Recently, HubSpot announced a whole slew of product updates to its hubs (marketing, sales, service and more) and CRM platform. There are some juicy bits here – especially in the realm of AI – that can make a big difference for your marketing and sales teams, how well your CRM performs, and more.
These features stood out to us as particularly useful for B2B sales and marketing teams!
AI Assistant updates: Blog Post Generator, Subject Line Generator, and Sales Generation Emails
There’s plenty of buzz about AI these days, and appropriately we see a few ingenious uses among HubSpot’s latest updates. To put it simply, when it comes to creating effective sales generation emails, blog posts, and even subject lines, HubSpot users can take advantage of AI to give more options and save time.
Sales Generation Emails
Let’s face it… drafting emails can be a pain! A huge plus of AI is its ability to automate tasks while still having opportunities for creativity and customization. That’s why one of the features we like the most in this latest update is the ability to utilize an AI assistant to generate sales emails.
Now in public beta via the HubSpot Office 365 add-in, this AI assistant can be used for all types of emails: Introductory emails, cold outreach, follow-ups, and more. With instant generation, your reps can spend less time writing and more time fine-tuning sales gen emails so they are more likely to get leads. It also frees up more time for them to focus on other tasks, too!
Blog Post Generator
What’s more, HubSpot now has an AI-powered blog post generator, giving you the power to create full blog posts just with a simple description of a broad topic! For those times when your content team is struggling to come up with the next idea for a blog post, this feature can be like a river in a desert. This blog post generator can also give your content creators more specific ideas and blog titles, helping you pare down the focus of your blog to a shiny, sharp target that reaches your intended audience.
Furthermore, HubSpot will show the popularity of a blog post’s page title and keywords. This can help your team fine-tune the blog’s SEO metrics for better engagement and performance. This can be a great way to save time and improve your SEO!
Subject Line Generator
Finally, let’s take a look at the HubSpot AI Subject Line Assistant for Marketing Email. What does it do? Well, it’s in the name – you can now create effective subject lines for your marketing emails. This may seem like a small thing, but ask any content creator, marketing expert, or copy writer on your team how surprisingly difficult it can be to craft the perfect subject line that well summarizes the email content and captures a lead’s interest.
So, with this tool, your team members can automatically generate an email subject line for their email campaign in seconds. It’s not at random either – the intelligence of the AI will take a look at the email body to craft an appropriate subject that compliments the content. Then it’s just up to your team to tinker with it until they’re happy (but it shouldn’t take much time!).
ChatSpot
Finally, it’s not surprising to see an AI-powered feature among the bevy of new updates. One of HubSpot’s new support features is ChatSpot, an AI chatbot that pulls from 600 hours of HubSpot Academy content for answers.
ChatSpot is powered by OpenAI’s database, ChatGPT, and Dall-E; if you haven’t already tried it out, it can be a great first step to prospect data about companies, summarize content, and analyze your website’s SEO. Now, feel free to ask ChatSpot questions about using HubSpot as well!
(Just a note that this feature is also in public beta, but given its usefulness we expect it won’t be too long until we see this live everywhere.)
Marketing Hub: Manage subscription types and integrate externally hosted data into email marketing
Next, let’s take a look at HubSpot’s Marketing Hub. What’s new? How about the ability to manage and communicate your subscription types across all your brands? That’s right, this long-awaited feature is finally here, and we now have the ability to manage subscription types separately across business units.
That way, contacts unsubscribing from one business unit, such as one of your brands, are still subscribed to the others in your portal. Sounds like an easy quality-of-life improvement!
Another new feature we’re intrigued by is the Marketing Single Send API. This enterprise-focused feature lets us integrate your externally hosted data with HubSpot’s email marketing platform. So we can leverage HubSpot’s excellent content creator and sending infrastructure while adding in our customizations.
Plus, this API can also automate personalized emails to send based on actions from your externally hosted website or blog.
