Episode 298: Mastering HubSpot - Attribution, Form Optimization & CMS Enterprise Secrets

Welcome to HubShots Episode 298:  Mastering HubSpot - Attribution, Form Optimization & CMS Enterprise Secrets

This edition we dive into:

• Be Proactive, Be Honest
• Where does Attribution sit in your HubSpot implementation plan?
• Form performance tips
• How to log replies from Contacts into HubSpot
• Renaming Ticket Name based on Ticket Properties
• Setting the date format for blog posts (and listing)
• Saving Column layouts in Lists
• Why Upgrade to HubSpot CMS Hub Enterprise
• What is the XML Sitemap used for in HubSpot

You can watch this episode on our YouTube episodes playlist.

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Note: whenever you see a (Stage X) notification at the end of a Shot it indicates what stage of the HubShots Framework it relates to.

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Recorded: Wednesday 26 April 2023 | Published: Friday 05 May 2023

Table of Contents

• Shot 1: Growth Thoughts of the Week
• Shot 2: Quick Shots of the Week
• Shot 3: HubSpot Marketing Feature of the Week
• Shot 4: HubSpot Sales Feature of the Week
• Shot 5: HubSpot Service Feature of the Week
• Shot 6: HubSpot CMS Feature of the Week
• Shot 7: HubSpot Gotcha of the Week
• Shot 8: Insight of the Week
• Shot 9: Listener Question of the Week
• Shot 10: Thought of the Week
• Shot 11: Quote of the Week
• Shot 12: Training of the Week
• Shot 13: Download the HubShots Framework

🌱 Shot 1: Growth Thoughts of the Week

Be Proactive, be Honest

We’re in a season of tough times - running our businesses is hard, the free money is over, and our prospects (and customers) are cautious about spend. Nothing new there. And perhaps the surprising thing is that prospects aren’t always like this…

So we need to be proactive, work harder (and smarter), provide more value, and keep a level head if we’re going to survive.

Sadly though, for some people this also means bending the rules, lowering their standards and employing activities that are on the shonky side. Some justify this under the guise of ‘always be hustling’ or ‘gotta make ends meet’.

I’m all for hard work and being proactive. But I have zero tolerance for dishonesty.

A small example: Recently we’ve been getting people booking in meetings with our consultants under the guise of getting help with HubSpot, but once they are on the call we quickly realise they don’t even use HubSpot and are purely on the call to pitch and sell. The meetings usually last 2 minutes before I boot them off the call. If you’re not going to be honest in our very first interaction, why on earth would I consider buying from you?

So, here’s my call: let’s all make sure we keep our standards high. Be proactive. But always be honest.

Attribution Reporting (Stage 4)

Yes, we all want proper attribution reporting - but if we aren’t logging all the activity, any insights we get will be low value.

It is important to log activity as it not only helps with attribution but also other areas of the business, like sales support, service and marketing.

When we discuss attribution reporting with clients we guide them through the first 3 stages of the HubShots Framework first, to ensure everything is being tracked. Only then can we start to get some useful insights out of the attribution reporting in HubSpot (which is why we consider it a Stage 4 item).

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✨ Shot 2: Quick Shots of the Week

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

• Create Multiple Knowledge Bases if you use Service Enterprise (limited to 5 KBs and max of 2000 articles each - why!)
• You can now set task due date to count business days in workflows
• With the new Split Lists feature you can now take any list and easily split it (up to 10 times) into multiple sub-static lists based on a selected percentage of each if you use Marketing Enterprise
• Advanced playbook recommendations using any property in any object (including custom properties and properties in custom objects)
• Repeat a past import
• Custom properties on HubSpot campaigns
• Coloured deal tags has rolled out

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🚀 Shot 3: HubSpot Marketing Feature of the Week

Form Performance Tips (pop-ups) (Stage 2)

How can you tell if a form (eg a pop up form) is working well?

View the Performance tab for a form and check for the following key areas:

• Form conversion rate
• Contact (to determine if these are new contacts, or if they are existing contacts who have filled out another form)
• Source (to see which channels are driving the best results)

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💰 Shot 4: HubSpot Sales Feature of the Week

How to Log Replies from Contacts into HubSpot

(if the original email thread isn’t logged)

[1] New conversations from contacts to you

If sent to you personally:

- these won't get logged into HubSpot

The only way to have new conversations from contact logged, is if:

- they were sent to a Conversations > Inbox

[2] Logging contact emails

- you can reply to a contact for an email and then it will get logged (based on your logging settings)

- you can also forward conversations into HubSpot, using your forward email:

[portalid]]@forward.hubspot.com

(get this from the Settings > Activities page)

[3] Replies from contacts to emails you start

- if you send an email to a contact

- and they reply

- you can optionally have their reply also logged automatically into HubSpot

- this is available from your personal Email Automation settings:

https://app.hubspot.com/settings/[portalid]]/user-preferences/email

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👨‍🔧 Shot 5: HubSpot Service Feature of the Week

Renaming Ticket Name based on Ticket Properties

A common request from service teams is for the Ticket name to be consistent and meaningful, based on items submitted (eg by a customer).

