Customer data is one of the most valuable assets for your company. HubSpot helps businesses collect, organize, analyze, and integrate data seamlessly, allowing you to make informed decisions and improve customer relationships.
But data is only as powerful as how well it’s managed and secured. Think about it—if customer information is poorly organized, it can quickly become a mess, leading to inefficiencies. Worse, data leaks or security breaches can put your company at risk, causing financial loss and damaging trust.
The good news? With a proper strategy in place, you can effectively manage and protect customer data in HubSpot.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through best practices for handling customer data securely so you can maximize its value while minimizing risks.
How to Manage Customer Data in HubSpot
1. Organize Your Contacts in HubSpot CRM
The first step in managing customer data effectively in HubSpot is to organize your existing contacts and ensure new data is structured properly from the start. A well-organized CRM eliminates clutter, prevents duplicate entries, and makes data retrieval seamless.
Organizing Existing Customer Data
If your CRM already contains customer data, start by cleaning and decluttering it:
- Identify and merge duplicate records using HubSpot’s Duplicate Management Tool, which scans for duplicate contacts and companies based on email addresses and company domains.
- Standardize existing data by ensuring fields like customer name, company name, deal type, and deal stage follow a consistent format.
- Tag and segment contacts properly using lists and filters to categorize customers based on industry, lifecycle stage, or engagement level, status (active/inactive).
Structuring New Customer Data for Automatic Organization
To ensure new data is automatically stored in an organized and structured manner:
- Set up a clear data entry system with mandatory fields for contacts, companies, and deals (e.g., customer name, company name, phone number, industry, deal value).
- Use Custom Properties to capture any additional details specific to your business needs.
- Enable Auto-Association between contacts, companies, and deals in HubSpot to link related records automatically.
- Create rules for form submissions to ensure leads coming in through forms have complete and structured information before entering your CRM.
By setting up these processes, you can maintain a clean and well-organized HubSpot CRM, ensuring that your team can access accurate customer data without wasting time on manual corrections.
2. Automate Data Collection
Managing customer data manually is time-consuming and prone to errors. With HubSpot’s automation features, you can streamline data collection, organization, and updates—ensuring that your CRM remains accurate and structured. Here’s how HubSpot automation helps in efficient customer data management:
- Use Forms for Lead Capture
HubSpot Forms automatically collect customer details from website visitors, landing pages, and campaigns and store them directly in the CRM. This ensures complete and consistent data entry. - Enable Progressive Profiling in Forms
Progressive fields in forms dynamically update new customer details over time, instead of asking for it from customers. - Use Workflows to Auto-Update Contact Details
Set workflows in a way it automatically updates contact properties as per customer actions. This keeps your customer data in CRM up-to-date. - Use Integration Feature to Sync Customer Data from Other Platforms
Whether you use Google Sheets, Shopify, or Eventbrite, try out integrations and sync the customer information in real-time. This eliminates duplicates and data silos.
How to Secure Customer Data in HubSpot
1. Establish a Strong Data Governance Framework
Once your customer data is structured and organized, the next step is to ensure it is managed securely and responsibly. A strong data governance framework helps maintain data quality, ensures security, and keeps your HubSpot CRM efficient and compliant.
Start by mapping all customer data points within HubSpot, including contact details, deal information, and interactions. Understand where the data comes from, how it flows through the system, and how it is being used. This clarity helps prevent data mismanagement, ensures consistency, and makes customer data handling more efficient.
Next, define roles and responsibilities within the CRM. Every team member should have specific access based on their role. For example, a marketing executive may only need access to campaign data, while a sales rep should only see lead and deal-related information. Use HubSpot’s user roles and permissions settings to control who can view, edit, or share customer data. Restricting access reduces the risk of data breaches and unauthorized changes.
Additionally, establish clear policies on how customer data is handled. These may include:
- Access requests (providing customers with copies of their data)
- Rectification requests (allowing them to correct inaccuracies)
- Erasure requests (deleting data upon request)
- Objections to data processing, and
- Data portability requests
By implementing these data governance practices, you ensure that customer data in HubSpot remains secure and accurate while minimizing risks.
2. Leverage HubSpot’s Security Features
We already covered user permissions and access control as a key security feature in Step 2. In addition to that, HubSpot offers several other features to further protect customer data.
Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) is one such feature that adds an extra layer of security by requiring users to verify their identity before logging in, reducing the risk of unauthorized access.
The next important security feature is IP Address Restrictions, which allow you to limit account access to specific, trusted networks, ensuring that only authorized users can log in from designated locations.
Another critical measure is leveraging HubSpot’s built-in GDPR and CCPA compliance tools. These tools help manage customer consent, process data subject requests, and ensure compliance with data protection regulations. Consent management tools allow you to track opt-in and opt-out preferences, ensuring that marketing and sales communications are only sent to customers who have given explicit permission. This not only helps maintain compliance but also strengthens data security by preventing unauthorized use of customer information.
Additionally, HubSpot provides a Security Center that offers real-time security insights and recommendations. Regularly reviewing these insights and implementing the suggested security measures helps keep your account protected from potential threats.
On top of these security features, it’s essential to regularly review HubSpot’s audit logs to monitor user activity. These logs help track login attempts, data modifications, and exports, enabling you to quickly identify and respond to any suspicious behavior. By proactively monitoring security activity and leveraging HubSpot’s built-in protections, you can ensure that your customer data remains secure and well-managed.
Other Key Tips for Securing Customer Data in HubSpot
- Collect Only Necessary Data
Data minimization is a crucial aspect of data security in HubSpot. This means collecting only the customer data that is essential for business operations.
Limiting data collection prevents unnecessary storage of sensitive information and reduces the risk of exposure in case of a security breach. Additionally, it keeps your HubSpot CRM clean, organized, and easier to manage.
- Evaluate Security of Third-Party Integrations
If you are using third-party integrations with HubSpot, carefully review their security and privacy policies before granting access to your data. Check whether they comply with relevant data protection regulations like GDPR and CCPA, ensure they have strong encryption measures, and verify that they do not share customer data with unauthorized parties.
Also, avoid granting broad permissions such as “allow all” or “access all data” to integrations unless absolutely necessary, as this can increase security risks.
- Provide Regular Security Training to All Employees
Security awareness among employees is crucial for both managing and protecting customer data in HubSpot. Regularly train your team on proper data handling, access control, and CRM best practices.
Educate them about data protection regulations, security protocols, and how to recognize and report security threats. Additionally, guide employees on identifying phishing attacks and avoiding suspicious links that could compromise HubSpot data.
- Back Up Regularly and Always Have a Recovery Plan
Regularly backing up customer data ensures that you don’t lose critical information in the event of a security breach, accidental deletion, or system failure.
Set automated backups at regular intervals and store them securely. Additionally, establish a disaster recovery plan to restore customer data quickly and efficiently in case of an unexpected incident, ensuring business continuity.
Final Thoughts
By following these practices, you can manage and protect customer data in HubSpot effectively. This will make your daily tasks easier, improve efficiency, and keep your CRM well-organized while safeguarding important customer information. Prioritizing data security benefits both your business and your customers. It helps you stay compliant and reduces risks while building trust among your clients. If you need expert help in setting up a secure and efficient HubSpot system, reach out to us now!