Manila HUG 2019: Understanding HubSpot’s Latest Product Updates

In 2019, HubSpot stayed true to its promise to #GrowBetter by launching several product updates geared toward helping sales and marketing professionals scale their operations and accomplish tasks more efficiently and effectively.

These changes to the platform plus some holiday presents were among the highlights of the fourth and last Manila HubSpot User Groups (HUG) meet-up for 2019 last December 9 at Acceler8 by UnionSPACE - Rockwell.

Looking back: 2019 wins for Manila HUG

It can’t be denied that 2019 was a great year for the Manila Hubspot User Group. Between May to September, StraightArrow Corporation and GetCre8tive organized and launched three learning sessions covering marketing automation, sales enablement, and delighting customers through social media.

Outside of these meet-ups, the existing community grew all the more over on Facebook and LinkedIn. These social platforms became an extension of our HUG gatherings, allowing HUG members (whom we fondly call “HUGgers”) to raise questions about inbound and digital marketing and share some best practices.

HubSpot’s 2019 Product Updates

To cap off the eventful year, HUGgers gathered once again, this time, to cover the latest HubSpot product updates. These were discussed by Chloe Villanueva, Manila HUG Leader and Head of StraightArrow’s Digital Marketing Department.

In 2018, HubSpot asked its users for suggestions on how to improve their products.

The overall feedback they gathered was that users wanted HubSpot to:

• Be easier to use
• Help them scale faster
• Allow them to do more, even on a tight budget

This wishlist gave way to several product updates.

Complete tasks efficiently

Making things easier means reducing the steps needed to complete a task. With the help of the following updates, you can spend less time on automated marketing tasks and devote more to strategies, conceptualization, and

• • • Contact deduplication

Contacts are the heart of an inbound strategy. Without these, marketers and salespeople would have no one to nurture or make a sale to. But while it’s good to have a lot of contacts in your database, duplicate records can provide contacts with a bad experience. Having multiple records in your database can result in a contact receiving automated marketing emails more than once.

As a marketer, manually reviewing your contact lists to clean up duplicates is also time-consuming and can result in human error.

To address this, HubSpot leveraged artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to make it easier to identify and merge duplicates.

If a contact in your database has two records—one with their personal email address and another with a company email address—HubSpot can now automatically find these entries for you to review and merge them in just a few clicks.

This feature is available on all Pro and Enterprise Product subscriptions.

• • • Workflow management

Chances are you have workflows named Campaign 1.A and Campaign 1. B sitting together with Campaigns 2 and 3.

Before HubSpot’s product updates, workflows were just stored in the workflow area. Now, you can create folders where you can store multiple workflows.

This folder feature should help you organize and compile related workflows, so you can easily distinguish them from the rest. 

There’s also a go-to action feature that allows you to link contacts to a previous step in your workflows.

This feature is available on all Pro and Enterprise Product subscriptions.

• • • Native lead ad creation

Facebook lead ad creation in HubSpot has been made simpler and more intuitive with a new but familiar interface patterned after the landing page creation page, and other tools on HubSpot. The processes are clearly defined, and you can quickly run your ads, and see your ROI.

This feature is available on the free CRM.

• • • New email editor and templates

HubSpot’s updated email editor now includes a drag-and-drop feature so marketers with little to no coding experience can create emails on the platform. Plus, there are new pre-made templates available that you can select from.

This feature is available on the free CRM and all Marketing Hub tiers.

• • • Updated knowledge base editor and templates

Knowledge bases are useful for creating playbooks for your customers. You can easily save time and answer all your customers’ frequently asked questions by referring them to your knowledge base.

In the Service Hub, HubSpot added the knowledge base editor that looks similar to other editors on HubSpot such as the blog and website pages editor.

This feature is available on the Pro and Enterprise Service Hub subscriptions.

