Our favourite HubSpot updates from September 2020
HubSpot Oct 23, 2020
The annual INBOUND event last month featured an excellent coverage of new features and development themes. In addition to these, minor updates were made to the system during September, especially for marketing and sales tools. Special mention to the advertising events function, which provides a great new feature to advertisers. The September updates also introduced a new, beta-stage, custom report builder that takes HubSpot's reporting functionality to a whole new level.
Marketing Hub & CMS Hub
Free landing page templates
- What it is about: HubSpot provides ready-made landing page templates for free CRM users. The pages are built under a HubSpot branded domain and include eight basic elements you can use in a drag & drop editor. You can create a total of 20 free landing pages per free license.
- What are the benefits: HubSpot offers fresh and stylish landing pages for freemium users. Often, getting started is much easier when you have ready-made, visually cohesive foundations to get your work started!
Marketing email "Health tool"
- What it is about: There is a new section called "Health" in the Email tab that analyzes the integrity and quality of email communications over the previous 30 days. The graph analyzes the "health curve" of the email communication based on the opening percentage and clicks, unsubscribing, and bounced contacts. Please note that the data will not start accruing until the monthly number of marketing emails exceeds 400 emails.
- What are the benefits: The Health tool function provides suggestions for improvements to develop each area of your emailing process.
Ad optimization
- What it's all about: Use HubSpot to target advertising to the contacts that are the most valuable to your business. You can define estimated revenue value to each lifecycle stage so that the system can start optimizing advertising to similar contacts proven to succeed in your customer journey.
- What are the benefits: The goal of the ad can be, for example, a page visit or downloading a guide. But what happens after that? Some of the contacts continue their journey and become your customers, and the others jump off the sled. Not all contacts that are equally valuable from an advertising standpoint are actually that for your business' perspective. What if the system could learn to optimize your ads for those contacts that matter most? HubSpot's new Events feature is making this possible!
Custom object fields as personalized tokens
- What to do: You can also add personalization tokens to automated emails under custom objects.
- What are the benefits: Imagine you are an entrepreneur in the logistics industry. Your customer's package is ready to go, and you want to notify the recipient of the parcel. If the logistics data is brought into the HubSpot environment as a custom object, that data can now also be utilized in email communication through personalized tokens. In this case, the specific data value change triggers a message to the transmission recipient, including the package's tracking code. All automated and fully personalized.
Across Hubs
Updates to the conversation box
- You can search for messages by email address
- You can add comments to messages to other users (to notify your colleagues internally)
- You can transfer conversations between inboxes if, for example, you have separate inboxes for first and second level customer support or customer support for different departments
Sales productivity tools
- What it is all about: HubSpot now has more options for viewing sales activities and forecasts. New features include the Forecast, which is still in beta and can be found under the Sales tab. Another area of development has been the Analytics Tools under the Reports tab, under which you can find the renewed Sales Activities. You can select data on sales activities, team performance, and sales forecasts (among many other variables) for views.
- What are the benefits: A better understanding of team effectiveness and performance yesterday, now, and tomorrow. The system has many ready-made analytics templates, which you should use a moment or two to get acquainted with. Select the most important metrics and reports for your team in terms of work efficiency and performance.
Custom report Builder
- What it's about: A revamped reporting tool where you can cross-link data from marketing, sales, and customer-related objects and other various data sources. The data from custom objects and integrations can also be used for reporting.
- What are the benefits: Custom report Builder offers even more extensive and versatile reporting capabilities on a HubSpot scale. Reporting used to be firmly based on internal reporting of different objects (such as contacts, companies, deals) but now you can use data crosswise between different objects and data fields.