Data Segmentation: How to Remove International Visitors from your HubSpot Contacts

We marketer’s love conversions. We love people coming to our website and providing their name and email address (and other information) to download our ebook, chats, presentations, white papers, webinars, etc. And all our great marketing efforts attract people not just from our target geography, but from around the world.

But why keep the information in your contacts database for visitors from countries or states you don’t serve?

We can’t serve everybody!

In our database, we found contacts from Australia, Brazil, Portugal, France, England, Germany, Canada, Russia, Hungary, Israel, India, Hong Kong, Italy, and Singapore — all countries that we don’t serve. We’re happy to have them download and learn from our materials, but it just doesn’t make sense to keep these contacts in our database.

Segmenting your data

Let’s say that you only serve customers/clients in the United States, for example, and that contacts from other countries are not useful to your company in any way. You’d like to remove these extra contacts from your HubSpot Contacts database, without losing any of your important US-based contacts. Here’s how you can do this.

Step 1: Identify contacts for removal

One way to remove contacts from other countries is by creating a list that has the rule Contact Property – Email – Contains Any Of  – .it, .au, .il, .ru, .br, etc. This filters into a list all email addresses that end with a country code. This is not a bad way to filter out contacts, but it’s not very reliable. What if your contact lives in Israel and has a .com email address. Or gave you their Gmail address?

A better way of filtering these contacts is by using the “IP Country” field. Create a list that has the rule Contact Property – IP Country – is not equal to – United States. Then, since you might have contacts where an IP Country was not found, add a second condition of Contact Property – IP Country – simply has this property.

This list will contain the contacts that have an identifiable IP Country outside the US. These are the contacts that you want to remove.

Step 2: Deleting non-US contacts

Now you can easily delete these non-US contacts. Simply click “Contact Actions” and then “Delete all Contacts.”

Using smart lists

If you create your list as a smart list in step 1, then you’ll need to create a static list with the criteria List Membership – Is a member if – Name of your SMART list. By doing it this way, you will be able to keep the rule of the SMART list and still delete all of your international contacts.

Take-away

It’s easy to delete groups of contacts from your HubSpot contacts database. In fact, you can use any field, or combination of fields, in the database to sort contacts and make lists. We now delete contacts from outside the U.S. at the beginning of every month.