Episode 214: HubSpot for COVID tracking, In-App Notifications, and you have no privacy

Welcome to HubShots Episode 214: HubSpot for COVID tracking, In-App Notifications, and you have no privacy

This episode we discuss:

• having no privacy,
• plus using HubSpot to meet COVID guidelines,
• plus HubSpot in-app notifications.

Listen to the episode here: https://soundcloud.com/hubshots/214-hubspot-for-covid-tracking-in-app-notifications-and-you-have-no-privacy

Welcome to HubShots - APAC's number 1 HubSpot focussed podcast - where we discuss HubSpot tips & tricks, new features, and strategies for growing your marketing results.

HubShots, the podcast for marketing managers and sales professionals who use HubSpot, hosted by Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found and Craig Bailey from XEN Systems.

Recorded: Thursday 06 August 2020 | Published: Friday 14 August 2020

Shot 1: Growth Thought of the Week

Full Show Notes In The Notification Emails?

Would you like to receive the full show notes in the notification email (ie opposed to just the summary)?

If so, let us know - we’re looking to make this available if there’s enough interest.

You Have No Privacy

You should assume you have no privacy.

A simple example: HubSpot records all zoom calls - however, there’s no indication of it being recorded. Craig only discovered this recently on a call with HubSpot and a client. It was a bit of shock afterwards to realise that everything on the call - even before the HubSpot person had joined - was all recorded.

You should probably assume this is the norm in all your interactions.

Assume you have no privacy. Anywhere. Zoom. Email. Slack. HubSpot. Any tool you use.

The recent Congressional Hearing highlights how your most private emails will always be found - examples include Mark Zuckerberg’s emails about Instagram being made public.

Shot 2: HubSpot Marketing Feature of the Week

In Australia businesses like cafe’s, or places that people visit and are present need to keep a track of who has visited.

We have a client that has display homes and they wanted to track visits. So what they have done is have a sign with a QR code that takes visitors to a landing page.

From this we have created active lists and then used them in reports so we can easily show when people have visited.

Shot 3: HubSpot Sales Feature of the Week

Follow-on from the previous shot. We use a workflow to send an in-app notifications to sales if the person they are dealing with has come through the display home.

Shot 4: Listener Question of the Week

A question from long time listener and supporter of the show Martin Bredl. He’s the CEO at takeoff pr in Austria. Send us your questions - feel free to record yourself speaking and send us the audio file.

Martin writes:

“Hi Craig, you and Ian are really running the HubSpot Marathon. Awesome how much energy you are investing for all of us followers. For me it is so easy to stay on track with HubSpot: Just listen 20 minutes on public transport to HubShots. “

“I do have this question and I think this is something other HubSpot CMS user also care: How important is Google insight speed? Is this the final device to measure speed? We have tested the 20 top HubSpot partners (Top Tiers). And no one is doing well on Google Insights speed. You and Ian are also not best performing there. Should we ignore Google Insights Speed?”

Google PageSpeed Insights

Google has been providing testing tools for a while, and their PageSpeed Insights tool is a good example of a tool that is gaining wider adoption. You can see below how poorly the HubShots site performs on mobile:

Although it is much better on desktop:

For comparison, check out how Amazon performs, first on mobile:

And then on desktop:

Takeaway: use as a guide for what to check and fix, but don’t get too caught up the specific numbers.

Other tools to check include GTmetrix and WebPageTest, plus of course Website Grader. See also episode 203 where we chat about Google’s Lighthouse in Fast or Slow.

Shot 5: HubSpot Gotcha of the Week

Difficult to setup Full Post Email Notifications

It’s hard to include the full content of a blog post in a custom email eg like we want to send as a weekly notification to listeners.

Shot 6: Marketing Tip of the Week

PS line in Emails

Your P.S. line at the end of an email is valuable - a reminder to test using it in your next email campaign.

Shot 7: Insight of the Week

Marketing is like Martial Arts

There’s no right or wrong martial art to learn/use.

But there’s a problem if you are a beginner and try to mix a bunch of them all together.

One of our clients has a number of different marketing agencies and consultants involved - and it is becoming inefficient - each company has their own way of planning strategy, campaigns, execution, etc.

