HubSpot 3 Launches Today at Inbound 2012

HubSpot 3 Launches at Inbound 2012

As a HubSpot VAR, we have been refreshed by the HubSpot team’s open and transparent approach to educating the channel ahead of market launch of new HubSpot features and capabilities.

In preparation the HubSpot 3 Launch which officially happened today from 9-10:30 during the Inbound 2012 Conference Keynote presented by Brian Halligan, HubSpot CEO & Co-founder, and Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot CTO & Co-founder, the HubSpot Channel Partner and Product Management organization provided detailed demos with screen shots to the HubSpot partners. This gave us HubSpot VARs ample time to craft blog posts to inform and educate the market about all the exciting features that are redefining the HubSpot platform. Though us vars have been walking around for a few weeks like the cat that swallowed the canary, its now finally time to let the cat out of the bag.

As I once said in the largest, most important software demo of my life, one that contributed to closing a $200M+ software deal in South Africa, “it’s time to roll back the covers and look under the hood.” Nothing like mixing metaphors!

HubSpot 3 Keynote Presentation co-founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah

For those Internet marketers that missed Inbound 2012, check out the following video by HubSpot co-founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah.The video length is just over 87 minutes, but if you want to fast forward to a specific HubSpot 3 keynote topic, checkout the Founders Launch HubSpot 3 During INBOUND 2012 Keynote [FULL VIDEO] posted on the HubSpot blog which includes a jump-to guide for specific sections of the full length video.

In the keynote address, Brian explains how the 20th century marketing playbook has been replaced by inbound marketing. Using Amazon.com as an example, Brian describes how great inbound marketing is a marriage of content and context to create marketing people love.

Brian announces a number of new, completely redesigned HubSpot 3 fully integrated features that make it easy for non-technical, creative marketing professionals to achieve the kind of personalized marketing (content + context) that leading Internet marketers like Amazon are infamous for.

Dharmesh explains that, like the iPhone, the magic of HubSpot 3 is not in its individual features, but in the possibilities that open up when all of its features are offered in a single, integrated tool.

Now let’s hear from the HubSpot co-founders about how HubSpot 3 and its inbound marketing approach is going to change the Internet marketing game.

HubSpot 3 Introduction by the HubSpot Team

For those that always forgo the book (and this post is a book), in favor of watching the movie, then the video from HubSpot introducing HubSpot 3 in their own words below is for you.

The video includes demonstrations of some of the key marketing enablers of the HubSpot 3 platform and what they mean to marketers who can now drive their own inbound Internet marketing campaigns indepdent of IT, integrated with the sales and their goals and systems.

HubSpot 3 – So What is New?

This new release of HubSpot 3 Marketing Automation is not minor release. In fact, some might say that with the new HubSpot 3 Contacts Database, HubSpot 3 has reinvented HubSpot from the ground up.

The following elements are new or rebuilt in the release of HubSpot 3 announce this morning at the Inbound 2012 Conference going on this week. They join blogging software, CMS, SEO tools, Marketing Analytics and other tools (including the marketplace) to make up the complete HubSpot 3 Platform:

