Ainhoa Rodriguez-Muguruza
Choosing HubSpot as a CRM is often thought a process through which you open new doors! And, this is often daunting. Trying to do too much or start using the platform without customising it first can discourage you and your team, ultimately making you abandon the platform.
A good way to start getting used to HubSpot’s vocabulary is to keep up with its new features. Because keeping on top of HubSpot's updates can be tricky, this blog will provide you with a summary of the most important HubSpot news during the month of March!
If you have not read my blogs before, my name is Ainhoa, and I am Insynth's Inbound Marketing Specialist, or, in other words, their in-house HubSpot expert. Since last April, I have been gathering the platform's updates monthly to make sure that you are not missing anything from HubSpot. You can find a round-up of 2021 here! And you can also check the January and February updates.
Marketing Hub
#1 New More User-Friendly Layouts for Multi-Touch Attribution Reports
For marketers, there is always a challenge on the horizon. How do we know when a lead has come from marketing? It is a constant battle but, in order to facilitate the attribution of incoming leads, HubSpot has a powerful multi-touch attribution reporting feature. HubSpot supports three types of attribution depending on the asset! You can report on,
- Revenue, which should tell you which one of your marketing elements and sources are closing deals
- Deal create, which should tell you which one of your marketing elements and sources are generating deals
- Contact create, which should tell you which one of your marketing elements and sources are creating contacts in your CRM
The easy layout of the multi-touch attribution report will allow for further filtering, making sure you can get the most accurate data about your marketing performance and strategy. As the tool develops, HubSpot has added new filters to facilitate marketing reports. The newest filter option gives you the ability to just look at interactions based on their source!
#2 Pre-Set Multi-Touch Attribution Reports
If you read the previous section and thought “Well, that sounds like a really useful tool”, you might have been tempted to go to your portal and try setting one up. Truth is, they are not necessarily straightforward! HubSpot has made sure they are so intuitive that it seems their set-up is easy, but it can get complex quite easily. So, to make sure that everyone can enjoy the advantages of accurate reporting, HubSpot has released some pre-set reports based on the most common configurations.
By getting started using a sample report, you can see the most common ways other customers get started with attribution. Little by little, as you use sample reports, you will grow more familiar with the platform and be able to create your own reports from scratch! All Marketing Hub Enterprise users, as well as users of Marketing Hub Professional, CMS Enterprise, and CMS Professional will have access to this feature.
Sales Hub
#1 [BETA] Email Data Check Per Industry
If you use HubSpot for email marketing, you are probably more than familiar with the health reports regarding your performance, open rate, click rate, and reply rate. It is such a compelling tool! But, truth is, the information in the analytics tool can sometimes be quite generic… At the end of the day, different industries have different benchmarks, and we should not be comparing the performance of a B2C retail business to a building product company.
With that in mind, HubSpot has taken into account the main factors regarding email deliverability and has provided users with the option of viewing them depending on the industry. Unfortunately, this data is only available for some industries. More industries will be available once there is enough data to provide an industry health score… This feature is available to all Marketing Hub users on the Email Health Tab.
#2 Better Calling Tools within HubSpot
With the industry moving towards an online/remote model, people are slowly realising that email is not the only way of reaching out! Calls have become more popular since the COVID19 pandemic. It is, however, important, to make sure that those calls are being logged into your CRM, so it is recorded as another interaction (just as an email will do!). To help teams remain more aligned, HubSpot has made calling integrations freely available.
Until now, only paid HubSpot users could use calling integrations such as Aircall, UberConference, CallRail, Dialpad, or JustCall, which meant that companies had to purchase more and more paid seats as their teams grew. That was not sustainable, and HubSpot realised a change was long overdue. Through these integrations, all calls are seamlessly recorded, making reporting on rep performance incredibly straightforward.
Service Hub
#1 HubSpot Service Releases Its Long-Awaited Customer Portal
For building product manufacturers, there is a clear element that is often overlooked: after purchase or after service customer assistance. Unsurprisingly, a significant part of the industry believes that the customer journey ends right after a deal is closed, and that could not be further from reality. Your customers need support! Particularly within the construction industry, where services and products often involve a warranty, you must ensure you are there for your customers.
