Marketing and salespeople were inspired by the content of the annual INBOUND event last week. The virtual business conference attracted thousands of people worldwide to hear about the latest marketing, sales, and customer success roundups & expert speeches. Based on past years' experiences, we were ready to get some insights regarding the HubSpot platform's new product releases. We gathered here the essential product news from this year's INBOUND.
HubSpot is easy to love thanks to its ease of use. On the flip side, it hasn't provided enough flexibility to large organizations' most complex business needs. HubSpot is elevating itself to be a notable heavyweight tool for sales needs with the new Sales Hub Enterprise. The most important and most significant change is the new custom objects. In addition to HubSpot's standard objects, such as companies, contacts, and deals, fully customized similar objects can be brought into the system. That data can be used, for example, as triggers for automation. A custom object can contain any business-critical information such as data relating to deliveries, payments, or subscriptions - or that specific data that is the most important for your business!
In addition to custom objects, the new Sales Hub Enterprise provides salespeople with new tools and reporting templates for sales forecasting and reporting. In the words of HubSpot: you no longer have to choose between easy and power - both can now be found on the same system.
The pricing of the Marketing Hub is heavily based on the number of contacts in the database. In the future, you will only pay for the contacts you target your marketing activities, such as marketing emails and advertising. Other contacts can be classified as 'non-marketing' contacts (which you can have even up to a million contacts). It's wise to add your unsubscribers and bounced contacts to the non-marketing contacts, which you might want to keep in your system anyway. It is super easy to change the contacts' status from "non-marketing" to "marketing" status according to your needs.
HubSpot will also create a new pricing model for marketing contacts. The more marketing contacts you have, the cheaper it gets for a single contact.
CRM-based marketing tools create new opportunities to develop more customer-centric service and marketing experiences. It is not a single new product or functionality, but rather a toolset consisting of several different updates.
Custom objects are designed to boost sales and CRM activities; it provides new possibilities for marketing. With the data provided by the custom objects, you can now target and trigger communication and other marketing-related activities at the right time to the right customers. Custom objects bring great opportunities, especially for SaaS companies, where marketing, sales, and customer processes and data should be aligned seamlessly to enable the best possible service experience.
Programmable emails offer a new level of customization for emails; sometimes, tokens are not enough to tailor and customize your email content. With the programmable emails, you can automatically customize your emails based on the receiver's custom criteria. One email template yet endless combinations of the content tailored based on your customer's preferences. Example of programmed emails: A customer indicates that they are interested in red Ford cars in a specific zip code area. Programmable email composes a weekly newsletter, including all red Ford cars from that zip code area found in the database.
Advertising functionalities are evolving rapidly in HubSpot, and the new so-called "events" are an excellent addition to an already diverse advertising package. You can now create events that help you spend the advertising budget to the most valuable people from your perspective. You can set an event for a certain Lifecycle stage change and give it a specific value. In this way, advertising can assess which contacts end up in the most valuable Lifecycle stages of the business and learn to target advertising to similar contacts.
All marketing updates can be found nicely put together on this blog by Nicholas Holland.
The reporting feature brings additional opportunities for more detailed reporting by combining different data sources. This is an essential addition to the ready-made report templates provided by HubSpot.
You can read the full compilation of HubSpot updates through this article, including updates released earlier this year, such as ABM tools (read our blog on the subject), the new CMS Hub, and the Service Hub updates.