Contacts Database: Originally released to a small audience in June, Contacts is an ever-evolving information portal on a company’s audience (Prospects, Leads and Customers). Contacts is really the brain of the new platform with lead and customer profiles automatically adapting based on changing preferences and interactions with the company.
Email: Also released to a small audience in June, the email system is closely integrated with the contacts database, workflows social media, dynamic content and a company’s CRM system. It enables greater personalization and deliverability than ever before.
Workflows: Workflows leverage the enormous amount of data in the Contacts database and a series of rules set by the marketer to create dynamically evolving segments and automate marketing actions. More than email automation, workflow enables marketers to trigger campaigns, change contact profile properties, score leads, send notifications, and sync to a CRM system based on when a lead has met a set of conditions.
Landing Pages: Landing pages have been rebuilt to be closely integrated with the Contacts database, CRM systems, email, dynamic components, and social media. Using the new landing pages marketers can build, implement, and measure a full multichannel campaign in one place. A/B Testing is built in (at the enterprise level) and the new landing page templates have responsive design to optimize for different devices and browsers. Because of Smart Forms and Smart CTAs, HubSpot’s landing pages are also among the most adaptive on the market.
Smart Forms: Smart forms adapt and minimize over time. As a company gathers contact information about a given lead, the forms remove fields that have been satisfied in past submissions, making for a better user experience.
Smart CTAs: Built off the Contacts database, HubSpot 3 enables you to show images and CTAs (Calls to Action) that adapt to reflect the interests and stored qualities of the person viewing them.
Smart Lists: Smart lists are continually evolving contact lists based on a set of criteria. Each time an individual meets the rules of a smart list, they are added. You can have an unlimited number of Smart Lists that are segmented based on the value of a contact property, being a member of a static list, or having ever filled out a specific form.
Social Media: With a new integration directly into Contacts, HubSpot Social Media now enables you to view a lead’s social activity and create dynamic segments based on your most engaged social media followers. In addition to that functionality, called “Social Contacts,” HubSpot social media now has an in-app view of all your Twitter and Facebook interactions and enables you to respond, follow or otherwise engage.
Mobile App: Available for free in the apple store, HubSpot has added a mobile application to enable marketers to keep tabs on their lead generation and customer conversions on the go. The mobile app includes a view of Sources, Marketing Grader and Contacts.
Salesforce.com Integration: HubSpot 3 brings you an even stronger Salesforce.com connector than ever.

HubSpot 3 – The Contacts Database – More than just a Facelift

In Sales and Marketing, contacts are everything, from the initial point when a prospect lands on a website through the time that visitor becomes a lead by exchanging the contact information through the time they become a customer. HubSpot 3 has a dramatic update in its Contacts Database. This update drives almost all of the new HubSpot 3 features that you will be reading about here.

The Contacts Database was originally released in beta to a small audience of friendly users in June 2012. The Contacts Database is an ever-evolving information portal on a company’s audience (Prospects, Leads and Customers). Contacts is really the brain of the new platform with lead and customer profiles automatically adapting based on changing preferences and interactions with the company.

Let’s take a look at some aspects of the newly-released HubSpot 3 Contacts Database.

HubSpot 3 – Prospects List

For Marketers, HubSpot 3 is the interface into their contacts database. For Sales, the interface into the contact database is more likely to be a CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) such as Salesforce.com, SAP, Oracle or SugarCRM to name of few of the most popular CRM systems.

HubSpot 3 – Contacts Main Interface

The contact database becomes the database of record for Sales and Marketing, enabling marketers to segment the contacts into Smart Lists and then customize the nurturing process based on those lists.

HubSpot 3 – Smart Lists

The HubSpot 3 Smart Lists can be dynamic so as a contact progresses through their buying process, they can be marketed to in a way that is both relevant and interesting to them, ensuring that contacts never feel like “just another lead.”

The HubSpot 3 Contacts Database is a major upgrade to the heart of the HubSpot platform and has been in beta to a small audience since June 2012, Contacts is an ever-evolving information portal on a company’s audience (Prospects, Leads and Customers). Contacts is the brain of the newly announced HubSpot 3 platform with lead and customer profiles automatically adapting based on changing preferences and interactions with the company.

HubSpot 3 – Contacts Main

We can see that the Contacts main interface provides access to the standard and custom contact fields. We see that there are a number of actions on a contact that can be initiated through this interface including:

Close contact as a customer,
Add a contact to a smart list,
Archive a contact,
Search for a contact in Google
View the contact record in Salesforce.com (Salesforce.com is pre-integrated with the Professional and Enterprise editions of HubSpot 3).

HubSpot 3 – Salesforce Integration

The HubSpot 3 contact database populates contact and lead information in Salesforce.com, the primary interface for the Sales team to see what forms the contacted filled out, what information they downloaded, what webinars they attended and what tools that used, all of which help inform sales more about the interest of the potential client, just like they had been listening to them before they even had a conversion.

