Welcome to our HubSpot Product Spotlight for September. In this blog, we’ll explore some of the team's favourite HubSpot updates from the last month.
Ready? Let’s dive in!
These are all the new features live and ready to use in your HubSpot portal.
Now you can automatically generate social media copy directly from the blog post editor using AI, making it easier to share your blog content on social channels.
The current workflow to create social posts to promote blog content requires manual copywriting for each social media platform, which is time-consuming and error-prone. Additionally, the process of creating a social media copy after creating a blog post is not very intuitive.
A new collection of recommended integrations is now available in HubSpot’s App Marketplace highlighting the essential apps for Sales Hub. Try out these integrations that are popular with Sales Hub customers and recommended by HubSpot:
Selling is harder than ever. To break through, winning sales teams need to work efficiently to deliver a world-class buyer experience. Sales teams can do so by leveraging Sales Hub at the core of their modern sales stacks, while seamlessly integrating their other sales tools with HubSpot. HubSpot’s App Marketplace has 1,500+ ready-to-use integrations, so sales leaders can connect their tools to Sales Hub and equip their teams to efficiently convert leads, accelerate deals, and drive revenue. Get started with this curated collection of essential apps for Sales Hub.
US based customers who have purchased the SMS add-on can now create and send SMS messages to their customers!
Harness the power of SMS for personalised, timely, and direct customer engagement.
With SMS, you can:
Marketers are increasingly embracing omni-channel campaigns, and SMS stands out as a vital platform for connecting with businesses. 90% of customers prefer messaging channels as a primary communication method with businesses.
We have heard the feedback that email and form assignments within a Shared Inbox can be confusing. Many teams expect email and form assignments to consider user availability status (Available/Away) when evaluating which user to assign to the conversation. We also hear confusion for inboxes that do not have Live Chat connected but still see availability statuses in the Assignee drop-downs and Availability Management pages and can’t manage the user’s status.
Before this update, emails and forms were assigned randomly without regard to an agent's availability status. With this release, emails and forms will only be assigned to agents who are available. If no agents are available, the email or form will be Unassigned, consistent with assignment in Live Chat and Facebook Messenger. Admins and Availability Management users can manage their agents' availability status even if the Inbox or Help Desk doesn't have a Live Chat channel enabled.
From the content management dashboard, marketers can now bulk change the domain of pages.
When customers previously wanted to change the domain of their pages, they would have to individually edit each page and update the domain. Now this can be done in bulk providing substantial time savings when switching over many pages to a different domain at once.
Users can initiate WhatsApp conversations from the following CRM objects:
In the past, users would have to wait for their contacts to initiate conversations via WhatsApp and reply to continue chatting via WhatsApp. Moving forward, the ability to start communications via WhatsApp will be easily accessible from the contact, ticket, company, and deal records.
Payment links now offer QR Codes out-of-the-box. Generate a QR code and share it online or in person to accept payments.
Make it easy for your customers to pay you for anything, anywhere. Have customers scan a QR code so they can easily pay. QR codes are great for sales at in person events, at your business, or anywhere you want to make available to your customers.
Following the release of the drag and drop version of the collaboration sidebar in Workflows, Dashboards and Marketing Email, we are now adding this drag and drop version into Forms.
The collaboration/commenting sidebar enables marketers to quickly access a handful of useful collaboration and productivity tools across HubSpot.
However, the original design took up a large amount of vertical space on the right-hand side of the screen, and could not be adjusted. With this upgrade, we're introducing a smaller, movable version of the commenting sidebar that can be placed in the ideal location by a user.
Historically the collaboration sidebar has been static; it's fixed to the right-hand side of the screen, with the only customisation option being to hide it completely.
This new moveable version gives users the ability to choose where on the screen the sidebar should be placed.
Additionally, the sidebar took up the full height of the screen. We wanted to optimise how we use the space by introducing a smaller, draggable version of the sidebar, which can be placed on any edge of the screen.
Anyone with the Microsoft Teams app for HubSpot installed can now connect to all channel types in HubSpot's conversations inbox. This will help minimize missed messages and wait times for your customers.
Previously, the Microsoft Teams app for HubSpot connected to HubSpot's conversations inbox across live chat and Facebook Messenger channels. Now, you can receive alerts about new emails, WhatsApp messages, and form submissions that enter your inbox.
In addition, you can now select the inbox channel types syncing to your connected Microsoft Teams channel. With a more complete and customisable app, you can connect with customers more seamlessly and stay on top of conversations.
Users of the Slack integration who create associations between Slack channels and HubSpot deals/companies can now sync Meetings, Tasks, and Emails activity updates. Users can also toggle updates on and off by activity type.
