Last week was a busy week in the world of HubSpot. The annual INBOUND conference was held in Boston, Massachusetts. This conference brings marketing professionals from around the globe together to connect and develop fresh new ideas that are then brought back to their companies and implemented. Our founder, Allie, and one of our account managers, Alex, attended INBOUND last week. Upon their return, we learned some game-changing new features and updates that HubSpot has implemented. These newly added features are going to help us step up our game, really tackle clients needs, and help achieve the results their business desires.

Customer Hub

In a Harvard Business review, it notes that it can be up to 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. This means that keeping your current customers and delighting them should be a key pillar in your business model. In the inbound methodology, customer delight has always been a key factor to success. But how do we define what customer delight is? To put it simply, it is all about pleasing someone (hint: your customers). How are businesses able to delight their customers in order to keep transition them from customer to promoter? 

HubSpot has just announced that they have released a new feature called Customer Hub. This feature allows business to have better conversations, develop deeper insights, and strengthen customer relationships. Customer Hub allows your team to:

• Identify and respond to issues using sentiment analysis and churn forecasting
• Monitor customer happiness with automated customer feedback and NPS (Net Promoter Score)
• Automate customer testimonials from your most loyal and satisfied customers 
  • Help customers help themselves with a robust knowledge center

To sum it up, the Customer Hub is going to make it easier than ever for the leads reaching your sites to get nurtured all the way into loyal brand promoters. 

Sales Hub

The Sales Hub was originally launched at INBOUND 2014. The goal was to create a tool that would help businesses grow, and grow quickly. When this tool was implemented and brought to the marketplace, no one expect the uptake and enthusiasm it received. With companies' sales teams scaling up and growing they need new tools and features to help manage sustainable growth.

This year HubSpot announced a brand new tier: the HubSpot Sales Professional. This tool is an innovative step up from the original Sales Hub. This sales tool will allow businesses to grow, open better relationships, and close more deals. A few of the newly added features include:

• Smart email templates, document tracking, and automated meeting calendar functionality
• Web chat, predictive lead scoring, and automated email sequences.
• Advanced deal and task automation tools, and robust team management features
• Custom dashboard and reporting features

Conversation Tools

In the world of digital, many consumers are taking to digital platforms as the primary form of communication with a company. It is predicted that by 2020, 30% of interactions with technology will be through “conversations” with smart machines. This leads us to Conversations, a newly introduced feature to the HubSpot CRM. This tool will allow your team the ability to manage, scale and leverage one-to-one communication across site pages.

Take a look at consumer behaviour: we begin conversation in person, continue via text message, and finish it online. These conversations are fluid and portable, allowing you to move across mediums and channels, never missing a beat. A few added features to HubSpot's Conversations to make this more seasmless include:

• Multi-Channel: allowing you to unify conversations from social media, online chats, and email into one inbox
• Tied into a CRM: tying your messages into a CRM allow you to compile all context from past interactions wherever and whenever they may have taken place
• Scaleable with chatbots: enable chatbots without needing technical skill and scale responses to match high volume inquires

Social Tools

Are Facebook and Instagram a large part of your company's digital marketing strategy? If so, you’re in luck! HubSpot announced a new Facebook lead ads integration, Facebook ads audience sync, and Instagram integration. These added features give markers the tools they need to reach, engage and convert the highest valued audience for their business. Added social tools allow HubSpot users to adapt to mobile users and capitalize on the benefits of using CRM data for Facebook Ads targeting.

• Facebook Ads Audience Sync: allows HubSpot users to retarget, nurture and convert Facebook users based on HubSpot data
• Facebook Ads Integration: allows businesses to target lookalike audiences, meaning HubSpot users have the ability to target and convert new audiences that are similar to existing high-value customers
• Instagram Integration: a feature designed to allow users the ability to draft and schedule posts inside the HubSpot desktop and post into the Instagram app with ease

Ecommerce Integration

Retailers are shifting from traditional brick-and-mortar locations only. Most businesses understand that if you're selling, you need to have a digital retailer. There's been a rise in ecommerce platforms available for online retailers. Shopify is one of the most popular platforms, and HubSpot has taken notice, creating an integration between HubSpot and Shopify. This integration allows Shopify merchants to bring sales data from the store, including customers, orders, and products into their marketing software with ease. This integration of the two softwares allows business to really bring their business to the next level by providing ecommorce merchants the tools they need to build more sophisticated ecommerce strategies. A few of the revolutionary features include:

• Allow customers to see online sales in HubSpot as deals
• Organize and analyze purchase patterns
• Measure customer lifetime value

Not using Shopify as your ecommerce platform? Don’t stress. HubSpot also announced an Ecommerce Bridge framework. This package provides a streamlined and official way for developers to connect their online store to HubSpot, allowing HubSpot customer the ability to build custom integrations.

These new features are going to change the face of HubSpot and making strategies more precise to clients business goals. These features are going to allow marketers to really dive down into their client's needs and create a robust marketing strategy that will be sure to achieve results. As Niagara’s only HubSpot partner, we’re ready to harness these new features for our HubSpot clients and start achieving results!