HubSpot Updates Rolled Out in December 2020

There are a number of places where you can learn about the latest HubSpot product updates and Strategic Piece Talks is one of them.

By rounding these up in one place, our goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to (a) put the updates to good use in your HubSpot instance and (b) not let an important update slip through the cracks.

Note that each update may or may not affect your HubSpot license. It will depend on which of the hubs you use (marketing, sales, service, CMS) and at which tier. If you have any questions about this, please don't hesitate to reach out to us at info@strategicpiece.

Advertising

Google Search Ads

You can now create search campaigns across Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google within the HubSpot Ads Manager. When you create and manage campaigns within HubSpot, you have creative, landing pages, and other assets at your fingertips, regardless of which ad platform you use.

Manage Multiple Currencies

Many companies run campaigns in different geographies and using different currencies. You can now set up a Company Currency and an Ad Account Currency – as well as set exchange rates for other currencies – and then toggle between your Company and Ad currency, which makes ROI reporting much easier.

Facebook Ad Sequence Builder

Adding to Facebook Ads management within HubSpot, you can now build ad sequences. What I love about this feature is that you can automate audience targeting, segmenting your HubSpot database and showing the right type of ad to the right contact at the right time. For companies that lean heavily on customer journey maps (I hope you're one!), this will add extra power to your advertising capabilities.

Blog

Import & Export Posts in CSV

While we hope this is mostly applicable to importing blog posts while migrating to HubSpot from another platform, it is now possible to both import and export blog posts as CSV files. One of the things we like about working with HubSpot is their culture and their values. Case in point, they try to make leaving their platform as painless as possible.

cms

Refresh of SEO recommendations Page

I'm a big fan of HubSpot CMS, which is why we host our website here. While CMS – or Marketing Pro – users do get access to some helpful SEO tools, I sometimes wish they were more robust. There are lots of great third-party SEO tools on the market, but most of them are quite expensive unless SEO is a core and critical piece of your marketing strategy. With HubSpot increasingly becoming an all-in-one marketing platform, I hope they continue building out SEO functionality. 

This month, HubSpot has refreshed the SEO recommendations page, which I do find helpful. I'm curious to hear what you think once you've tested it out.

Apex Domain Hosting

For CMS Enterprise customers, HubSpot now supports apex domain hosting (Pro customers can use redirects). This means that you no longer have to add a subdomain when connecting a domain to HubSpot.

Commenting

You can now use commenting functionality in campaigns, emails, and forms. Users with whom you are collaborating will get notified via their communication channel of choice, which could be email, in-app, or Slack.

Database Management

Merge Custom Objects

People laugh when I say duplicate records are like database cancer. While that might be slightly melodramatic, duplicate records can grow undetected and wreak havoc on the health of your database. HubSpot rolled out custom objects earlier this year and now you can merge duplicate custom object records.

Inbox & Conversations

Custom Objects

If you're using HubSpot's Inbox for your Customer Service and Support functions, then your team may also benefit from access to custom objects for things like shipments and tracking codes. These are now visible in the Inbox contextual toolbar.

Delete Comments

It is now possible to delete your or a colleague's comment in a conversation – for example, if someone comments on a conversation that's already finished.

Email

Classic Editor UI Update

If you use HubSpot's classic email editor, be on the lookout for a facelift. HubSpot is changing its UI so that it keeps the power of the classic editor but with the ease of use of the drag-and-drop email builder.

Video Module

You can now drag-and-drop a video module into your emails! I'll come to more video-related rollouts below, so keep reading...

Integrations

HubSpot for Quickbooks Online Advanced

When it comes to accounting software, many of our clients are using NetSuite (also for ERP), QuickBooks, and Xero. This strengthened integration means that QuickBooks Online teams won't have to enter data in both HubSpot and QuickBooks – HubSpot will now send sales entries directly to QuickBooks. We think this might be one of the most helpful of the December updates.

Cookiebot

As privacy regulations grow stronger and companies are required to take more and more responsibility for the data they capture and track, we all need solutions to make it easier. To that end, HubSpot now integrates with CookieBot, which helps marketers manage cookies and online tracking codes in one place.

Workflows

If you use integrations in your workflows (and you should, because it makes them even more powerful), you can now authenticate those apps directly within the Workflows manager. You no longer have to go to the Marketplace, find and authenticate them, and then back to Workflows.

