Welcome to HubShots Episode 283: HubSpot Top Tips August 2022 Edition

This edition we dive into:

• The power of incremental growth
• List layouts can now be saved per list
• Make sure you use Email Subscription Types properly
• Frequency versus Relevancy in your email strategy
• How to update a Contact when they’ve left a company
• Automatically Re-Open a Closed ticket when a customer replies (to a Closed ticket)
• Compare email performance in a workflow
• Workflow gotcha - avoiding race conditions
• Custom Reporting tip - using Date Frequency versus Date Part in reports
• Target Account recommendation lols
• HubShots QuickCheck service now available

You can watch this episode on our YouTube channel (or just listen to it on our YouTube audio channel).

We’re also available on Spotify or Soundcloud if that’s easier for you.

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Recorded: Thursday 11 August 2022 | Published: Friday 19 August 2022

Table of Contents

• Incremental Growth
• List Layouts
• Email Subscription Types
• Frequency versus Relevancy in your email strategy
• Update a Contact when they’ve left a company
• Automatically Re-Open a Closed ticket when a customer replies (to a Closed ticket)
• Compare email performance in a workflow
• Workflow gotcha - avoiding race conditions
• Custom Reporting tip - using Date Frequency versus Date Part in reports
• Target Account recommendation lols
• HubShots QuickCheck service
• Quote of the Week
• Training of the Week

🌱 Shot 1: Growth Thought of the Week

Incremental Growth

It’s been over a month since our last episode… the longest break we’ve taken between episodes ever in our 7+ years of recording the podcast.

There’s plenty of ‘life gets in the way’ reasons why this has occurred, but I’ll spare you the excuses. Instead I wanted to reflect on the main takeaway for me: how easy it is to lose momentum once you break a habit. Our weekly habit of recording the podcast was broken, and then one week became two, became three, etc.

I’m happy to say though that during that ‘break’ we’ve taken some time to reflect on what’s working and what we can improve.

As you may know we’ve been putting a little more effort into the YouTube channel, and there’s going to be a big focus there in the coming months (mostly around improving the production quality of the videos).

We’ve also been lucky to record some interviews with leading HubSpot community members - you’ll start to see those being published in the coming months too.

Plus we’ve started recording separate video lessons that will be on the channel as well (separate from our main podcast/vidcast episodes).

There’s also some other pieces rolling out medium term (but they aren’t at an advanced enough stage to mention just yet).

Why am I mentioning all this?

Because when it comes to ‘growth’ it’s a timely reminder (to me at least) that it’s important not to get distracted with too many things… because it can mean you end up not getting anything finished!

Incremental growth is definitely the process that works best for me. How about you?

Shoutouts

A quick shoutout to Huntington - thanks for listening (from California), and for your detailed feedback - much appreciated! He asked a bunch of really good questions too, some of which we’ll be chatting about in upcoming episodes.

Shoutout to Moby and the InboundBuzz podcast team - publishing a bunch of good episodes lately!

✨ Shot 2: Quick Shots of the Week

Here’s a few quick items of interest we noticed:

• New "Developer" or "Marketer" recommended role labels added to all SEO recommendations in the SEO Recommendations tool.
• (Beta) Apex domain functionality rolling out to all plans (including Free). This is a welcome change (you may recall we were confused by this previously - listen at the 9:29 mark in episode 256)
• Lists layout is by default saved per list now (and you have to explicitly choose to save the layout for all lists). This brings Lists functionality closer to Views functionality (one really nice feature of Views is that you can save the layout per View):

🚀 Shot 3: HubSpot Marketing Feature of the Week

Email Subscription Types

This is something that comes up a lot when we do our HubSpot QuickCheck audits for HubSpot customers - we find areas of HubSpot that aren’t being used.

One of my favourite features - which is often not used by customers - is the email subscription types.

Here’s an example of the default subscription types:

And here’s an example of when a portal has it used much more fully:

And here’s an example when they’ve possibly gone a little too granular:

Frequency versus Relevancy

We often hear customers worrying they are sending emails too frequently, and that contacts will unsubscribe.

I don’t think frequency is the problem.

Instead relevancy is.

I’ll happily receive an email every day from a business if it is particularly relevant.

But I’ll also unsubscribe from an email once a month if it’s not relevant.

My point is: focus on relevancy.

Segment your contacts list, and as much as possible get them to self select their interests. And then ensure they are only sent a content that matches their preferences.

How to use Email Subscription Types when sending emails

When preparing emails, you set the applicable subscription type in the Email settings tab:

HubSpot automatically takes care of ensuring that it is not sent to any contacts who have unsubscribed from this subscription type (ie they’ve unticked it as a preference when managing their email preferences).

💰 Shot 4: HubSpot Sales Feature of the Week

How to update a contact when they have left a company

We noticed that the contact has moved businesses.  This should ideally be done by sales support or the contact owner.

Initial Process (frequency: weekly/fortnightly):

• We did a Google search, using the Actions > Search in Google
  
• Find the contact on LinkedIn - check where they have moved to
• Updated contact email (from LinkedIn) using Lusha, Lifecycle stage and other relevant properties.
• Decide if there is an opportunity in the contacts' new business.

