable.
• Prone to human error.
• Reporting is difficult.

The Future of Email Tagging in HubSpot

The HubSpot Community feedback often drives product development. If email tagging is a critical feature for your workflow, consider upvoting the existing feature request in the HubSpot Ideas forum. The more traction a feature request gains, the higher the likelihood of it being implemented in future updates.

Leveraging E-commerce Data for Enhanced Email Context

For businesses using HubSpot for e-commerce, integrating your store data can provide valuable context to your email communications. For example, if a customer abandons their cart, you can automatically tag any subsequent emails as 'cart abandonment follow-up'. This level of integration is crucial for RevOps alignment and ensuring a seamless customer experience. If you're looking for an ecommerce website maker with tight HubSpot integration, consider exploring solutions like ESHOPMAN, which offers built-in storefront and e-commerce capabilities directly within HubSpot.

Conclusion

While HubSpot currently lacks native support for tagging logged emails, several workarounds can help you achieve similar functionality. By leveraging dummy contacts, internal properties, or notes and naming conventions, you can better organize and prioritize your email communications. Remember to consider the pros and cons of each approach and choose the solution that best fits your specific needs. And, of course, advocate for native email tagging in the HubSpot Ideas forum to potentially influence future product development. Knowing how to add products to a HubSpot store and then effectively communicate with customers is a key part of growing any business.