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.
YES! placeholder tokens should be checked by HubSpot before allowing the user to send the email. It should render as an "empty field" if the HubSpot User doesn't manually make the change. When our rep told us about placeholder tokens, he used the terminology "templates with placeholder text won't allow the user to send without filling our the properties" - this was in fact FALSE. It says in the description of the placeholder texts when creating them "must be filled out" - well then the system should obviously check before sending!
Yes, if there was a pop up like when you move a deal over and it requires you to fill in properties, that would be helpful.
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.
Yes, when we were trained on templates, the HubSpot trainer said it wouldn't allow you to send if the placeholders hadn't been updated. Luckily we tested that before sending. Our sales team is very weary about having Placeholders in the templates as they fear they'll miss one (they don't really stand out as much as they could). Would love to ensure emails can't be sent without updating the placeholders.
I guess this feature would be really helpful to avoid sending out Mails with missing infos.
During Template creation a Info note says "Placeholder tokens must be filled out before sending a template or sequence. This will make sure you've personalized your outreach" but it does only work for sequences and not for Templates.
I envision the placeholder prompt being something like if you are about to send an email with no subject line. It would be great if this worked with the Gmail extension as well.
If the placeholder token gets these updates within templates I will be absolutely thrilled.
I too would like to see this feature changed so that the email cannot be sent unless the auto generated placeholder text has been either replaced or the placeholder text manually removed. I have a dread of accidentally sending an email with that placeholder text still in it.
Hey HubSpot team, as stated above the way this currently works is of no use. We could already put some placeholder text in the template. What is needed is a way to prevent someone from sending the template email without replacing the placeholder with some value.
Whoever designed this feature didn't hit the root problem to be solved, which is to ensure the email doesn't get sent unless a value is inserted...not just highlighting the fact that there is a placeholder in the template.
Wanted to pop this again to your attention Hubspot Team. Could you please fix this asap, it really messes up our work and makes it likely that one day soon one of our sales reps will accidentally send out an email with something like [[ MISSING PLACEHOLDER - DATE AND TIME ]] in the middle of the email.
Totally agree. The current situation with just putting "MISSING PLACEHOLDER" is not ideal, even if you are inside HubSpot and try to send the mail from there.
This needs to be implemented! Salesforce does this and it is a huge help. I have Clients looking to switch over but this might be a deal breaker for them.
We just switched from Salesforce and found out about this during the implementation - I wish we had seen it during our comparison of both solutions. This is a big issue for us, and I assume many organizations operate with global teams with simial customer service situations. I know this ticket has been open for almost three years, but at what point will this be addressed? In the meantime, does anyone have a 3rd part solution that solves this? I feel like I am going backward with another solution, but it is what it is.
Hubspot, please work on this! The placeholder function is great, but almost useless without the system vetting the email for missing entries before sending. Seems like a no-brianer!