For marketing, the same information can be seen from HubSpot Contact History interface. In this model, the HubSpot 3 contact database is the Sales and Marketing DOR (Database of Record) and Salesforce.com is the lens that they sales team views contact and lead information.

One feature of the HubSpot Salesforce integration that sales and marketing professionals really appreciate is the ability to add contact fields in HubSpot 3 contact database and have those fields and their values flow into Salesforce.com and remain in synch with the custom fields in HubSpot.

HubSpot 3 – Smart Form Builder

The HubSpot 3 Form Builder allows marketers to add standard and custom fields to HubSpot forms by dragging and dropping those onto a form pallette, no coding required. These fields will be maintained in the HubSpot contact database and can be used to segment the contact database using the new Smart Lists.

Progressive profiling can be implemented with the Smart Forms feature. Smart forms adapt and minimize over time. As a company gathers contact information about a given lead, the forms remove fields that have been satisfied in past submissions, making for a better user experience, alleviating the need for contacts to re-enter the same information over and over again through-out their engagement on the website.

This is huge as it allows marketers to collect additional information from users by not overwhelming them with fields that do not add information to the contact record. Can you feel the ground begin to shake? That is the sound of HubSpot users cheering loud and enthusiastically!

HubSpot 3 – Contacts Interface – History Tab

The contact interface history tab also provides a contact property history, showing how the contact has progressed through their buying lifecycle. This information is used by the platform and smart lists to make sure that all email marketing all landing page content presented to those users is relevant to their interests, what they have already consumed and what stage they are at in their buying process without filling their inboxes with irrelevant junk or display offers that are no longer relevant or have already been consumed.

Additional contact information can be viewed from the contact history tab, providing a look back for contacts actions such as pages viewed when the contact was a prospect and before they ever opted in. A contact that exists in the contact database can be augmented with additional information even if a visitor to the website never opts into a form on HubSpot. For instance, imagine that you meet a contact at hugely popular, thought-leading industry event, say Inbound 2012, and you exchange cards with a prospect and receive permission from them to include them on email distributions with content that you feel they might be interested in.

As soon as you enter their information into the contact database, you can then create a smart list with all your inbound 2012 contacts and add them to a campaign targeted to those contacts. Anyone that clicks on a link in an email will be tracked in the email tab and subsequent visits to the site. This provides valuable insights by connecting the dots from one integrated interface which can be used to enter offline leads and track online actions with no opt-in form submission required. How cool is that?

The email tab of the contact interface shows past emails sent to the contact, which ones were opened, which ones the contact clicked through. Like history, this kind of information can be invaluable when nurturing leads to market qualified leads and ultimately converting those into sales-ready leads. The sales team then gets a 360° view of the contact to engage them in a context that is interesting and relevant, enabling sales to adapt to what the prospective client needs.

Importing Contacts into the HubSpot 3 Contacts Database

Contacts can be imported through CSV files to population of your HubSpot 3 Contacts Database.

HubSpot 3 – Contact Import Wizard

The import wizard makes it straightforward for Excel users to import contacts from other systems into the HubSpot 3 contact database with no programming or IT support required.

HubSpot 3 – Email Marketing, Up Close and Personal

Creating an email in HubSpot 3 is as easy as 1, 2, 3, literally. On the email manager screen, click Create a New Email.

1.) Give your email a name:

2.) Select a template from a library of HubSpot-provided templates that can be easily customized to align with your company’s logo, colors and brand identity.

HubSpot 3 – Email Templates

3.) The third step is to create the content of the landing page which includes a header which will become the landing page headline. The main body of the landing page can be edited from this interface also.

Once your email has been set up to align with corporate branding guidelines, these settings are applied to the templates. Once template has been selected and customized with company logol, now the fun part for us marketers comes in, the all important task of composing the email message. Now it’s time to get up close and personal.

HubSpot 3 – Email Compose Interface

The Email application has a Email Preview pane which updates in real time as changes are made to the email content. Contact fields can have a default value that is configured once for each field on the contact database, allowing email templates to work even when personalized fields aren’t populated for a contact.