Previously, associating a Slack channel with a HubSpot deal/company record meant only syncing Calls and Notes activity updates. Now, you can sync additional types of activity updates, including Meetings, Tasks, and Emails.
In addition, you can now toggle updates on and off by activity type using the new association settings. This provides better control over the type of updates flowing into the associated Slack channel to ensure relevant information is being shared with your team.
You can now create coloured object tags that filter on properties of associated objects. Previously, you could only filter object tags on properties of the current object. With this change, you can now filter more extensively when creating a new deal tag and/or ticket tag.
Bonus: Presets are available for deal tags! When creating a new deal tag, you now have the option to choose a preset (based on commonly used filters), which provides a shortcut with all the fields pre-filled. You can edit any of the fields, or save the tag as is.
This change offers super admins more flexibility to create object tags that filter on properties across associated objects.
Presets for deal tags serve as shortcuts for super admins in new deal tag creation--saving you time.
JavaScript modules and partials are new building blocks you can use to write React and JavaScript instead of HubL inside the HubSpot CMS. JavaScript modules and partials are built from React components and can be directly referenced via HubL tags in your templates.
In addition to stitching server-rendered React components into the HTML generated by HubL, JavaScript modules and partials support client-side interactivity with islands. Similar to the islands concept from Astro, Fresh, and others, you can add an <Island /> inside your JavaScript module or partial to establish a component that is rendered on both the server and client and is automatically code-split. In addition to allowing you to reuse JavaScript code between the server and browser, islands help you write fast websites by giving you precise control over what JavaScript is shipped to the browser and when it runs.
While we will gradually introduce more features over time, we believe that the current modules, partials, and islands are stable and reliable, giving you the confidence you need to build with CMS JavaScript Building Blocks.
Using JavaScript and React comes with many benefits, including component composability, code reuse, broader community resources, and real access to JavaScript on the server. Our hope is to make developing on the HubSpot CMS feel like modern web development. Plus we want to give you technologies that scale with you, all the way from simple static pages to complex interactive and dynamic web applications.
Rendering React on the server means that there is far less of a technological divide between your code that serves the initial page HTML and your interactive browser code. Previously, as you created more complex and interactive pages, that would either lead to:
In other words, JavaScript Building Blocks gives you the tools to:
Playbook authors can now include a button that will allow playbook users to create a new record from directly within a playbook. Creating new CRM records is an important step in many sales processes. Now, you can include this step into playbooks and enable users to quickly create records without having the need to leave playbooks and disrupt their workflows.
HubSpot users often need to create new records while they're using a playbook to complete a job. To do this currently, they need to leave the context of a playbook. When they create a new record they're taken away from the page they're on and the playbook disappears. With this enhancement, a user can create a record from directly within the playbook and will be returned to the playbook when they're finished.
iOS and Android Apps will support enrolling, un-enrolling, pausing and resuming contacts from a sequence.
Sequences are a key part of a sales reps prospecting workflow - it's how you qualify leads and get them into your calendar as quickly and efficiently as possible. Being able to do this on mobile brings Sequences to the next level, untethering the prospecting sales rep from their desks.
Imagine meeting a prospective customer at a conference, scanning their business card on the HubSpot mobile app and enrolling them into a sequence - all with a few taps.
This is automation on the go and we think our customers are going to love this update.
You can now enforce uniqueness on contact properties in order to prevent duplicate values.
You rely on the data you store in HubSpot to make timely and critical business decisions, so it's important that the data is clean and reliable. One of the most critical aspects of having clean and reliable data is uniqueness—i.e., ensuring there are no duplicate records.
Until now, HubSpot has enabled admins to set newly created custom properties as unique for companies, deals, tickets, and custom objects. With this release, admins can now set newly created custom properties as unique for the contact object.
You can now personalise your voicemail messages with custom audio! We've recently introduced the option to compose your unique voicemail greeting, and now we're taking it a step further by allowing you to customise the available audio tones by language or even upload your own custom audio file to make your voicemail truly one-of-a-kind.
Introduced in July 2023, the custom voicemail feature marked a significant step providing HubSpot users with enhanced personalisation options for their voicemail greetings. Initially, this feature allowed users to tailor their greetings using text-to-speech (TTS) technology.
Now, users have the flexibility to choose from a range of voice tones and languages that complement their custom text greetings, or they can take it a step further by uploading their own audio files. This functionality proves essential as it empowers users to create distinct and captivating voicemail messages, which in turn solidify their brand identity and cultivate stronger connections with callers. In today's competitive business environment, this degree of customisation sets companies apart and leaves a memorable impact on both customers and prospects.
Using the HubSpot App Marketplace, you can integrate your existing tools or discover new apps to help your business grow – including the newly certified Webflow app, which makes it simpler for marketers to connect their Webflow creations directly to HubSpot and configure mission critical automations.