Aiming for consensus is a recipe for low outcomes.

Shot 8: App of the Week

3D Book Cover Creator in CSS

This is a handy tool for creating book covers using just CSS:

Shot 9: Quote of the Week

“First master the fundamentals.” —LARRY BIRD

Shot 10: Bonus Links of the Week

Microsoft on Work Challenges

Shot 11: Follow Us on the Socials

Connect with HubShots here: HubShots YouTube channel - HubShots Spotify channel - HubShots Facebook group - HubShots Twitter - HubShots Instagram - HubShots LinkedIn

Connect with Ian Jacob on LinkedIn and Craig Bailey on LinkedIn

HubShots is produced by Christopher Mottram from Podcastily.

Please rate and leave us some feedback as this helps us improve and reach more marketers.

Full Transcript of HubShots Episode 214

- Hi, everyone. Welcome to "HubShots" episode 214. In this episode, we discuss having no privacy plus using HubSpot to meet COVID guidelines, plus HubSpot in app notifications. You're listening to Asia Pacific's number one, HubSpot focus podcast, where we discuss HubSpot tips, tricks, features and strategies for growing your marketing, sales and service results. My name is Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found and with me is Craig Bailey from XEN Systems. How are you, Craig?

- I am well Ian and feeling exposed actually. I'll come to that in a minute when I realized I had no privacy at all. I'd love your feedback because for those of you who have signed up to get notifications of the show notes, they get sent out every Friday but currently they only have a summary of the post and I'm wondering if any of our listeners would like the entire show notes come to them as an email. 'Cause if you actually look on our site, the show notes are pretty detailed. We have tons of screenshots, lots of stuff. If you'd like that in an email, could you just, well, drop us a note on LinkedIn, send us an email, reply to one of our notification emails. You have to sign up for it on the site first and let us know. Now you might think, well, why don't you just provide it anyway? As I've come to in shot five, it's actually a little bit harder than it sounds so we'll come to that.

- All right, Craig, our growth thought of the week is, you have no privacy. All right, so I didn't realize this 'cause I'm in calls with the HubSpot team I mean and last week I was on a call with a client and with Nifty Nick. Hey, shout out to Nick. Nick had organized the meeting and sent the Zoom link and so we joined. Nick was, I got on there a bit early with the client and we're chatting away. Anyway during the call, one of the other people on the call, not from HubSpot but actually an outside consultant said, "Look, would it be okay if I recorded this call?" He was asking everyone on the Zoom call and Nick says, "Oh no worries, this is automatically recorded." And we're like, "What?" "Yeah, no, the call's recorded. "I can send you a copy afterwards." I'm like, "Ah." Anyway, this was news to me but when you join a HubSpot call, there's this little thing, it's kind of as if someone's sitting there without their monitor on and it just says HubSpot note taker. And I've seen this on calls before and I'm like, "Oh, I wonder what that is, it's just muted." I just assume it was someone in the office that if they needed to, they could jump on the call. Anyway, that's some outside service. You'd heard of this, it's called Gong, I think.

- Gong.io.

- Gong.io.

- It analyzes calls and it gives people sales intelligence to how people are reacting on the zoom call.

- Yeah, right okay. Well, maybe I'm the last person in the world to know about this because in hindsight, maybe it was kind of obvious but I had no idea. Actually, no, I'm not the last person 'cause the other people on the call were totally surprised as well. Anyway, so it sits there and it records the entire call and what's disconcerting about this is that it had been recording right from the start. There's no indication on the screen, you know the normal zoom recording. So that's not there. And it's been recording right from the start. So even before Nick from HubSpot joined the call, I was there chatting with the client. Luckily nothing sensitive or well, not that we would anyway, but kind of assumed we were just chatting private. We were talking about personal stuff and then now it's all been recorded and so a bit of a cold sweat goes through. I'm like, "Oh, how many HubSpot calls have I been on?" Perhaps with my team, we've joined the call early or perhaps with clients, you kinda mentally race back going, "What did I say?" It wouldn't have been anything bad but it's sometimes there is just intelligence, things that you wanna talk about privately. Anyway, that's all an intro to say, you have no privacy and I think this has been my default position for a while is that, look, you have no privacy. Someone's gonna get it. But this is just a reminder to everyone. I think just take the default position that you have no privacy, Slack calls, email, Zoom. Just about any tool you use, HubSpot, all your data's in there. Sensitive deals, just assume you have no privacy, regardless of all of these regulations and privacy rules in California and European Union, all that kinda stuff. That's my default position and just finally, if you've been following the congressional hearings recently, you saw how Facebook, all your emails from way back when they were acquiring or going after Instagram, also Apple emails from way back when all surfaced. I bet Mark Zuckerberg never thought they'd see the light of day but there they are, all out for public consumption. I mean, what's your position and do you kinda feel, do you feel you have any privacy?

