.svg)
Overview
HubSpot Lists are the segmentation engine that powers targeted sales and marketing execution. Whether you are routing inbound leads to the right rep, building nurture campaigns, or syncing high-fit accounts to your sales engagement platform, lists determine who gets what message and when.
For GTM teams running multi-channel outbound or complex ABM plays, understanding how to build and maintain lists is non-negotiable. The difference between a 2% reply rate and a 15% reply rate often comes down to whether your segmentation actually reflects how prospects think about themselves and their problems.
This guide covers everything you need to know about HubSpot Lists: the difference between active and static lists, how to build dynamic segments that update automatically, use cases across sales and marketing, and best practices for keeping your lists clean and actionable. We will also cover how context engines like Octave can feed enriched qualification data into HubSpot to power more sophisticated segmentation.
What Are HubSpot Lists?
HubSpot Lists are saved groups of contacts or companies that share common characteristics. They serve as the foundation for almost every automated workflow in the platform: email campaigns, lead assignment rules, ad audience syncing, and reporting dashboards all depend on lists to define their scope.
Think of lists as the query layer between your raw CRM data and your execution tools. Instead of manually selecting contacts every time you want to send a campaign, you define the criteria once and let HubSpot maintain the group automatically.
Two Types of HubSpot Lists
HubSpot offers two fundamentally different list types, and choosing the right one for each use case matters:
| List Type | How It Works | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| Active Lists | Automatically updates in real-time as contacts meet or no longer meet the defined criteria | Ongoing campaigns, lead routing, nurture sequences, any workflow where membership should change based on behavior or properties |
| Static Lists | Contains only the contacts who matched criteria at the moment of creation or were manually added; does not update automatically | One-time campaigns, event attendee lists, historical snapshots, import-based campaigns |
Active lists answer the question "who currently matches these criteria?" Static lists answer the question "who matched these criteria at a specific point in time?" Most GTM workflows require active lists because your segments need to reflect real-time changes in contact data.
Active vs Static Lists: When to Use Each
When to Use Active Lists
Active lists should be your default choice for any ongoing operational workflow. They ensure your targeting stays current without manual intervention.
Common active list use cases:
- Lead routing: Automatically assign new leads to reps based on territory, company size, or lead score
- Nurture sequences: Enroll contacts who have not engaged in the past 30 days
- Sales prioritization: Surface contacts showing buying signals for immediate outreach
- Re-engagement campaigns: Target contacts whose deals went cold or were lost
- Upsell targeting: Identify existing customers who match expansion criteria
- Ad audience sync: Keep your LinkedIn or Facebook audiences aligned with CRM segments
Active lists also support workflows that need to remove contacts when they no longer qualify. For example, a "Marketing Qualified Leads" list should automatically remove contacts once they become Sales Qualified or Closed Won. This prevents duplicate outreach and ensures your metrics reflect reality.
When to Use Static Lists
Static lists make sense when you need to capture a specific group at a moment in time or when you are working with imported data.
Common static list use cases:
- Event follow-up: Contacts who attended a specific webinar or conference
- One-time campaigns: Product launch announcements to a curated segment
- A/B test holdout groups: Control groups that should not change during the test
- Import-based sends: Lists from partner referrals, purchased data, or manual research
- Historical reporting: Snapshots for comparing performance across time periods
If you find yourself frequently recreating the same static list, that is a signal you should convert it to an active list. Static lists require ongoing maintenance; active lists maintain themselves.
Building Dynamic Segments in HubSpot
The power of HubSpot Lists comes from the criteria builder, which lets you combine multiple properties and behaviors into sophisticated segments. Understanding how to use AND/OR logic and nested filter groups is essential for effective market segmentation.
Basic Filter Types
HubSpot supports three categories of filters for list creation:
- Contact properties: Any field on the contact record including default fields like job title, lifecycle stage, and country, plus custom properties you have created
- Company properties: Fields from the associated company record such as industry, employee count, annual revenue, and technology stack
- Behavioral filters: Actions contacts have taken including email opens, form submissions, page views, meeting bookings, and deal activities
Using AND/OR Logic
The filter logic determines how criteria combine:
- AND: Contact must match ALL criteria in the group
- OR: Contact must match AT LEAST ONE criterion in the group
For example, to build a list of enterprise decision-makers in your target verticals:
Start with company size (AND logic)
Employee count is greater than 500
Add industry filter (OR logic within the group)
Industry is any of: Technology, Financial Services, Healthcare
Add job title filter (OR logic within the group)
Job title contains any of: VP, Director, Head of, Chief
Exclude existing customers (AND logic)
Lifecycle stage is not Customer
Advanced Segmentation with Nested Groups
For complex segments, you can nest filter groups to create more nuanced logic. This is particularly useful when your ICP definition has multiple valid paths to qualification.