If you are using a form to submit tickets, it’s easy to update the Ticket name based on form properties:

Note: you can only use Ticket properties (ie it won’t be able to use Contact properties from the form)

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🔥 Shot 6: CMS Hub Feature of the Week

Setting the Date format on Blog listings and posts

By default when you set up a blog you probably see date and time on blog posts eg

However, you can easily change this to just show the date (which is probably more what you wanted):

Thanks to Kevin at Helpful Hero for alerting us to this - I had totally forgotten about these settings!

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🔧 Shot 7: HubSpot Gotcha of the Week

Saving List Column Layouts is only for your browser (others don’t see it) (Stage 3)

This caught me out this week. Prepared a list for a client and added in a bunch of columns. Saved the List, ie

I then shared the list link with the client, but they didn’t see the columns I had saved into the list.

Turns out this as per design. Via the HubSpot Knowledge base, the layout is only saved for your browser - other users (or even just other devices you used) won’t see the layout.

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💡 Shot 8: Insight of the Week

Why Upgrade to HubSpot CMS Hub Enterprise?

These are the reasons we tend to find why people upgrade:

1. 1 core domain and 9 additional root domains - so basically 10 websites!
2. Custom objects, up to 10 object definitions, 500,000 records
3. Memberships
4. Web apps to build items like a calculator, event system, customer portal, learning management system (LMS).
5. Adaptive testing
6. Site performance monitoring
7. 10 addition website audiences over professional for ads bringing it to a total of 15
8. 25 additional dashboard over professional bring it to a total of 50
9. Includes the ability to use code snippets for custom Messenger bot actions
10.  25 additional filtered analytics views over professional  bringing it to a total of 50
11. 195 more calculated properties over professional  bringing it to a total of 200
12. Up to 400 custom reports than professional
13. One sandbox
14. Code alerts

So if you have more than 3 websites then upgrading to CMS Hub Enterprise should not be a big decision!

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🏈 Shot 9: Listener Question of the Week

What is the XML Sitemap used for in HubSpot? (Stage 2)

The XML Sitemap is a list of all of the pages on your site that you would like a search engine (eg Google or Bing) to include in their search results.

It is a file that is built by HubSpot (and hosted on HubSpot) that you can ‘submit’ to Google or Bing, by giving them the URL link to the file.

This is the sitemap that's purely used for indexing and crawling your website and is manually submitted (eg to Google Search Console).

You can access it from Settings > Website > Domains & URLs > Sitemap

If you are managing multiple sites in your HubSpot portal, each domain will have its own sitemap.

However, it’s important to keep the XML Sitemap ‘clean’ and remove any pages that you wouldn’t want Google to index - for example, Thank you pages (you likely don’t want them turning up in Google results).

If you see a page in the sitemap you don’t want included, simply hover over it and click the Remove button:

Recommendation: check through your sitemaps and remove and pages that you don’t want appearing in Google.

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📚 Shot 10: Thought of the Week

HubSpot Support is Still Excellent

Don’t be afraid to jump on a support chat or create an email - use the Help icon in the bottom right of your HubSpot portal

By the way, we asked Midjourney to create some images to match this Shot, here’s a few examples (see if you can spot the problems!)

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✍️ Shot 11: Quote of the Week

“Different is better than better”  

Sally Hogshead (YouTube video)

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🏋️ Shot 12: Training of the Week

Here’s a few of the AI related profiles and channels I follow:

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/icreatelife 

https://twitter.com/nickfloats 

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/@AllAboutAI 

https://www.youtube.com/@godago   

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🏋️ Shot 13: Have You Downloaded The HubShots Framework?

HubShots Framework Poster

Download a copy of the HubShots Framework A3 PDF poster (recently updated with colour coding and more).

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🧲 Shot 14: 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, XEN Create and XEN Solar.

HubShots is produced by Christopher Mottram from Podcastily.

We record using Riverside.fm (<= affiliate link)

Please share this with colleagues - it helps us improve and reach more marketers.

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