Gym and Studio Management Software
A guide to integrating HubSpot with your gym or studio's management software
Integrating your gym or studio management software with HubSpot creates a centralized, reliable source of data for automation, reporting, and lifecycle management. It reduces manual data entry, prevents data drift between systems, and ensures sales, marketing, and operations teams are working from the same up-to-date information. Below you will find guidance on best-practices and decisions that need to be made when setting up this integration.
Key decisions to make
How will identities be de-duplicated and linked between HubSpot and your client management system?
What data do I need synced into HubSpot and to which objects?
Understand your use cases
How you plan to use client or member data in HubSpot should guide your identity and property mapping decisions. As you answer the questions below, keep in mind which HubSpot products you’re using (Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, etc.).
Which communications will be facilitated by HubSpot and data from your client management system?
It’s important to understand which client or member data and events will drive communications and contact segmentation. This data must be synced into HubSpot, either directly to the contact record or to a related object such as a deal or appointment.
Which communication methods will you use?
Are you only sending emails out of HubSpot? Will HubSpot facilitate SMS and direct mail?
Only using HubSpot for email communications come with less advanced identity requirements than using it for SMS where you may want all clients represented.
What does a contact represent?
Should a contact represent every membership or just serve as a marketing identity?
If you are business that sells family memberships (multiple clients falling under a primary account), should a contact only represent the primary member?
Do I need to use HubSpot for reporting?
If you plan to use HubSpot to report on member counts, for example, you’ll need a contact or related object, such as a deal, for each individual membership. This may require workarounds to handle scenarios where multiple clients share the same email address.
Will it every be possible or appropriate for a contact to existing in HubSpot without an email address?
Will contacts sourced via forms ever lack and email address?
Do you want to sync clients without an email in your client management system?
Requiring an email and enforcing uniqueness better ensures clean data, but it may not align with your goals and operations
Contact identity
Mapping your client and member identities to the appropriate HubSpot contacts is foundational to your integration. Without a clear strategy, you risk creating duplicate records or failing to sync all required data.
HubSpot contact identity
Primary identifiers
HubSpot enforces contact uniqueness through the contact record_id and email. Two contacts cannot share the same record_id or email.
record_id is the internal ID for an object in HubSpot. This is the ID you'll find in your URL when viewing an object.
If email addresses are not unique in your client management software (e.g., two individuals can share the same email), you’ll need to make decisions about how identities are mapped in HubSpot. Specifically, you must determine whether both individuals should exist as separate records in HubSpot.
Secondary identifiers
You can configure single-line text properties on contacts (and any HubSpot object) to be unique. These properties can act as external IDs, allowing you to connect identities across systems while enforcing uniqueness within HubSpot.
Depending on your business model, this unique ID may be a client or member ID, a phone number, or a concatenation of personally identifiable information—such as name and phone number—which rarely change.
Our recommendation is to always have a member or client ID property. This helps faciliates bi-directional processes, object associating, and simplifies contact lookups.
Contact lookups
When syncing client data to HubSpot contacts, it’s often necessary to perform record lookups. A client may already exist in HubSpot with a different email address, no email at all, or may not yet be associated with their client ID. Lookups help ensure the correct contact is identified and updated when a matching record already exists in HubSpot.
Below is Middle's recommended client lookup:
Look up by their unique secondary identifier, typically client ID
Look up by their email address
If a contact is found and represents a different person, you can set up comparison logic to determine whether the existing contact should be overwritten
Look up by their name and phone number
Middle templates typically account for numerous phone number formats
Property mapping
You’ll need to determine which data should be synced into HubSpot and how it should be modeled within the platform. This requires considering how the data relates to your clients, how it will be used, and any limitations of HubSpot.
Custom propertiesClient-to-data relationships
A client’s relationship to their data can be categorized as either one-to-one or many-to-one.
Core client data
Core client data has a one-to-one relationship with the client. This includes information such as name, email, phone number, and current membership details. This data can be easily mapped to contact properties in HubSpot and used for automation, segmentation, and reporting.
Relational many-to-one data
Much of your data, especially event-based data such as bookings and purchases, has a many-to-one relationship with your clients. This makes it difficult to represent on a single contact record. You typically have two options:
Flatten the data through abstractions, such as a total check-in count or last check-in date
Utilize HubSpot's relational objects, such as deals, appointments, and custom objects, to represent may-to-one data
When using a relational object, it must be associated with the contact either via the API or through HubSpot workflows using property matching. Our recommendation is to use HubSpot workflows with matching properties to create these associations. Client ID, email, and phone number are all strong options for associating records.
Data volume and latency
When architecting any HubSpot integration, you must be mindful of HubSpot's API rate limits.
The more stringent your data volume and integration latency requirements, the more heavily you’ll need to rely on APIs. We recommend combining API-driven workflows with file-based imports to balance throughput and timeliness.
For example, when syncing member data into HubSpot, you may use a close-to-real-time, API-intensive workflow to perform identity lookups and quickly sync critical events from your client management system, such as new joins or cancellations. Larger, less time-sensitive data sets can then be handled through file imports.
Middle supports both serialized, near–real-time workflows and file-based import workflows.
When importing data via a file, we highly recommend using unique secondary identifiers to facilitate object updates. For non-contact objects, this is a necessity to avoid duplicates.
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