Consider a SaaS company selling to both marketing teams and sales teams. They might want a list where:
- The contact works at a company with 200+ employees, AND
- EITHER the contact is a marketing leader with MarTech budget authority, OR the contact is a sales leader with RevOps responsibility
This requires nested OR groups within the main AND structure, which HubSpot supports through its filter group interface.
Segmentation Strategies That Drive Results
Having the technical ability to build lists is table stakes. The strategic question is: what segments actually improve conversion rates? Here are proven approaches that align your lists with how buyers think and buy.
Segment by Problem, Not Just Firmographics
Traditional segmentation focuses on company size, industry, and geography. While these filters are necessary for targeting, they do not capture the problems prospects are trying to solve. Two 500-person tech companies might have completely different priorities.
Layer behavioral and engagement signals on top of firmographics:
- Pages viewed (product pages, pricing, case studies by vertical)
- Content downloaded (topic indicates problem area)
- Form field responses (self-reported challenges)
- Meeting requests (stage of buyer journey)
This approach aligns with concept-centric personalization rather than surface-level demographics.
Segment by Buying Stage
Not every contact in your database is ready for the same message. Creating stage-specific lists ensures your outreach matches where the prospect actually is:
| Stage | List Criteria | Appropriate Action |
|---|---|---|
| Awareness | Downloaded educational content, no pricing page visits | Educational nurture sequence |
| Consideration | Viewed product pages, comparison content, or competitor pages | Product-focused content, case studies |
| Decision | Viewed pricing, requested demo, or engaged with sales | Direct sales outreach, personalized sequences |
| Customer | Closed-won deals, active subscription | Onboarding, expansion, advocacy |
Segment by Engagement Recency
Recency is a powerful predictor of responsiveness. Build lists that prioritize contacts showing recent activity:
- Hot leads: Engaged within last 7 days, multiple touchpoints
- Warm leads: Engaged within last 30 days
- Cold leads: No engagement in 90+ days
- Re-engagement targets: Previously engaged but went dark
These time-based segments help you allocate effort appropriately. Your sales team should focus on hot leads while marketing runs re-engagement campaigns for cold segments.
Segment by Qualification Score
If you are using AI-powered lead scoring or manual qualification frameworks, create lists that correspond to score ranges. This enables differentiated treatment:
- High-fit leads get routed directly to AEs with fast response times
- Medium-fit leads enter qualification sequences
- Low-fit leads go to long-term nurture or are deprioritized entirely
Tools like Octave can enrich contacts with qualification scores and reasoning that HubSpot can then use as list criteria, enabling more sophisticated routing than basic lead scoring formulas allow.
HubSpot List Use Cases Across Sales and Marketing
Sales Use Cases
Account-Based Targeting: Build lists of contacts at target accounts for coordinated outreach. Combine company-level criteria (account tier, buying signals) with contact-level criteria (seniority, department) to ensure reps engage the right people at priority accounts. This supports ABM execution at scale.
Deal Velocity Optimization: Create lists of contacts associated with stalled opportunities. Criteria might include deal stage not updated in 14+ days, or contacts who have not engaged with sales emails. These lists feed re-engagement workflows or alert reps to follow up.
Expansion Revenue: Build lists of existing customers who match upsell or cross-sell criteria. This might include customers approaching contract renewal, those using only basic features, or accounts that have added headcount since signing.
Marketing Use Cases
Lifecycle-Based Nurture: Create separate lists for each lifecycle stage and build automated nurture tracks that move contacts through the funnel. This ensures prospects receive stage-appropriate content without manual intervention.
Event Promotion: Build lists for event invitations based on topic relevance, geography, and engagement history. After the event, convert attendees to a static list for targeted follow-up that references their attendance.
Product Launch Targeting: When launching new features or products, create lists of contacts most likely to benefit based on their industry, use case, or past engagement with related content.
Operations Use Cases
Data Quality Monitoring: Create lists that surface data issues: contacts missing key fields, duplicate records, or records with outdated information. These lists can trigger automated enrichment workflows or manual cleanup tasks.