Scale faster

A growing business needs an arsenal of tools that will help them remove friction in its processes. The team at HubSpot also wanted to address how their technology can help their users’ businesses scale better as they grow. 

• • • App Marketplace

HubSpot reorganized the App Marketplace to make it easier for you to find and install apps that will help you scale your operations. Each integration is also now required to include pricing, data flow structure, and demo videos in their listing, so you could easily see all the relevant information.

The new HubSpot App Marketplace features integrations such as Slack, WordPress, and 300 other available apps, so you can combine the power of multiple tools in one platform.

This feature is available for all products.

• • • Facebook Messenger with chatflows

This year, HubSpot integrated Facebook Messenger into the Conversations section of the platform. This way, social media managers or customer support no longer have to leave the platform to respond to a Facebook message.

This feature can be found under Conversations, though it’s still in the beta stage at the moment.

• • • Advocacy automation

Happy customers invite other happy customers, while unhappy ones can become a detractor from your business. In previous HUGs, we covered how delighting customers is crucial when growing your business.

With the new advocacy automation available in Service Hub, HubSpot users can better respond to customer feedback. The feature involves new workflows that trigger messages to customers based on their response to your net promoter score and customer satisfaction surveys.

How this works is when a contact responds with positive feedback on your product or service, you can automate emails with an option for them to refer your product or service to colleagues or friends. And if it turns out otherwise, you can also set up automation for an email that is aimed at clarifying their issue.

This feature is available on the Pro and Enterprise Service Hub subscriptions.

Work on a budget

Lastly, budget is a crucial factor when making a marketing decision. As marketers themselves, HubSpot wanted to encourage their users to get the most out of the platform and generate high ROI—without breaking the bank.

• • • Free Email

Good news for marketers who are using HubSpot CRM for free! You can now utilize the platforms’ email tool with features that include the post-send analytics screen to see how your email performed, or navigate to a contact record to see whether or not that specific contact opened or clicked within your email.

The free email tool also allows you to create contact lists and send a maximum of 2,000 emails per month.

This feature is available for all products.

• • • Free Ads

The Ads feature is also added for free accounts. You can run ads across Facebook, Google and LinkedIn and do cross-network ad campaigns so you can do both lead generation and lead nurturing. It lets you manage and monitor up to $1,000 per month of ad spending across the said three social media platforms.

This feature is available for all products.

• • • Marketing Hub Starter Packaging Updates

For a base price of $50, HubSpot Marketing Hub Starter users can enjoy updates like the landing page drag-and-drop editor and form follow-up emails.

Marketers will be able to create optimized landing pages without having to learn HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. And form follow-up emails let you send up to three automated emails after form submissions to better nurture contacts and convert them into leads.

This package is coming soon!

• • • Sales Hub Professional Packaging Updates

As HubSpot explained in their Product spotlight, customers’ expectations are high and they wanted to make sure that their product works harder so businesses can maximize the money they’re pouring in. This gives way to the Sales Hub Professional’s packaging updates.

With a new price of $500 per month, customers will enjoy new features such as Sequences Improvements, “Buy Now” Button, eSignature, and Calculated Properties.

This package is coming soon!

Growing better in a community

These updates were positive news for all HUGgers who attended the gathering. It encouraged them to #GrowBetter as HubSpot continues to improve the platform based on their requests.

But the fun doesn’t end with the updates granted by HubSpot. Since the HUG coincided with the holiday season, Bel Roxas of GetCre8ive took the floor to facilitate a game of human bingo.  We believe that building a community means getting to know each other—and what better way to do that than through an activity to pick up some interesting facts about your fellow marketers?

After all, the goal of HUGs is not only to teach marketers about the new tools and trends but also to grow better and have fun in a community of like-minded marketers and sales professionals—a goal the team is confident to have achieved in 2019 and is looking forward to growing even better with everyone in 2020.

Interested to learn more about HubSpot?

We can help. Join the Manila HubSpot User Group or schedule a consultation with us today.