Other notable updates in the Marketing Hub
1. More features for the social media hounds on your marketing team:
- Include up to 20 images on Facebook posts from mobile, allowing for richer content to get posted
- Schedule the first comment for Instagram posts with First Comment Support, giving another opportunity to boost a post’s engagement
- Publish videos to LinkedIn from mobile, providing another element to the content that promotes your company bran
2. Manage multiple brands in one HubSpot account by assigning business units in HubSpot to workflows
3. Zero in on customer journey touchpoints with new analytic tools that support campaign filtering
4. Randomly split enrolled records into evenly sized groups for workflow experimentation – giving new opportunities to try different approaches and tactics!
5. Build lists filtered by an SMS or WhatsApp subscription status
CMS Hub: Send follow-ups to unfinished registrants, allow contacts to manage personal data
Meanwhile, in the CMS Hub, we’re seeing some neat new stuff! Such as this new feature for enterprise-level users: Setting up automated registration email follow-ups for private content. This way, you can send emails to users who started account registration, but didn’t finish it for one reason or another. It’s a neat way to encourage users to finish signing up and removing potential blocks that may be keeping them from registering.
We can also now add modules that give contacts more agency, allowing contacts to request to download or delete their personal data. Of course, it’s up to you if you want to enable this feature for your contacts, but keep in mind this can be a great way to show your contacts that your business follows the best practices in privacy and can help you keep in line with your country’s laws on data protection. Think of it as a trust-building tool!
Interested in revisiting blogs with HubSpot? In addition to the AI-powered blog post generator, you may also be interested in the improved Blog Posts module, replacing the old-and-dusted Blog Listing module. What’s so special about this new iteration? This module takes advantage of JavaScript and React tech, rendering code on the server and leading to a smoother blogging experience. So, if you’ve used HubSpot’s blogging module before and found it to be lacking, it may be worth another try now!
Other cool updates in the CMS Hub
- Create new pages as a clone from existing pages more quickly, and publish them as brand new pages
- Access and manage files on the mobile experience of the HubSpot app, so you can upload, download, and manage your files while on the run
By the way! There are also some new features that impact both the Marketing and CMS Hubs – such as letting you keep track of approvals activity in HubSpot’s collaboration side bar.
Sales and Service Hubs: Create ‘Leads’ objects and custom goal templates
Let’s take a look at the Sales and Service Hubs next. In the Sales Hub, there’s a new object called ‘Leads’. This doesn’t replace contacts; instead, the ‘Leads’ object can help sellers manage prospecting and qualification efforts for both inbound and outbound demand gen.
Think about what your sales team can do with ‘Leads’. Your prospecting reps now have a way to organize, prioritize, and engage your leads all in one place, leading to a more effective workflow, better connections with prospective customers, and ultimately more pipeline.
We also have a great new quality-of-life addition for both the Sales and Service Hubs, with a new ability to save custom goals as templates. No more extra time and effort to define a custom goal for every month, quarter, or year! Since it’s easier to define custom goals, that makes it easier to use HubSpot as, well, the spot to define and revisit your business goals throughout the year.
Other useful updates in the Sales and Service Hubs
- Easily categorize customer feedback with the new Feedback Submissions Tagging feature
- Streamline the meeting booking process with lead form routing
- Connect a HubSpot-provided phone number to inboxes and route inbound calls to up to 10 users at a time by calling as a channel
- Initiate calls via the HubSpot mobile app from any CRM record while working on desktop
- Copy and paste the link to any message in the Conversations Inbox or Help Desk with message deep linking
Operations and Commerce Hubs: Gauge visualizations and an enchanted checkout page
Meanwhile, in the Operations and Commerce Hubs, we see a plethora of small-but-useful new features, such as gauge visualizations in the custom report builder that can give you a quick check on how a key metric is performing. It’s not a huge change, certainly, but small details like this can make a difference.
As well, U.S. users can now see Apple Pay and Google Pay as payment options on their HubSpot Payments checkout page, not to mention a more secure ACH flow that instantly verifies bank accounts. If you’re not in the U.S., don’t worry – HubSpot indicates that the improved checkout page will be available to its users around the world in the coming months.