The HubSpot 3 email overhaul is its tight integration with the Contact Database. The message can be personalized including fields in the subject line, the email body and even who the email is sent from. For instance, HubSpot 3/Salesforce integrated users, the email sent from can be configured to be from the contact owner in Salesforce.com. This field is populated on the send based on the then current ownership value in Salesforce. Any field in the contact database can be used as a personalization element within the new HubSpot 3 email application enabling marketers to talk directly to their contacts with all the up to date information from the contact. Personalized emails improve click-through rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%. (Source: Aberdeen Group).

HubSpot 3 – Email Personalization Example

For example, if company name is a personalized field that we use in the email and no value exists, a reasonable default value for company could be “your company” this way marketers can take full advantage of all information to personalize their message where possible but still have the same email work where there are gaps in a contact record that is being built up.

The goal is to have your email marketing talk to individuals. This technique build trusts and drives opens, clicks and ultimately conversions. In a study of 650 multi-channel marketing campaigns, personalized campaigns consistently and overwhelmingly beat out static campaigns in generating a high response rate from recipients. (MindFire). See a breakdown by industry.

Email Analytics

Once your email is sent, you can receive real time feedback on delivers, opens and clicks. It is pretty cool to see these numbers update as contacts open the emails and click through to the offers. This provides a near real-time email marketing dashboard to enable marketers to asses email marketing campaign impacts in a timely manner.

HubSpot 3 – Email Analytics Dashboard

HubSpot 3 users can filter by status to quickly view which contacts have received the email, which ones have opened the email and perhaps most interesting, which contacts have clicked through to the offer.

HubSpot 3 – Landing Pages and Smart CTAs

In the Beginning…

Landing page software was developed as a way to put Internet marketing and messaging control back in the hands of marketers who would be enabled to publish new and valuable information and offers without requiring the support of scarce IT resources every time they wanted to get a new page on the Internet.

HubSpot 3 – Landing Pages without IT

The challenge today is that landing pages generally don’t go far enough to capitalize fully on the opportunity they support. So you can get a page on the Internet today, but you can’t launch a campaign from it because you have your landing page over here, your email marketing tool over there and your social media tools somewhere else. Sure, you can track basic performance metrics with online marketing analytics, you can do basic A/B testing, but integrating that data with your other marketing efforts is a huge challenge. The challenge many marketers today face is understanding how social media or a search campaign drove landing page results.

Existing Landing page tools offer multiple templates enabling marketers to quickly and easily format their landing pages as efficiently and effectively as possible, but you can’t actually personalize the design of your landing page to reflect the person that is looking at it, limiting the landing pages relevancy to individual users. What would it mean to your Internet marketing efforts and business if you could dynamically tailor your landing pages to your visitors and their Interests to make them feel as though you are speaking directly to them?

In HubSpot3, announced today at Inbound 2012, the New HubSpot Landing page challenges those limitations of existing landing page software taking landing pages to the next level with dynamic, adaptive content.

Landing pages have been rebuilt to be closely integrated with the Contacts Database, CRM systems, email, dynamic components, and social media. Using the new landing pages marketers can build, implement, and measure a full multichannel campaign in one place. A/B Testing is built in (at the enterprise subscription level) and the new landing page templates have responsive design to optimize for different devices and browsers. Because of Smart Forms and Smart CTAs, the HubSpot 3 landing pages are also among the most adaptive on the market.

All of the landing pages are accessible through the HubSpot 3 Landing Page dashboard. The green dot in the left column indicates that a landing page is currently live. Key performance statistics are tracked and viewable here by landing page, including:

Number of views,
Number of submissions (i.e. conversions),
Conversion rates,
Number of new leads,
New lead rate and
Date of landing page was last update.

HubSpot 3 – Landing Page Dashboard

Here is the interface to define a new landing page even a marketer with absolutely no coding skills could build.

1.) The first step is to name your landing page.

2.) The second step is to select a template. On the right hand side of the Interface is the Landing Page Preview pane which updates as the landing page is constructed to give you an updated view of progress.

HubSpot 3 – Create a New Landing Page

Now its time to edit the Landing Page Content.