Reporting

Attribution

Time-Decay MOdel

The Time-Decay Model is now available as an attribution report. While your company may have a preferred attribution report that it relies on for definitive results, we find that running multiple attribution models of different types can help expose real trends and anomalies that aren't always obvious when only looking at one or two reports. The Time-Decay Model is now available for both revenue attribution and contact creation attribution.

Events & Video Views

When running revenue attribution reports, you can now include events (e.g. webinars tracked through a marketing event) and video views (of HubSpot hosted videos) as touchpoints.

Custom Report Builder

Data visualization is a key discipline in an information-driven organization, yet sometimes it gets overlooked. With the new Custom Report Builder, you can add a second Y-axis to your reports when overlaying multiple measures. You can also customize chart settings like labels, stacking, min/max values, and other axis options.

I'm particularly excited about the axis settings because on my dashboards, I recently started hitting new levels of website sessions, which changed the scale and made it look less impressive (even though I know the numbers are still getting better!)

Video

One of the cool things that you can now do with the Custom Report Builder is use "video views" as a data source. This means that you can tie video to other business efforts and results.

Video views will also now show up in a contact record's timeline, if they watch a video for at least 5 seconds. Because video is becoming so prevalent – for example, in one-to-one sales emails – sales reps will enjoy having this video effectiveness data at their fingertips.

Think about how awesome it will be to tailor communications to the content format a particular contact prefers. If they don't respond to video, your team can choose to follow-up in a different way.

Share Reports to Slack

When you want to share a report from HubSpot, you could take a screenshot and share it. Or, you could send an email. But, with so many people preferring Slack to email for internal matters, HubSpot has now enabled direct report sharing via Slack.

partition reports

While many HubSpot users rely heavily on the default reports featured in dashboards, a slew of other potentially helpful reports are available. However, there wasn't previously a way to partition these reports – they were either private or available to everyone. Now, HubSpot has given admins more granular control so each user can be given access to just the reports they need. This is important when managing potentially sensitive information, such as data related to job performance.

Sales Forecasting

I was so excited when we learned at INBOUND that a beta version of this functionality was being rolled out. Forecast reports have been on many of our clients' wish lists, and now they are officially available. This is also something companies that aren't using HubSpot say leaves a lot to be desired in competing software tools, so we are extra glad to see HubSpot investing in this area.

Service

Multiple JIRA ASSOCIATIONS

One service ticket does not necessarily mean just one Jira Issue. Now, you can associate multiple Jiras with one service ticket in HubSpot.

AutomatED creation of Jira Issues

You can now set up a workflow to automatically create a Jira issue whenever a user adds a service ticket to the support pipeline. I seriously love these seemingly small tweaks that reduce double data entry!

different footers in feedback survey emails

Do you want to send feedback surveys to customers on behalf of a particular location? Or perhaps, one particular brand? Your team can now decide which of multiple footers to use when sending feedback surveys.

Sequences & Templates

More Granular Permissions

In many areas of HubSpot, admins can get very granular with user permissions. They can be set at the role, team, and individual user level. However, there was previously no way to prevent anyone from updating a sales sequence or template (often by mistake). Oops! Now, sequences and templates enjoy the same granular user permissions as other parts of HubSpot.

tasks

In my opinion, Task features are an underutilized part of HubSpot. There is some serious functionality available to sales reps, SDRs, BDMs, and others, and HubSpot has now upgraded the Task Home view to make it even more accessible. Users can now customize their view so that all tasks, meetings, engagements, and CRM records are visible in one place. They can even interact with contacts on LinkedIn. This brings even more value to awesome existing features like Task Queues, that make transitioning from one contact record to the next seamless. Check out the new Today view on both the desktop app and mobile app.

Workflows

SKip dates

Earlier this year, HubSpot introduced new capabilities for customizing the timing of workflows, such as preventing a lead from being sent an email overnight or, say, skipping Saturdays. With the new Skip Dates functionality, you can also now skip specific dates – for example, the typically dead week between Christmas and New Year.

Workflows with Errors

Once you start using workflows in your business – whether for communications, database management, or internal notifications – they tend to grow exponentially. HubSpot has created a new Workflow Index that identifies workflows with errors so you don't have to manually review one by one or guess which ones might be broken.

We're pretty pumped about many of these roll outs and we'd love to know which ones you think are most valuable!

Leave us a comment below or reach out to us at info@strategicpiece.com.

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