HubSpot Ideas

chelocean

"Fill in the blank" / placeholder areas for templates

I'm watching the HubSpot Academy course on the Sales CRM, and it mentions using Tokens as well as fill in the blank sections as best practice for Templates.

 

It would be amazing if "Fill in the blank" sections could literally be input into emails, similar to a token, triggering us to enter custom fill in the blank topics, but HubSpot would not let you send an email until they had been deleted or filled, making sure that if your template says WRITE SOMETHING PERSONAL HERE you don't accidently send it out of habit.

 

Possible? Maybe!

HubSpot Updates
Delivered
April 27, 2020 02:53 PM

In Beta
January 09, 2020 05:59 AM

Hi Community!


I'm happy to let you all know that we are in development of custom "placeholder" tokens! We will roll this out to customers in the coming weeks! 

 

- Glen

17 Replies
JasonRosa
HubSpot Employee

Create the ability to add placeholders in sales templates. The idea would be to add a placeholder field like you would a personalization token and when actually using that email later on, you could just use the tab key to fill in each of the fields. 

22Eighteen
Contributor

Absolutely. I did this myself when I first started using the tool.  It’s quite embarrassing. It could be a personalization token that remains empty until the template is used, or simply a set of characters (not just square brackets) that tells the system to pop up a message when they are still in an email someone is trying to send. 

 

I certainly don't want to tell anyone at HubSpot how to add/program this functionality, but it's one that will eliminate and glaring user error issue.  Especially, since their own training promotes using plain text reminders to customize the email.

 

People WILL forget, or if users are not the creators of the template will overlook, these fields resulting in emails that recipients will know are templates which totally defeats the purpose.

jamesburnes
Member

Agreed. A generic "Fill in the blank" field for templates would be highly valuable. It fills silly creating a "Fill in the blank" company field so we have a token to use. *We did it, reluctantly.

ndwilliams3
Key Advisor

Just ran across this issue. It is really easy for a sales rep to overlook a placeholder. I agree, we need a way to highlight placeholders, so they aren't overlooked. I tried changing the text color to red. However, I then got calls from the team asking how to change the color! My plan didn't quite work out.

 

stoven91
Member

I'd also like to bump this up. Having a field that you need to fill in would be great way to remind myself of a way to personalize emails. 


Did anyone find a solution to this?

abbiandrews
Member

When you're composing new templates, I'd like there to be there a way of inserting a token that isn't associated with a field in hubspot- i.e. some free text instead?

 

This is a feature on Yesware if that's helpful?

joeolsenmm
Participant

Ok, so can't believe this is still lingering.. But it sounds like the hack right now is to add a company field called "fill in the blank" or similar and use that?

glencornell
HubSpot Product Team

Hi Community!


I'm happy to let you all know that we are in development of custom "placeholder" tokens! We will roll this out to customers in the coming weeks! 

 

- Glen

22Eighteen
Contributor

FANTASTIC!!!!  I can't wait to see it in action.

abbiandrews
Member

EXCELLENT!

ndwilliams3
Key Advisor

Awesome!

RyanArriba
Member

Awesome. We really needed this feature and missed it from Yesware. Is there a way to get notified when it rolls out?

glencornell
HubSpot Product Team
 
Namola
Member

I'd also to be kept up to date if possible. It would be amazing if a pop-up appeared to say 'a placeholder is missing information - fill it in now' and it provided a box, and even moreso if an automated email from a workflow created a pop-up task for the user to fill in the details and then it auto-sends.

 

Will be following closely.

calliehardin
Participant

This was delivered, but could use some improvements for it to be functional. It would be nice if there was a pop up like when you move a deal over and it requires you to fill in placeholder properties before it will let an email be sent

 

Also, the sequences function would be more helpful if you could bulk update the placeholder text for all of your users. Such as adding in a specific holiday or event name.

benzil
Top Contributor

Yes, the functionality for sequences is great;

 

it reminds you to fill in the placeholders, 

 

it would be good for this same functionality to be in place for templates, outside the use of sequences too - but in templates outside the context of sequences this functionality doesn't exist for some reason?

Peque
Contributor

@glencornellIt seems like the implementation missed the "would not let you send an email until they had been deleted or filled" part of the requested feature here. Do you have any plans on implementing that?

Related:

https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Improvement-to-placeholder-tokens-in-Email-templates/...

https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Make-Custom-Placeholders-work-in-standard-emails-via-...