Since July, 71+ new apps joined the App Marketplace and 17+ apps were enhanced with new features. Read on to learn more about these detailed improvements.
HubSpot’s App Marketplace has 1,500+ apps, with new additions and updates made regularly. These recently enhanced apps help customers connect their tools to the systems they know and use every day.
You will now have access to four (4) new HubSpot-defined Contact properties to track the progression of a Contact as it moves through lifecycle stages:
You'll be able to use these new properties in both reporting and workflows, and see the history of these properties.
Access the latest time and cumulative time that a Contact spends in each stage as it progresses through the Contact pipeline's lifecycle stages, for use in reporting and workflows.
Users can now easily add emojis into their Inbox messages via a keyboard shortcut and/or the emoji picker in the toolbar.
Inbox users may want to add personalisation to messages they send from Conversations Inbox. In the past, users would have to use their browser or device's emoji picker or paste in emojis. Now, users can add emojis from the emoji picker right inside the conversations inbox composer.
You will now be able to publish videos to your personal LinkedIn accounts.
As we've seen within the social media space, the consumption of video content continues to rise and engage audiences, specifically short form video. Video content is a great way to increase brand awareness, site traffic and ultimately generate leads. You will now be able to plan and schedule all video content for LinkedIn company and personal pages.
Microsoft Teams app users can now associate HubSpot company and deal records with channels, creating a dedicated space to share information and collaborate with teammates on key accounts.
Boosting account details visibility and aligning cross-functionally drives strategic growth in both sales and marketing. With these recent enhancements to the Microsoft Teams app for HubSpot, teams can create dedicated channels and sync information between systems to stay in the loop and sell better.
The ability to log emails to HubSpot custom objects from within Gmail and web-based Office 365.
HubSpot customers were previously unable to log emails from Gmail or O365 to HubSpot custom objects. This meant that customers would need to go into HubSpot contact records and manually associate relevant emails to custom objects.
These updates are currently in the works and nearly ready to be released on your HubSpot Portal.
The leads view is the newest feature in the prospecting workspace.
Prospecting reps have a hard job: they have to organise all the information about their assigned leads, figure out which ones to prioritise, execute excellent outreach, AND remember which data in the CRM to update. Oh, and they have to do it all under the pressure of a monthly quota.
Now, all the information they need is organised and at their fingertips, right from the Prospecting Workspace.
Some specific functionality to call out in this first release:
The leads view means prospecting reps (BDR, SDR) can organise, prioritise, and engage with their leads all in one place. This leads to a more efficient workflow, better connections with prospective customers, and ultimately more pipeline.
For managers and ops, managing and tracking leads inside HubSpot means better insight into sales process performance and lower data maintenance costs.
CTAs Permissions enable HubSpot administrators to give or remove your users the ability to view the CTAs or edit or publish them in HubSpot.
On the go-live date, all existing users in your portal will have the View, Edit and Publish permissions to avoid disruptions to existing users. Going forward, any new users that are created in your portal will not have edit or publish permissions by default. They will need to be given permission manually.
HubSpot administrators need more granular controls for who is able to make changes to existing CTAs or create and publish new CTAs, particularly the pop-up types that get published on the website immediately.
You can now add and edit descriptions on Reports with the added benefit of HubSpot AI to make generating reports quicker and easier.
Understanding Reports can be difficult. Having a description that helps to explain what a report contains, what it's useful for, and what questions it can answer makes it much easier to gain the insights and knowledge you're looking for. Additionally, custom descriptions can help add critical context to reports, making sharing and communication easier than ever before.
Thanks to AI, mobile sales reps can now quickly and easily gain the context on any given CRM email thread, and receive a full email thread summary within seconds.
Sales reps can now elevate their productivity game by quickly responding to emails from the HubSpot mobile app wherever, whenever.
High volumes of emails from different customers that sales reps have to manage every day means reps often have a great deal of context switching between customers and email threads.
When on the go, gaining the context to respond to the next customer or lead email thread is even more challenging given the time pressure sales reps are under to respond. Providing mobile sales reps with a tool to give them an instant bite-size summary puts them on track to quickly respond to the latest incoming email with little to no effort. Increasing your communications productivity has a direct impact on your overall productivity as a sales rep.
The improved module insertion experience in the blog post editor allows you to:
· Drag custom HubL modules
· Clone modules
· Reposition modules
· Copy/paste modules across blog posts
Earlier in 2023, we released the module insertion feature in the blog post editor. This feature allows you to drag and drop modules into the rich text area of your blog posts. However, we understand users wanted better flexibility with the modules in the editor for quick and easy updates such as repositioning and cloning modules.