Integration Sync: Use lists to define which contacts sync to external tools. For example, only sync marketing qualified leads to your sales engagement platform to avoid cluttering rep workflows with unqualified contacts.
Compliance Management: Create exclusion lists for contacts who have opted out, bounced, or should not be contacted for legal reasons. Reference these lists in all outbound workflows to ensure compliance.
Best Practices for HubSpot List Management
Naming Conventions
As your list count grows, a consistent naming convention becomes essential. Consider a structure like:
[Type] - [Purpose] - [Segment] - [Date if static]
Examples:
Active - Nurture - Enterprise Awareness StageActive - Routing - Inbound High FitStatic - Event - SaaStr 2026 Attendees - 0226Active - Exclusion - Opt Outs and Bounces
This makes lists searchable and helps team members understand what each list does without opening it.
Folder Organization
HubSpot supports folders for lists. Use them to group by:
- Team (Sales, Marketing, Operations)
- Campaign or initiative
- Lifecycle stage
- Time period (archived lists)
Regular Maintenance
Lists accumulate over time and become difficult to manage. Schedule quarterly reviews to:
- Archive or delete unused static lists
- Review active list criteria for relevance
- Check that list-dependent workflows still function correctly
- Consolidate duplicate or overlapping lists
Performance Monitoring
Track key metrics for your most important lists:
- List growth rate: Is the segment expanding or contracting?
- Engagement rates: How do contacts in this list respond to outreach?
- Conversion rates: What percentage of list members progress to the next stage?
If a segment consistently underperforms, revisit your criteria. The list may be too broad, or the underlying data may be incomplete.
Integration with External Tools
HubSpot Lists become more powerful when combined with external enrichment and qualification tools. Platforms like Octave can research companies, score fit against your ICP, and push qualification results back to HubSpot as custom properties. This enables list criteria like "Octave Qualification Score > 7" or "Octave Best-Fit Persona = VP Marketing."
This integration pattern supports segment-based messaging at scale by ensuring your lists are built on deep qualification data rather than surface-level firmographics alone.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Over-Segmenting
Creating too many narrow segments leads to maintenance headaches and diluted sample sizes. If a list has fewer than 100 contacts, consider whether it can be combined with a related segment.
Under-Segmenting
The opposite problem: lists so broad they are meaningless. A list of "all contacts" provides no targeting value. Every list should represent a group you would genuinely treat differently.
Ignoring Data Quality
Lists are only as good as the data they filter. If job titles are inconsistent, industry fields are blank, or engagement data is not tracking properly, your segments will be unreliable. Prioritize data hygiene as a prerequisite to effective segmentation.
Set-and-Forget Mentality
Active lists update automatically, but their criteria do not update themselves. When your ICP evolves, your product changes, or market conditions shift, your list definitions need to follow.
Not Testing List Logic
Before launching campaigns from a new list, manually review a sample of contacts to verify they actually match your intended segment. Filter logic errors can cause embarrassing mis-sends.
Frequently Asked Questions
In HubSpot terminology, "Smart Lists" is an older term that referred to active lists. Today, HubSpot uses "Active Lists" and "Static Lists" as the official terms. Active lists automatically update based on criteria; static lists do not.
List limits vary by HubSpot tier. Free accounts have limited list capacity, while paid tiers offer higher limits. Enterprise accounts can create thousands of lists. Check your specific plan's limits in HubSpot's pricing documentation.
Yes. List membership is a common workflow enrollment trigger. When a contact joins an active list, they can automatically be enrolled in sequences, assigned to reps, or have properties updated.
Custom properties appear in the filter builder just like default properties. If you have created custom contact or company properties, they will be available as list criteria under the relevant property group.
Not directly. However, you can create an active list that uses "is member of list" as a criterion, referencing a static list. This lets you combine the stability of static lists with the automatic updating of active lists.
HubSpot integrates natively with many sales engagement tools like Salesloft and Outreach. You can configure sync settings to push contacts from specific lists to your sequencing tool. For tools without native integration, use HubSpot's API or a workflow automation platform.
For active lists, HubSpot re-evaluates all contacts against the new criteria. Contacts who no longer match are removed; contacts who now match are added. For static lists, changing criteria has no effect on existing members, but you can manually update the list.
Enrich your HubSpot contacts with data from qualification tools via API or native integrations. Store the results as custom properties, then use those properties as list criteria. This approach lets you segment based on sophisticated qualification logic that goes beyond what HubSpot can calculate natively.