- To be honest, Craig no and I've known this for a while and I think it's becoming more and more apparent that like it's more in people's faces. Let's put it that way, that there is no privacy. You can tell now very clearly, and this happens to me all the time. I talk to people and when we tell them what we do, they often go, "Hey, I was talking about this to my wife "or my friend," and the next minute I'm on Facebook and I see an ad. I'm scrolling through the feed and this happens all the time.

- But hang on. Now you're getting into tin foil hat territory here which I'm not disagreeing with, by the way.

- I know for a fact, look and you know, if you use G suite for your email or you're using Google mail, you'll just look at what happens now. It predicts everything that you're about to write. It pre-fills their name and like we said in the last episode 10 on HubSpot AI in your inbox to fill out details, straight to CRM, pick up any actions. You know what, with stuff like that, there is a price essentially and that's what we're seeing.

- I think that's right. Just a final comment because my VA has full control of, well a lot of my life really. So I'm totally fine with that. But I think there's a difference between knowing that someone has access to your stuff and not knowing and that's the thing. So the point, if you're an agency owner, HubSpot partner here maybe, that's potentially just a note. If you're ever joining a HubSpot call with your client, alert the client that it's probably being recorded and they haven't been asked for their permission. No one asks for their permission and no one notified us. So I think that's an important thing so that your clients don't feel unsettled by it. Just make sure it's very clear upfront.

- Well said, Craig. I think someone made a good point this week when I was listening to something about the whole privacy, what that means to us and how we should embrace what's coming. And I can't remember off the top of my head right now but when I do, I'll stick it in the show notes. All right on to our marketing feature of the week, Craig and this is to do with using HubSpot to help one of our clients who happens to be a home builder and they've got display homes in different locations. And now it's a requirement by law that they need to keep a track of who has been into the display homes. And it started off with a conversation of, how do I create a QR code? I'm like, what are you doing with a QR code? Anyways, so it turned out to be, here's the QR code and then we also need to know which location. So what they were trynna do is collect the data in a really simple and easy manner so that they could then keep a track because if they find out that someone has got the virus and they need to inform other people, they now have a register, essentially.

- So this is basically about contact tracing, right?

- Exactly, so got QR codes for each location, built a really simple form, first name, last name, email with their phone number so we can get in contact via email or a call, definitely a call because I think that's one of the first things that they do, is call you and also a consent of marketing. If they want to know, what's interesting out of this conversation and shoot other things. It's like, hang on. What if that person has already spoken to us and they're already getting nothing from us? What if they've never actually converted with us? Maybe they visited the site. We might not know that but maybe they've just been browsing but they've never actually downloaded anything or interacted that we understand with, then what do we do? So it was really interesting. It started with this really simple question and then went down this whole thing. Oh, what else can I show? Oh, it actually turned out to be interesting. It's like in the sales meeting, they were like, well, can I show how many people that inquired now have actually visited a display. I guess with more data, we see more stuff here. But what we essentially did was implement this in HubSpot so that when people scan the QR code, they got taken to a particular learning page, gave them the simple form. Now out of that, we've created lists in the backend. You'll see, there's a couple of lists. We've created lists with the overall list of people that are registered. Then we've split it by location. Then we've said, tell me the ones that have got no owner and have opted in and the ones that have no owner and haven't opted in and have maybe engaged with us at some time? So just trynna understand who these people are and you know what, this is really interesting when you look at what's going on and how we can implement stuff. Now, the next part was, oh, how do we tell sales? And this is leading on to our, HubSpot sales feature of the week.