The question is how to make sure that that happens timely and appropriately. A very exciting update from HubSpot could be the solution: their newly launched Customer Portal. A customer portal is a home behind a login where your customers can view, open, and reply to their support enquiries. The customer portal helps provide transparency and visibility and gives customers the ability to know what happens after they reach out for support or complain.
#2 Create Your Own SLAs on HubSpot
SLA stands for Service Level Agreements, and they allow for excellent customer service. An SLA should reflect the commitment between a service provider and a customer while making clear what can be expected from each of the parties. When it comes to providing customer service, this is key, since it will allow for service agents to prioritise which enquiries should be answered first (some teams might look at enquiries at chronological order while other might prioritise my urgency!).
A user with Super Admin permissions can now set up and configure an SLA meeting, making sure that details such as your office hours are clearly stated. When using SLAs, four SLA ticket properties will be added to your account You can use these properties to store your SLA data, and then use them in reporting, lists, and workflows.
CMS Hub
#1 Blog Listing Pages are Getting Updated!
A blog listing page is a template that displays a summary of the information of your blog posts. They are supposed to be the launchpad for your blogs. People will browse, identify something that they like, and click! Blog listing pages sequentially list blog posts based on the date they were published and display the featured image and title of the post. These kinds of pages were first launched to HubSpot users last September.
And, quickly after they were launched, users agreed they felt restricted… If you wanted to swap the template for their blog listing page, you needed to delete the blog, move all of the blog posts to a new blog, and select the new blog listing page template. That was not a great user experience! Template swaps for blog listing pages will now work exactly the same for blog listing pages, except, when selecting the new template to swap to, all blog listing templates in the account will show up.
#2 Easier Blog Navigation for CMS Users
Making blog listing pages easier to swap meant to make the life of marketers and developers a little bit easier… But users realised those templates were rather hard to find! Adding a dedicated Blog Listing Page tab, HubSpot is trying to solve discoverability issues reported by users. Once clicked on the tab, you can see a list of your listing pages and can edit from this point.
Developers will still have access to the templates of these pages through the Design Tools, which will allow them to make more compelling changes and modifications that are not available through simple template swaps. Blogs are available to CMS Starter users and all Professional Hub users, with blogs being one of the most used tools in HubSpot.
Operations Hub
#1 New Integration with Microsoft Teams
I know what you might be thinking… After over two years of video calls, it was about time! Building on the ever-growing number of integrations available through the Operations Hub, HubSpot has developed an in-house integration with the famous meeting platform, through which you can automatically create Microsoft Teams meetings for all new meetings you create via HubSpot contact records, company records, or meeting scheduler.
The Microsoft Teams meeting details are automatically added to your HubSpot meeting, so attendees can join seamlessly. But meetings are not the only element that HubSpot can trigger within Microsoft Teams! You can set up workflows that automatically send notifications, so everyone is on the same page. If you are curious about how the integration works, in the App Marketplace, search for Microsoft Teams and install the app to connect the integration.
#2 3 New App Integrations added to the 100+ Data Sync Integrations
Since it was launched in April 2021, HubSpot has not stopped adding integrations to its very own in-house built app marketplace. Together with integrations built by third parties, HubSpot has managed to build a fantastic app ecosystem where building product manufacturers can create a network of integrations that connect marketing, sales, service, finances, and operations platforms into a single CRM.
Far from slowing down the pace, after HubSpot reached out to over 100 apps launched in their Data Sync tool, the month of March has brought another three integrations. Among these integrations, HubSpot launched Syspro CRM, software designed for manufacturers and distributors; BombBomb, a video platform to record, send, and track personalised video emails; and Sage Business Cloud Accounting, the popular online accounting software.
About Insynth
At Insynth we deliver a predictable flow of leads, customers, and specifications for building product brands through our inbound marketing approach, proven to reach a technically demanding audience.
We use the latest marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to equip building product companies to grow sustainability in this era of digital transformation.
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major in construction marketing. We have a proven formula of bringing a variety of functionalities together including CRM Implementation, Web Design, Sales Automation, SEO, and Email Marketing to achieve your ultimate aim: Growing your business and gaining new specifiers and customers.