HubSpot’s February 2023 releases: The manager’s guide

Custom properties for marketing campaigns and improvements to lists highlight February’s HubSpot releases.

HubSpot is publishing more comprehensive monthly updates outside individual portals, such as the “What’s New in HubSpot’s Software” page, previously limited to quarterly roadmaps.

Here’s a list of the latest HubSpot updates relevant to managers:

• Marketing Campaign custom properties (beta)
• List releases: Create a random sample, clone and restore static lists and ‘has/has not completed’ filters
• Easier social media publishing and email replies on mobile (beta)
• SEO recommendations
• Filter using ‘or’ in views on index pages for all objects
• Saved task views, clearer workflow errors, resolvable comments and improved comment notifications
• Track more accurate campaign engagement by checking bot filtering status
• Colored deal tags (beta)
• Improved playbook features, survey options and ticket integrations

Marketing Campaigns now have custom properties (beta)

Keep your campaign information and assets organized and report on new types of campaign information, by creating custom properties for Marketing Campaigns. The once-limited Marketing Campaigns feature now behaves like other standard CRM objects (i.e., contacts and deals), so you can organize, filter and report on the custom campaign data most relevant to your business.

Previously, many companies used complex naming conventions as workarounds to store campaign information in the name. There was no way to report on that naming information as individual pieces of data. Watch a video about this release here.

List releases: Create a random sample, clone and restore static lists and ‘has/has not completed’ filters

If you are running A/B tests, creating personalized actions for a specific active or static list, or choosing contest winners randomly, the new beta release to create a random sample from any list will eliminate the previous workarounds and potential errors from exporting and importing spreadsheets. This new feature allows you to choose a percentage or a count of list members who will be added to a new static list.

You can restore accidentally deleted lists for up to 90 days using the new ‘Recently Deleted’ tab. If you need to filter a static list differently or turn it into an active one, you can now clone it and make those changes. Previously, only active lists allowed cloning. Watch a video about these two releases.

There’s also a new list filter for reporting who has or has not completed a Marketing Event, Media Interaction, or Custom Behavioral Event. The previous ‘is known’ filter for these events was not clearly understood, and it was difficult to segment contacts who had not completed the event.

Using the new HubSpot mobile app features, your team will be better equipped to create and correct social media posts on the go. They include mentioning pages for greater visibility, previewing the link image or choosing the site preview in the post for greater relevance and dynamic hashtags to check correctness while editing the post. In-app editing features also now include changing text, attachments, mentions and link previews.

Encourage greater adoption and data collection by using the new beta release to send and reply to emails within the mobile app. This ensures the emails are timely, tracked and all team members on all devices can see the latest conversation and context for the record.

Dig deeper: HubSpot debuts ChatSpot generative AI tool

New SEO recommendations

Your website can get more traffic by using several new SEO recommendation tools. These tools scan websites for broken external links your team needs to fix, verify pages are working properly and confirm which pages are correctly blocked from search engines. Learn more here.

Filter using ‘or’ in views on index pages for all objects

Find relevant information across multiple properties faster and create views in real-time, using the new ‘or’ filtering on the main index page for CRM objects such as contacts, companies and deals.

Previously the workaround was to create lists using the “or” filter, which required more steps, took additional time to load and cluttered the Lists area with unnecessary items.

You can more easily monitor specific team members’ tasks or important types of tasks by using the new release to create and pin saved views of tasks, limiting the information to what is most relevant to your needs.

The “workflows with errors” tab has been renamed “at-risk workflows.” That should alleviate some anxiety since items appearing on that tab may not have been true errors or were errors that had been resolved. Admins can now prioritize and ignore risks that are not relevant.

Quickly check if you’ve responded to your team’s comments and see if they are getting the answers they need using the new resolvable comments beta feature in the collaboration sidebar. Encourage your team to resolve the comments incorporated into their work to make finding any unresolved comments that still need to be addressed easier.

See more comment detail and context without logging into HubSpot, thanks to the improved email notifications for comments, including a new subject line format for threading comments in the inbox.

Previously, your inbox may have been overloaded with notifications requiring multiple steps to see important context before responding.

Track more accurate campaign engagement by checking bot filtering status

Determine whether your email engagement metrics are accurate or if they are being inflated by bots by checking the email post-send page for the new status indicator Bot Filtering setting.

If you recently switched to HubSpot and your email engagement metrics are different than in past systems, try toggling this switch on or off to see if bots were the reason your previous system’s engagement numbers were higher.

Help your teams prioritize the full or constantly changing deal pipeline boards using the new beta for colored deal tags. Your super admin can create up to 10 deal tags based on a set of conditions, such as deals with a value greater than a certain amount. When the conditions are met, the colored tag automatically appears on the deal in the board view. The board can also be sorted and filtered by the deal tags.

Gather and report on customer feedback more easily with improved playbook features, survey options and ticket integrations

Collect more customer information, guide team members through calls more efficiently and keep your team focused on the customer during calls by using Sales Playbooks inside the HubSpot App for Zoom meetings.

This feature allows your team to use any HubSpot playbook, track and log data on records, search and view existing contacts and associate a playbook with a specific HubSpot contact record, all within the Zoom call without switching tabs or windows. See the feature in action in this video.

Customer service reps can lead consistent calls and collect more reportable information using the Customer Onboarding playbook during their first call with a new customer, a critical point in the relationship to make a good first impression.

The new Business Review playbook can assist with regular customer check-ins, gathering data from the same customer over time and also to compare customers and discover any signals for positive or negative trends.

It’s now easier to report on customer ratings in custom surveys to gauge customer sentiment now that the survey rating is a “number” type, which supports calculating average ratings over time or across customers. The update applies to new ratings, not historical info not saved in this “number” format. Standard surveys such as CSAT already had this ability.

If your company uses Salesforce cases to collect customer questions or feedback, you can now send and one-way sync those cases into HubSpot tickets for greater visibility of customer feedback across teams using different tools (in beta).

Teams using Hubspot can now see if existing contacts have opened a case in Salesforce, giving all team members more visibility into customer communication and support. Previously, cases had to be synced into custom objects in HubSpot, which are only available for Enterprise users and have fewer reporting and segmentation features than native Tickets.