HubSpot closed out 2017 with a bevy of product updates that can slingshot your 2018 marketing, sales, and customer loyalty efforts.
What’s more, they further establish HubSpot as THE leading SMB marketing automation and CRM platform. These 6 updates should get your marketing machine humming at a higher gear.
Update #1: Customer Hub
Customer Hub is a new addition to HubSpot CRM. It aligns customer teams with sales and marketing teams to create a truly seamless customer experience. Now every handoff—from marketing to sales to the customer team—is smooth and no moment of engagement ever falls through the cracks. (As HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah puts it, “not only will the left hand know what the right hand is doing, they can even exchange a high five at the appropriate time.”)
You can even ask customers for feedback on your products and services, so you can keep improving and building loyalty. When you consider that it costs between 5 and 7 times more to gain a new customer than to keep an existing one, the ROI opportunity in this enhancement is clear.
Update #2: Conversations
This Customer Hub feature got lots of “oohs” and “ahhs” at the INBOUND17 conference in September. Enhancing HubSpot CRM Free, Conversations wrangles all your different communication channels (Facebook Messenger, Slack, your own website chat, social media, email, and more) into a single, fluid, one-to-one stream for each customer.
Conversations routes multi-channel customer messaging into HubSpot CRM Free. This means your marketing, sales, and customer teams can see how conversations flowed in time AND quickly grasp their situational contexts (Was there an issue? Who was tasked with resolving it? Any progress?). As a result, all users are better informed.
And this should come as no surprise from a leader like HubSpot: Conversations will give brands easy-to-use chatbot-building tools. This capability will allow scaling of conversations during high-volume periods—leaving no lead hanging.
Update #3: Sales Hub Updates
HubSpot has powered up the capabilities of their Sales Professional tier, to help teams strenghthen prospect relationships. That helps more deals get closed.
HubSpots Sales Pro now does more in four critical areas of sales effectiveness:
- Sales team efficiency. Smart email templates, document tracking, and automated meeting calendars keep salespeople out of the weeds and in the hunt.
- Prospecting and lead nurturing. Predictive lead scoring helps salespeople know where to put their energy. Web chat and automated email sequences keep communications flowing, and keep leads moving to close.
- Sales team management. Technology has made sales a more sophisticated endeavor than ever before. It’s a lot to stay on top of, and Sales Pro helps managers with advanced deal and task automation tools, plus other robust team management features.
- Analysis. Custom dashboards and reporting features empower teams to quickly see what’s working and then adjust strategies and tactics accordingly.
Update #4: Content Strategy Tool
Creating content strategies may not seem like something you can automate, but HubSpot makes it happen with its new content strategy tool. Leveraging the proven “topic cluster” content development methodology, the tool suggests relevant, popular topics based on the expertise you’re already demonstrating on your site. Your strategies will not only cement your authority but also positively influence your search rankings.
Update #5: Shopify App Store
If you’re an online merchant, HubSpot’s new Shopify App Store brings remarkable power and insights to your eCommerce efforts. Through the Shopify/HubSpot native integration, users will be able to:
- Visualize online sales in HubSpot “Deals”
- Drill down into purchasing patterns
- Determine customer Lifetime Value metrics
- Automate transactional emails
- Execute abandoned cart remarketing workflows
Update #6: New Social Tools
Finally, Hubspot has launched a new integration, Facebook Ads Audience Sync. Now brands can sync their HubSpot lists to Facebook audiences, retargeting audiences on the world’s biggest social network. It’s even offered as part of the HubSpot Marketing Free suite.
And in the works at HubSpot is Instagram Reminders, which takes advantage of HubSpot’s desktop/mobile sync to allow users to draft, schedule, and deploy Instagram content. Watch for its addition to Social Tools in the HubSpot Marketing Hub.
That’s a lot to unpack. As a HubSpot Silver partner, we’re more than happy to answer your questions about these new enhancements, or just chat about what you need to accelerate your growth.
Feel free to reach out anytime—and if you’re new to marketing automation, be sure to download our ebook, The Basics of Growing Your Business with Marketing Automation.