- Just before you do that, can I ask you a question on this? So the reason for the QR code is 'cause you want them to register on their own device. Is that right?

- Correct, yeah. As opposed to having like an iPad sitting there where they type in?

- That's right.

- Right, 'cause I've seen in businesses mainly, they have like a pen and paper. You've got to write your note but I actually haven't seen any way you can kinda sign in and it's kind of obvious, I've wondered why it's not been there but I think this is really good. There's a perfect example of it being implemented, well done.

- And you know what, there was a really good blog post on the HubSpot blog about QR codes and how to set them up, which is what I actually shared with my client at the time when they said, how do I do this? What service do I use?

- You better put that in resource for the week as well.

- I have to put that in the resource the week. And so listeners, the next part was one of the things, it's like, well, how do we notify if we know who that person is and they're already dealing with somebody in sales, how do we notify the person in sales that the person's been through the display? So what we did was we created a workflow and we decided with sales, instead of getting another email, we'll send an in app notification to sales to let them know that their customer or potential customer has been through the display and maybe they get notified while they do it. So they could be in the display at the time and they might actually recognize that they've been notified that they're actually there and get an opportunity to speak to them and see how things are going. So that was another little thing that came out of that, that we implemented.

- That is really nice, I like that.

- Onto our listener question of the week, Craig. Alrighty, a question from longtime listener and supporter of the show. This is Martin Bredell and he's the CEO at Takeoff PR in Austria, shout out to Austria. He often gives us a shout out as well and talks about not having kangaroos in Austria, which we of course have in Australia.

- We used to chat a bit on LinkedIn, but sorry, man. I'm just so not on LinkedIn these days. I'm terrible at it but email this in and, we'll go through the question in a second, but I wanted to say we really like getting questions from listeners and there's been a few others actually. Martin's been good and we've been conversing backwards, forwards on the buyer journey and attribution tracking. Not so much questions but him telling me things and chatting about the discussion. So it's been really good and email by the way, is the best format for me. I'm sorry, I bailed in LinkedIn.

- So listeners, what you were going to say, Craig, if you wanna ask a question by all means, we'd love you to record a voice question and just attach it to an email and email it through to us. We would love to include that in the show, if you don't mind.

- Yep, we'll fit you on the show. Actually, do you wanna read out Martin's question in?

- "Hi, Craig. "You and Ian are really running the HubSpot marathon. "Awesome how much energy you are investing "for all of us followers. "For me, it is easy to stay on track with HubSpot. "Just listen to 20 minutes on public transport "to "HubShots." Well, there you go.

- I know, thanks Martin, yeah.

- Thank you, Martin. "I do have this question "and I think this is something perhaps HubSpot CMS users "also care about. "How important is Google's page insight speed? "Is this the final device measure speed? "We have tested the 20 top HubSpot partners," so the top tiers, "and no one is doing well "on Google insight speed. "You and Ian are not the best performing there either. "Should we ignore Google page speed insights?"