Other intriguing updates in the Operations and Commerce Hubs
- Easily review data model adoption and usage with the Data Model Overview
- Respond to workflow issues quicker with visible notifications via Slack, Facebook Workplace, MS Teams, or through mobile, desktop, email and in-app platforms.
- Search across objects and records and find sync errors quicker with Inspect by Record View
- More data quality tools to help understand how much data is available and where it’s coming from
- Facilitate revenue tracking with automatically generated invoices for subscription payments (U.S. only for now)
CRM Platform: Associate records of the same type and create custom unique IDs
There are a ton of updates to HubSpot’s CRM platform; were we to go through each one, it may be a new year by the time we finish! So, let’s focus on the updates that really caught our eye.
For one, we can now create associations between records of the same type, such as contacts, companies, deals, tickets, and custom objects. So, it’s easy to make associations from contact to contact, company to company, and so on.
This undoubtedly makes things more efficient! It used to be that, when a customer raised a ticket with a support team, the support team would have to raise an internal ticket in a different ticket pipeline – just to action the customer's request. That’s a bit unwieldy! But now, with this new association feature, the customer ticket can simply associate with the internal ticket, giving more visibility and likely easier resolution..
Another new feature we like is the ability to create custom unique IDs for contacts within support. Why does this make a difference? Now there’s an ability to upsert and dedupe your data across contacts, companies, deals, tickets, and custom objects. This makes actions like migration even easier.
(Not using HubSpot but want to start? Remember, Macro can help you migrate from your current CRM – read about our CRM expertise.)
Other awesome updates in the CRM Platform
- Automatically flag poorly performing lists and cancel membership registration emails to those lists (with increased visibility of cancellations so you know when registration emails are cancelled)
- Apply new and improved filters to any report on your dashboard
- See additional details about a contact, company, deal, ticket, or task when looking for them in Global Search
- Create descriptions for Custom Objects so anyone who interacts with it can get more clarity
- Get a quicker understanding of key user stats related to activity and login
- And more!
The updated CRM platform also displays some new design features:
- A refreshed header that spotlights important ticket and conversation info
- A new global toolbar above HubSpot Nav, making for an easier-to-find search experience
- A new data privacy dashboard that can help your team follow data privacy laws and best practices while managing the communications preferences of your contacts
- A new collaboration sidebar integrated into individual Lists, allowing for conversations about a List to happen where they are most relevant
- An updated user table that shows additional info about the users in a given portal
One more cool update! Integrate HubSpot with a state-of-the-art web dev platform
Is your site using Webflow as its CMS? Webflow offers amazing ease-of-use, flexibility, and customization, making it one of the most popular web design and development platforms in recent years (and undoubtedly for years to come). And now, through a certified app, you can connect your Webflow site to HubSpot!
- Embed HubSpot forms and chatbots directly into your Webflow site
- Seamlessly collect contacts to your HubSpot CRM
- Send automated emails to those leads and customers
- Add HubSpot assets and tracking codes to your Webflow site and more!
We like Webflow a lot here at Macro – so much that our new site is on the platform! We think it’s going to be. And now with this app integration with HubSpot, the use case for Webflow for B2B businesses just got even better.
(If your site is on Webflow, or thinking about making that transition to Webflow, we’ll be happy to talk to you about our experience, too.)
Other exciting updates in Hubspot’s App Marketplace & Integrations.
- Automate outreach by enrolling contacts in a HubSpot Sequence directly from Salesforce
- Book HubSpot meetings from Salesforce
Get expert support for your HubSpot implementation
There are so many things to take advantage of here with this latest update! HubSpot already is an amazing CRM platform and hub for marketing and sales, and these new updates add to the already humongous pile of features it has.
Concerned there’s more to keep track of? Don’t worry about it! With our Macro team as your expert HubSpot consultants, you’ll only use the features that make sense for your business use cases. There’s no concern of being overwhelmed when Macro can help you get your HubSpot implementation started, keep it running, and get better performance.
Visit our webpage on HubSpot to see what we can do for you, and – whenever you feel like it! – get a free consultation from Macro. As a natural extension of your global B2B marketing team, we’ll help you make the best out of your HubSpot performance.