Improvement to placeholder tokens in Email templates
The placeholder token could be a lot more useful with a small tweak,
at the moment, the placeholder token is *almost* very useful - it allows us to define custom information that the salesperson needs to amend before sending out a template, where that custom information isn't stored in a property field.
however, it still allows the salesperson to send out an email without having customised the placeholder token, which could end in poor customer experience.
At the moment, the placeholder token provides little extra added value than us defining them within the template itself. In fact, it's a little less useful, as in the template we can format it with yellow highlights around the text, which is more noticeable than the current format of the placeholder token.
what would be super useful, is if the system checked whether the placeholder tokens had been overwritten by the salesperson before allowing the email to be sent to the contact. It could even highlight the particular placeholder that the salesperson has failed to overwrite with a message that they forgot to fill it in - a bit like how users cannot complete forms without 'required fields'. This would help increase compliancy and accuracy.
HubSpot, any progress on this? We are new users and thank goodness we figured this out internally before our prospects received an [INSERT TEXT HERE] email. Looking forward to seeing this feature rise up to the standard you have set for so many other things!
We're continuing to monitor this idea. Our team and our clients are hopeful that the placeholder functionality will be improved. Even a warning prompt would be welcomed to prevent users from accidentally sending an email without overwriting the placeholder.
Agreed - it's great in Sequences because it won't allow you to send until it's updated. But in just an email, it simply shows brackets but still allows you to send it. Would love to see this updated.
I agree with all the replies, this should be added functionality to not just sequences, but when you use as a single email template. You should not able to send without addressing this PLACEHOLDER tag.
I only found out today that Placeholder's are NOT required to be filled out before sending an email which is wild to me, having always assumed it would... but no, not even a warning prompt to make you aware that you are about to send an email with an unfilled Placeholder Token.
What's especially nuts, is that this functionality is already effectively built, but only for when enrolling a Contact into a sequence with an email template that includes a Placeholder Token.
Would love to know if this is even on the roadmap or not...
Great to see that I'm not the only one eager to see this feature implemented. It's been an open request since May 2020, which is quite some time now. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like it's on the roadmap yet. Our customer service department heavily relies on automation to streamline processes, and the lack of this feature adds an additional step for us to review, inevitably slowing things down and increasing the potential for errors.
Has anyone found a workaround or a built-on solution for HubSpot that can provide the functionality we're looking for? I would much prefer to keep everything on one platform rather than juggling multiple different tools. Any suggestions or alternatives would be greatly appreciated!
Omg, we just discovered this after building hundreds of templates with Placeholders in. The training video for Sales Hub Content Tools explained that this works across email templates, and didn't specify that it was ONLY available for use on Sequences?! This is such a limitation.
Why build something and only implement it on one aspect of email sending, you should be able to select a Template from the Gmail extension and fill the placeholders in. Gmail can access the Contact data from the extension so I don't get why this isn't a thing.
ALSO, why can't this work on 1:1 emails being sent from HubSpot CRM? All the info is there to validate the tokens!
We now need to rebuild all templates, as only 1% of our emails make sense to be used in a sequence.
This is a major letdown that this is not implemented. As many have said here, placeholder tokens are useless unless they prevent a user from sending an email before filling out a placeholder.
PLEASE change this Hubspot - clearly it's an ongoing concern for the last 4 YEARS. Our reps and management teams were SO excited when I shared that the placeholders (due to the training videos I watched) would keep them from making errors in their emails of accidentally sending [Customer Name] in any email like previous employees had in the past when utilizing templates, but then to discover that wasn't true...man the disappointment within our team...
This change is vital for the correct functioning of placeholder tokens - it works perfectly (as far as I could tell) in Sequences but for normal email templates it's nearly useless; please update the functionality of this feature! It's hard to believe it has been requested for so long with no response from Hubspot about this. Would it be possible to get an update?
There isn't any point of bothering to use a PLACEHOLDER personalization token unless it has the super power of not letting you send an email until that information is filled in. This functionality exists in Sequences. It seems like a bug or a developer gap that it's not working yet for Templates.
I totally agree, this is an important function that should be implemented in the Placeholder tokens, as without this fuction, the Placeholder token is completely useless. I noticed that it has been a popular request since 2020, this would definitely be helpful please!