HubSpot 3 – Create Landing Page Content

An A/B Test can be defined directly from the landing page which marketers who constantly test different landing pages will appreciate the convenience of the Create A/B Test Feature.

The results of the A/B Test can be can be viewed in the variations tab on the landing page details interface. In the example below, we can see the total number of submissions compared got two variations of the landing page.

HubSpot 3 – Results of A/B Testing

Next we can take a look at the landing page performance tab to see which traffic sources provided the most visits, leads and lead to customer conversions and total number of customers.

HubSpot 3 – Landing Page Performance by Traffic Source

As you can see, HubSpot 3 has a number of new landing page creation, testing, and reporting capabilities to enable marketers to create, test and fail quickly for continuous landing page performance enhancement.

Smart CTA Rules (available at the professional level)

Smart CTAs are built off the HubSpot 3 Contacts Database. Smart CTAs enables marketers to show images and CTAs that adapt to reflect the interests and stored qualities of the person viewing them.

Imagine if your marketing resources could construct dynamic landing pages that adapt to display different calls to action based on the stage of the sales process that a visitor (contact) is in (i.e. lead, marketing qualified, default).

Here is what Smart CTA Rules definition looks like in the HubSpot3 interface.

In the example above a new visitor, which would trigger the default CTA rule and would be presented the Free Ebook: Optimizing Email Marketing for Conversions on the landing page. This allows landing pages to present new visitors (i.e. prospects) with a relevant, top of the funnel offer.

Leads are former prospects who have opted-in on a prior visit and are now in the HubSpot3 contact database. These visitors would trigger the Free Inbound Marketing Assessment CTA for the lead CTA. This rule allows the landing page to present returning visitors (leads) with a middle of the funnel offer.

Market Qualified Leads who have progress through the sales funnel visitors would trigger the Contact a HubSpot Salesperson CTA for the Market Qualified Lead CTA. This rule allows the landing page to present returning visitors (market qualified leads) with a bottom of the funnel offer.

While this capability is impressive enough to us marketers, users won’t even realize that the relevancy was by design which is they beauty. The Smart CTA functionality can also be used in emails to display Smart CTAs the same way that they are used in Landing Pages.

What, Enterprise Marketers Need More Relevancy You Say?

That’s OK because HubSpot3 has got you covered there too. In fact, with dynamic landing pages for Enterprise subscribers, marketers will be able to tailor content beyond which stage a visitor happens to be and can create content based on fields in the customer contact database. For global enterprises severing multiple industries, HubSpot3 enables those enterprises to build one landing page that can serve each contact in a way that is relevant to them.

We can see in the HubSpot3 interface the link to Add a Smart CTA Rule which could be triggered for existing customers who might be shown offers for upgrade to features or discounts available for prepaying application subscriptions.

In order to personalize the landing page by industry, we could use a Smart CTA Rule along wit the Smart List feature to display a relevant industry-specific image based on the industry-specific lists that can be defined.

In the example below in the New Call To Action screen, we apply smart CTA rules based on identifying a visitor as a contact in the manufacturing contacts list, a contact in the healthcare contacts list and everybody else. The everybody else would be presented a default CTA to be since they are not a member of either the manufacturing contacts or healthcare contacts Smart Lists.

HubSpot 3 – Smart CTA Rules – Industry Segmentation Example

In the preceding example, industry was a Contact Database field that was used to build 2 Smart Lists and Smart CTA that can be tailored to visitors based industry there in. One could easily imagine that one could build landing pages that target different users by title. How much value would it be to tailor landing pages based on whether a visitor was an Operations, Finance, Marketing or Sales executive? Each group has their own interests, needs and perspectives. The value of HubSpot3 dynamic landing pages lets marketers build landing pages that speak to visitors and what they are interested in, in a way that is both scalable and efficient, enabling marketers to take full advantage of the opportunity to convert more website visitors to leads and ultimately to customers.

So What? Personalized emails improve click-through rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%. (Source: Aberdeen Group). It’s not too much of a stretch to extend the Aberdeen Group findings to dynamic, adaptive landing pages presenting CTAs that are most relevant based on where the visitor is in their buying process and what industry they are from.