As part of this update, we will now bundle comments left in quick succession on the same thread. This means users will receive less notifications and crucially when we do notify, we can provide more clarity and context helping our customers to get the full context on the ongoing work.
When multiple comments are left on a thread today, each new comment generates its own notification. On a busy thread where multiple comments are left in quick succession, this can lead to inboxes becoming cluttered with notification emails referencing the same thread and leaving users overwhelmed as they scroll through multiple emails to get up to speed.
In private content settings, HubSpot users will now be able to set an automated registration email follow-up, which will automatically send emails to contacts who have not completed account registration. This is important because until the contact's registration is completed, the contact will be unable to access private content.
By enabling this setting, users will no longer have to manually resend registration emails to contacts that have not registered. This new setting is an automated way to ensure that more contacts are able to complete registration, boosting engagement with private content and reducing support time.
What is it?
The custom report builder now supports gauge visualisations. Gauges make it easy to understand how your data is performing compared to defined ranges!
Typical visualisations like lines, bars, and pies are great at displaying data when looking at trends or proportions but often are lacking when trying to determine how a metric is performing against a specific range. Gauges make it easy to understand if your metric is above or below where you want it to be.
At a glance, you can answer questions like "How close are we to meeting our quarterly sales target?", "How close are we to achieving our monthly lead generation target?", "How are we performing in terms of our target for customer satisfaction scores?", and many more!
Now new CTAs offer a way for marketers and CMS developers to add custom CSS.
HubSpot’s brand new re-imagined CTA editor offers you plenty of flexibility to create engaging, pixel perfect CTAs for your websites and marketing emails. But sometimes you need even more flexibility and want to add custom CSS to your CTAs in order to e.g. add custom fonts, customise hover states or easily match the CTA with your website theme. Until recently you couldn't do that as the new CTAs are rendered inside of an iframe. But with the new embedded HTML CTA type you can customise your embedded CTAs with custom CSS classes or rules.
We are releasing a number of updates to the collaboration sidebar to make it easier to find new and unread comments. The updates include:
When you open the collaboration sidebar on an asset to catch up on new comments, it can be difficult to locate where exactly the new comments you have not read actually appear. Often there are multiple threads and it can be challenging to find what are the latest details on the thread without needing to read back on everything.
With these updates, we can steer the user directly to the latest comments they need to action and address, allowing them to catch up faster and get the latest context.
The updated frozen column setting allows you to quickly freeze the first column on a view so that you can view your table data without losing sight of which record you're working on.
Using the index table is a core part of the day for many users, however for those with 6 or more columns on an index table, or for those on smaller screens - it can be difficult to navigate the table and remember which record you're looking at. Freezing the first column gives users a setting to make the 'Name' column sticky on a table so that its visible as you scroll to the right - regardless how many columns you may need! :🎉
You can now add videos to your new CTAs
Video has been topping the list of content forms that marketers are interested in these days. With this latest update, you can now add video into your HubSpot CTAs in order to better engage with your website visitors.
You can now see additional details about a contact, company, deal, ticket or task, when looking for them in Global Search. Also, every detail in the result is now labeled to help you understand what it is. This will help you quickly identify the result that you were looking for even if they have similar names or properties.
Results in Global Search can be confusing without additional details, especially for results that look similar. For example, you could have 10 tasks that say "Follow-up" but it is impossible to figure out today who to follow-up with, as you can see below. At the same time, what adds to the confusion is that there is no indication of what each detail actually means.
Saved views for CTAs enables you to filter all your CTAs by the "Advanced filters" available, and save that set of filters as a view for yourself, your team or for everyone in your portal. Views provide a quick way to drill down to the exact CTAs you're looking for and focus on your draft CTAs, recently published, CTAs you created, and any sort of grouping you can think of. CTAs now contains the most up-to-date set of features for filtering/views too including AND/OR filtering, improved view management and a brand new "Gallery" mode.
Gallery mode introduces a brand new way to visualise and manage your CTAs. Gallery takes the standard table layout and creates a more visual layout focusing on the preview images of CTAs, alongside the standard name, status and performance information. The preview image is often the quickest way to tell one CTA from another, and historically the preview image has been a tiny image constrained to a single cell in the table. The new "Gallery" mode puts this preview front and centre providing an at-a-glance overview.
Organising the things you create in HubSpot can be a bit of a pain. You'll often need to resort to complex naming conventions as a workaround for this problem by adding in information to the name, and then using the search bar to quickly get to related assets.
Throughout the two years we've been introducing the power of saved views and custom properties as an organisational standard across more and more of the Marketing and CMS Hub tools, and with this update we're bringing saved views to the new edition of CTAs. This brings CTAs up to the latest standard available in Campaigns, Lists, Workflows, Pages, Blogs, Forms, the CRM and more.