- All right, so a really good question and it probably follows on from last episode or on episode two, when we were chatting about the new core web vitals that are turning up now in Google search console and these Metrix while they're available on Google page speed insights, which is what Martin's referring to. So I've got links to page speed insights. If you haven't seen it, it's a very simple Google tool. Google's good actually. They're putting out a lot of tools and these are very user friendly. And so what you do is you stick in your website, I've got some screenshots here where we ran "HubShots" through the analyzer. Interestingly, when I put it in, I put it in as an https but you'll see in the screenshot, it's taken the sl, I'm not sure why but you'll even see the one I've requested. Anyway, that goes through and it gives you some metrics. Some of those, first content for paid cumulative if these are the core web vital metrics, things that we talked about and you'll see "HubShots" on mobile is really bad. It gets 16 out of 100. It's a little bit better on desktop. We score a 67 there but man's alluding to the fact that, yeah, it's a really bad score and a lot of sites score badly. So his question is, well, given that so many sites score badly and especially HubSpot-hosted sites, as well as WordPress hosted sites, we not really worry about it? So it's a good question. It's a difficult one to answer but lemme give a few comments. Firstly, the first thing I do whenever I use a comparison tool is I go and compare it with Amazon because we know Amazon is so focused on user experience that they will work incredibly hard to get as responsive site as possible. So that's the first kinda benchmark, I always check in Amazon and we've got some of them in the screenshots. So on mobile, amazon.com that I use, the home page gets a 53. Immediately it's better than our 16 but it's lower than our 67 that we get on desktop. Amazon on desktop gets a 73. Go and check out the screenshots 'cause you'll see some of those good core web vitals stats coming through. So then given that Amazon doesn't perform particularly well, although better than us admittedly but they're not up in the 90s, the question really does become, well is it worth doing? And so here's, well, this is just my opinion, interested in whether you agree or disagree, Ian but I feel it's useful as a guide. So we always look at these and go, okay, is there anything obvious or a low hanging fruit that we should fix? So if you do some of these things and you say, Oh, you've got a format file on the home page and it's really slowing it down. Great, you should go and fix that. There's also other tools, and we've talked about this in other episodes, Sheet, GT Metrix, webpage password of cause website creator, HubSpot's own tool. Run through those as well. Good to run sites through a range of tools because some highlight different things, which you can take action on. However, even though we scored so badly, the other thing I do is then just test myself. I go on my phone. We don't have particularly good internet here at home and I test on desktop, test on incognito so it's not cached. I run it and I check the response and whereas page insights were saying 18 seconds before I could use the page on mobile, I know myself just on mobile on average internet, it's actually responsive after a second or two. It's actually really quick. So it makes me dubious and I'm not exactly sure why they're so poor on page insights. So my summary is, I don't get too caught up on it, especially when I see Amazon is also graded poorly but I do look for it into insights that I can easily fix, low hanging fruit. What's been your experience, Ian?

- Similar experience, Craig. And one of the other tools I use in conjunction, is GT Metrix and I use that to test and keep history of what's going on. So that's a really good tool to get started with. I know page speed insights can be difficult at times and also listeners take a note of this. It's called page speed insights, not website speed insights and it's looking at a page. So you often put in your website that looks at the home page. Now, if you run that test on a different page, you will get a different answer. So just be aware that this does not apply to your site right across the board and obviously there are common components, they might be headers, footers that are common across the site, but it could be what is on the homepage. You could be running a really big video or something. So just be aware of that. So one of the things we do is like, look at those top traffic pages and test its page insights on those top traffic pages to give an insight into how the speed is. And just like Craig said, test it yourself, test it on your mobile device, test it on your desktop, get your mother to test it and see how she feels because that's a good measure because if some people to, probably get a really younger person to test it because there'll be really impatient and they'll go, "That's too slow." So that's a really good measure because what you might be seeing, and I know on GT Metrix, you can set where the test takes place from. So often the test defaults to the U.S or to Canada and we specifically test we was hosting a site here in Sydney and we wanna test it in Sydney because that's where all our market is all in Australia. So that can make a big difference. We're not going across the Atlantic and coming back here, we're on the same continent. So just be aware of these things when we're talking about page speed insights and about how they're collecting the data because that's a really key thing in this whole process. All right, onto HubShots gotcha of the week, Craig and this is going back to those listeners. Would you like all the show notes in an email from us? And now Craig is gonna explain how hard this is to do.

- All right, so just to recap, we want to send out a blog post that's posted on a HubSpot hosted blog. We wanna send that out as the full post, all the content in an email. It's actually quite hard to set that up custom. So many people know that when you create a HubSpot blog, HubSpot in the background creates three emails for you, instant notification or daily, weekly and monthly. And that email, if you go into it, you can edit it and you can set a setting that says, full post content, but that is only sent to the people that have subscribed using that blog subscribe widget. So normally that's on a sidebar. That's not our situation. We've actually got a whole list of HubShot subscribers that get the notification. That's a custom email, it's not that a HubSpot created one. That does not have an option for the full email content. So then the question is, well, how do you actually make it happen? So I'm currently working on a little process for that and I will mention that in a future show, if we can get it all working but it basically involves finding that subscription setting on the contact record, setting it via a workflow to send basically for people that are in another list. So more on that, but that's the HubSpot gotcha of the week. I don't know why it's not easier or maybe it's easy and I just don't realize it. So the gotcha is I couldn't find it. More on that in a future episode.