Next steps:

• Add to static list to do not email - temporarily till you get consent
• Connect on LinkedIn
• Follow up with a message to have a conversation if the new company is a good fit (use template)
• If appropriate followup via a call
• Decide outcome  (this will decide if we keep or remove the contact)

👨‍🔧 Shot 5: HubSpot Service Hub Feature of the Week

Automatically Open a Closed Ticket when a Customer replies

This has come up in client discussions this week - the need to automatically reopen tickets (that had been closed) if a client replies by email to that ticket)

This is actually standard functionality available from the Automation tab of a Ticket pipeline - here’s what it looks like:

 Behind the scenes HubSpot creates a Ticket workflow that does the following:

Note: this workflow is view only - you can’t edit it - because HubSpot maintains it based on the chosen settings.

🔧 Shot 6: HubSpot Workflow Feature of the Week

View Email Performance in Workflows

Workflows have a nice way to easily view the performance of all emails sent in the workflow

View the Details of a Workflow, and then scroll down on the Performance tab

You’ll see an Email trends section:

Some quick notes:

• You can switch between total numbers or % rates
• The list of emails will separate out email variations (eg if you are A/B testing emails in a workflow) and indicate if an email has been removed from the workflow A/B testing (eg if it was the losing variation)

Very handy for quickly checking the success of emails.

🔧 Shot 7: HubSpot Workflow Gotcha of the Week

Delay before branching to avoid race condition

Back ‘in the day’ we used to add a 1 minute delay to the start of most workflows. Back then we figured it was a safety step to make sure that there weren’t any conditions that required a slight lag.

A few years ago we stopped doing this - I’m not entirely sure why - since it didn’t seem like that was required any more. And why make a contact wait for a minute just to receive a Thank you email?

Turns out though (sadly) there are situations where having a delay is a good idea still - to avoid a race condition.

Some examples include:

• Using an If/Then branch that uses Form field properties that were set by the Form submission that is in the enrollment criteria
• This is because the Form submission for the contact registers right away, but the properties in the form submit might take a second of two to be updated on the contact record
• But by then the branch criteria have already been checked

Summary: we’re starting to add delays in some workflows again:

It’d be wonderful if the delay could be set in seconds (Eg 5 seconds) - currently the smallest duration delay is a minute.

🏈 Shot 8: Reporting

HubSpot Custom Report Date part versus Date Frequency

HubSpot has added a nice feature to custom reports using date fields.

You can select to show grouping by date frequency or date part.

Date frequency is what you will have been used to all along.

Consider a simple report of contacts grouped by create date.

Here’s what using Date Frequency looks like when grouping by create date month:

Zooming in on just the graph:

But there’s now a new option to group by date part (eg the day of the week, or day of month, or week, or month, or year, etc)

Here’s what Date Part looks like when grouping those same contacts by month:

And zooming in on just the graph:

In this grouping, the Jan month in the chart above is the total of all contacts created in January in any year (eg in our case it includes Jan 2013 plus Jan 2014 plus Jan 2015 etc all the way up to Jan this year)

Date Part reporting is a really useful way to look for things like seasonality trends, or outliers for particular times of the year (or month or week).

In the example above we were just using contact create date, but start to think about how you could use this for analysing deals, revenue, tickets, etc. 

📚 Shot 9: Lol of the Week

Target Account Recommendations

Something amusing I ran into when using Target Accounts this week - the recommendations HubSpot gave for me to consider as Target Accounts:

I’m going to start reaching out to this company called HubSpot…

✍️ Shot 10: Quote of the Week

 “Don't compare yourself with other people; compare yourself with who you were yesterday.”

• Jordan Peterson

🏋️ Shot 11: Training of the Week

From HubSpot Academy

HubSpot Reporting

Who is this for? Marketing, Sales & Service Professionals

Course Details: 8 lessons, 22 videos & 7 quizzes (3:21 hours) 

🏋️ Shot 12: Need help with your HubSpot Portal?

HubShots HubSpot QuickCheck

Our new HubSpot QuickCheck service has been popular with companies who are looking for a quick review of their HubSpot portal to understand:

• Are there parts of HubSpot I’m not using yet that I should be?
• Am I using best practices in the key parts of HubSpot (eg Workflows, Forms, Emails, Landing Pages, Lists, Deals, Reports)?
• Are there any ways I’m using HubSpot that are cause for concern that I need to address?
• Are my processes efficient (eg qualifying new leads, creating tickets, managing Marketing Contacts, etc)?
• My renewal is coming up - is my HubSpot subscription giving me good value?
• Should I consider upgrading my Hub or adding new Hubs into my portal (eg I’m using Marketing Hub, should I consider Service Hub)?

If you’re asking yourself any of these questions, our QuickCheck call might be ideal. Here’s the details:

• We organise a 90 minute Zoom or Teams call with you
• On the call we start by getting a brief overview of your business, your goals and how you currently use HubSpot
• We then guide you through our 50 point checklist through your portal, to gain a high level understanding of how well you are using your portal
• We provide recommendations for improvements, features to use, and processes for increasing efficiency
• Pricing is available on the site

You can view more details and book in your session here.

🧲 Shot 13: Follow Us on the Socials

Connect with HubShots here:

• HubShots YouTube channel 
• HubShots Spotify channel 
• HubShots iTunes
• HubShots Facebook group 
• HubShots Twitter 
• HubShots Twitter Show Notes
• HubShots Instagram 
• HubShots LinkedIn 
• HubShots HubSpot Coaching
• Sales and Marketing Scorecard ⇐ you should try this

Connect with Ian Jacob on LinkedIn and Craig Bailey on LinkedIn 

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 and XEN Solar.

HubShots is produced by Christopher Mottram from Podcastily.

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