These are just two dimensions for application of Smart CTA rules. Marketers will no doubt dream up countless ways to segment and personalize. That could be why in a study of 650 multi-channel marketing campaigns, personalized campaigns consistently and overwhelmingly beat out static campaigns in generating a high response rate from recipients. (MindFire). See a breakdown by industry.

HubSpot 3 Workflows

HubSpot 3 Workflows leverage the enormous amount of data in the Contacts Database and a series of rules set by the marketer to create dynamically evolving segments (Smart Lists) and automate marketing actions (Workflows).

More than email automation, workflows enable marketers to trigger campaigns, change contact profile properties, score leads, send notifications, and sync to a CRM system based on when a contact/lead has met a set of conditions.

The workflows are design to enable marketers to respond to contacts’ behavior with a series of marketing actions. Each workflow will have a starting condition that once met, will trigger the execution of the workflow. Note that the first action can be configured to start after a defined amount of time after the starting condition is satisfied.

Here is what it might look like to define a process titled Convert to Marketing Qualified Lead in the workflows interface.

HubSpot 3 – Workflows Definition Example – Convert to Market Qualified Lead

In this example, we want to trigger an action immediately after the workflow starting condition is satisfied.

The first each workflow step, when being defined, includes the options to send email, take an action on a list or modify a contact.

In the next example, a workflow titled Sales Qualify Email Sequence is being defined where the workflow step 1 will begin 3 days after the starting condition is satisfied.

HubSpot 3 – Workflows Definition Example – Sales Qualify Email Sequence

The goal of this workflow is to define a sequence of automated emails, beginning with the initial message being sent out with 3 days after the starting condition has been satisfied, with subsequent nurturing emails sent in succession separated by 3 days each. Workflows are used to automate different parts of the sales process, in this case, to qualify the contact.

HubSpot 3 Workflows Demo

Checkout this 2 minute demo of HubSpot 3 Workflows:

Social Media Integration into Contacts Database

Social Media: With a new integration directly into Contacts, HubSpot Social Media now enables you to view a contacts social media information and activity. In the example below, Tim has 2 twitter clicks that resulted in a visit to the HubSpot website.

HubSpot 3 – Social Media Information from the Contacts Database

In addition to that functionality, called “Social Contacts,” HubSpot social media now has an in-app view of all your Twitter and Facebook interactions and enables you to respond, follow or otherwise engage.

HubSpot 3 – Social Interactions – twitter example

As you can see, a HubSpot 3 users can respond to replay to a retweet or follow a user right from the application, while being able to view the message (tweet in this case) details within the same interface.

Segmenting Social Users with Smart Lists

HubSpot 3 enables users to organize and segment contacts through creating smart lists. In the example below, a list is being defined based on the most recently engaged followers, for example, users that have clicked at least once on a tweet that linked to the HubSpot website and clicked after 07/01/2012.

HubSpot 3 – Using Smart Lists to Segment Engaged Contacts

Another Smart List could be defined to segment your most engaged contacts as Social Media Influencers. In the example below, we define the Social Media Influencers list based on segmenting all contacts that have at least 2500 twitter followers, have clicked through to the HubSpot website from at least on tweet and have a click more recent than 06/01/2012.

As contact information and social media activity change over time, so does the list makeup based on the lasted contact information in the contact database, which is what makes these smart lists and their composition dynamic over time.

HubSpot 3 – Using Smart Lists to Segment Social Media Influencer Contacts

Now that the cat’s out of the bag and this post has darn near grown intoan ebook. Those of you reading to this point have demonstrate interest in learning more about HubSpot 3 (to say the least) and how it can take your sales and marketing program to the next level. Why not contact eBiz ROI today for you Internet Marketing Assessment to find out how HubSpot 3 can help you use inbound marketing to grow your business while maximizing your marketing ROI.

Want to learn more about how HubSpot 3 can propell you past the competition, then request your free, no obligation Internet marketing assement. Your only regret will be not to have requested one sooner.