- Alright, Craig, onto our marketing tip of the week, and this is P.S lines in emails.

- Well, just a reminder that this is kinda one of those well-known, I won't call it a growth hack or anything but it's just the P.S line in those emails. You send out a campaign, everyone knows, they go to the bottom and then, P.S have you seen our XXX or have you this, fill out a survey. It's very powerful, people often click that. We've looked at those heat map overlays where people click. Often they'll skim through your whole email and the only thing they click is the P.S line. So just a reminder, don't ignore the P.S in your email campaigns.

- All right, Craig, and onto our insight of the week. Marketing is like martial arts.

- I'll tell you how this came up. Chatting with a client, they've got outside consultant and other marketing agencies involved. And we are the main marketing agency for this client but they've been involved with some government grants and government local business things who have then brought in other agencies. So there's a bunch of marketing agencies involved and I've then been in calls with these other marketing agencies and we're all kind of advising our client, the CEO of our client. And it occurred to me, there's kind of friction and it's not like competitive friction 'cause these other people are just on a set thing. It's not like where they're gonna bump us out or we're bumping that out or anything. But it's just actually, it's not friction, it's inefficiency. And it occurred to me that because I was like, why is this getting inefficient? Why are we not getting things done? It occurred to me it's like martial arts and fun fact, I think you know, Ian I did martial arts for 30 years, I did karate. And it wasn't until I was, shall we say at a certain level of proficiency that I then started incorporating other martial arts styles. Because when you're a beginner, you just gotta stick with one style. It occurred to me here, this CEO is trying to learn a whole bunch of different martial arts styles as a beginner all at once. Each marketing agency has their own way of doing it, their own martial art, if you like. So he's ended up with the big ready to rumble, mixed martial arts extravaganza and he's a beginner, doesn't know what to do. And it's like none either is right or wrong. It's not like one martial art is right. Karate is better that Judo, they're all good. It's just that you can't learn them all at once. I thought that was a nice, interesting parallel.

- Analogy.

- Analogy. I don't know if it works or I've flubbed it too hard there but I think it was a good insight when I explained to the client, you're trying to learn too many things at once. Just find one, stick with it, get really good at it then you can expand to include other styles.

- I couldn't agree more, Craig. All right, listeners, onto our app of the week and this is 3D Cover Creator in CSS. So Craig was showing this and I got excited. So we'll put the link in the show notes. It's really cool. Put a image of your potential ebook or book and you can create a really nice looking book that will even have some sort of interactivity with you that you can stick on a site and you can essentially cut the code and stick it on your page.

- All right, onto our quote of the week, listeners and this quote is from a Larry Bird and this ties in very well with your previous point, Craig. It says, "First master the fundamentals." And how funny was that? I've stuck that code in before you actually put out the marketing tip.

- Perfect.

- Alright, listeners, we've got some bonus links which are in the show notes on work challenges that Microsoft has written and it's well worth the read and we'll probably discuss that in another episode. Please follow us on the socials, comment on our personal LinkedIn. Please connect with Craig and myself on LinkedIn and tell us that you listen to the show. We love to hear from you guys and thank you to those who have connected with us over the last week. We appreciate that. If we can help you in any way with anything, HubSpot, marketing strategy, you need a portal review even with ads because it's very inbound, ey Craig? We can help you and don't feel afraid to reach out to us and ask us any questions and we love hearing from you. Any questions that you have and you would like us to feature on the show, please, like I said, record them and send the voice note by email, we'd love to hear from you. Well, listeners until next week, catch you later, Craig.

- Catch you later, Ian.

- Hey there, thanks for listening to this episode of "HubShots." To get the latest show notes, HubSpot tips and marketing resources, sign up at hubshots.com. You can also book time with us to help you grow better, with HubSpot.