Your New Experience in Marketing Free & Starter

[Shay]

Users of Marketing Free and Starter, welcome home. We are very excited to announce a few new additions to your account which we hope will give your marketing strategy an extra boost. Today, you’ll find a brand new dashboard and reporting experience inside HubSpot, a more robust contacts application, and a brand new form submission email notification.

New dashboard
In the dashboard you’ll find all your usual reports, but more flexibility when it comes to your data. You can now adjust the date range for your reports to preset ranges, or completely customize the time ranges.

In addition, you can now export all the data on your dashboard on an individual basis or as a recurring send to your team. Use this data to track your progress, or demonstrate the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. 

Prefer to catch a glimpse of your recently returning contacts first thing when you log in? You can drag your reports around and add them in the order and size that suits you and your business.

New submission notification email

We know that it’s important to get back to a lead as soon as possible, that’s why you’ll find a brand new email notification for all form submissions in your account. This email doesn’t just have a new design, but also a brand new sending infrastructure ensuring that you get notified of submissions immediately.

New contacts

Have you ever wanted to filter your contacts database? Attach quotes or other files to the record? Add notes? Edit contact properties or even create new ones? All are now possible with the brand new contacts application inside HubSpot Marketing Free. Bringing the power of HubSpot CRM directly to your account, you can now:

• Import contacts directly to your account
• Filter to find specific contacts based on all the information available on their record
• Attach relevant files to each contact record
• Add a note to the timeline of a contact
• Add and edit contact properties on each contact
• Merge duplicate contacts together to keep your database clean

Looking to take advantage of the full power of HubSpot CRM, with Deals, Companies, and Tasks? Click ‘Create a deal’ or ‘Add a company’ in the sidebar of any contact record and you can activate the full HubSpot CRM in your HubSpot Marketing account.

We’re excited to get these updates in your hands to take advantage of the newest features and get the most out of HubSpot. If you have any questions or feedback, please let us know below. ~Shay

[mkersgard]

My Account has 2 profiles, one for sales and the other for marketing

I am very new to this, so I would not be surprised if I accidentally created 2 accounts.

So...

Is if safe to delete one?  

AND How do I add clients to this?

 I am confident the forms can be an upsell, immediately for 2 of my clients

[roisinkirby]

Hey @mkersgard, I have answered your query here 🙂

[decli]

Dear Shay,

  I agree with everyone on the topic to revert to the former email format.  The submissions are also sent to my client who does not have access to my hubspot account. My client would analyze each visitors path to make the site more useful.  The new emails are essentially worthless to him.  

I also particularly agree with Mr. Cavanaugh's statement, "You have to remember what you've done to customers so far. This was a product called LeadIn that used to 1) be actually usable inside of Wordpress (which you have removed), 2) have the ENTIRE history of the contact (which you have now limited to one week I believe), and 3) send useful emails upon receipt of a form. This product has basically been stripped of everything useful about it that attracted your original users."  

Shay, I was in the room at Inbound 2015 when I watched you unveil the new Leadin product in which Dharmesh had challenged your small team to come up with a free lead tool. You were so excited!  The product was great, and I shared it with many colleagues. I could ask questions right within the WP app. But overtime it has changed so much that the original product is unrecognizable.  Perhaps this was the "big picture" all along.  If so, I feel misled.   DeAnne

ps. So I login to Hubspot and look at a contact to see the new info.... and then I see, "You only have 7 days remaining in your 7-day access to website activity details for this contact. To maintain access to pageview data, upgrade to HubSpot Marketing Starter now."  

Monthly Plan $50/month

Unlimited Contact Insights. Custom Lead Flow fields. No HubSpot Branding.

 This makes me sad. I work with small businesses, they will never be able to afford $600 a year.  😞

[Shay]

Hi @abrown, @leelanau, @livergenex, @toddcavanaugh, @dvpruitt, @nurango, @gregoryNSR thank you all for your comments here, we definitely agree and it's something that we're looking to reintroduce back into the newer email notification, however we're looking into a way that will scale with our users and will be as reliable as we need it to be. 

I added a bit of context on the changes to the email notification in a comment earlier, which should help shine a little light on the reason behind the update, here: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Conversion-Tools/Your-New-Experience-in-Marketing-Free-amp-Starter/... 

We hope you agree that the key importance here is that you are notified for every single lead and that info in the email is always the most accurate info. We can guarantee this with the newest email, but the older one had a series of problems that would have meant that it would take some time to get the notification to you, or would not have made it to you at all, and it's for this reason that we moved to the more reliable email system.

It sounds like the big wins from the previous version were the pages visited previously to converting and the traffic source. We're identifying ways to re-introuce this data, and still ensure that the email always makes it to your inbox for every lead, and right after that lead converts.

If there's anything besides this that you might find useful in these notifications, we'd definitely love to know more. Feel free to reply here or DM me with any feedback you have. Thanks!

[tedium]

Hi @Shay, I appreciate the additional context, that makes sense—though I think you should have polled your users before taking this step. You might have found that you prioritized the wrong thing in solving this problem. The email coming in a couple hours late is less of a problem for me as a user than it might be for other user bases. I get that it didn't scale but these changes really do come at the cost of a lot of usability. Were users asked about this beforehand?

The other point I would bring up regarding this is that the emails you now send now bundle in Gmail, which makes them harder to track. It was much more useful to have them come in separately as it offered a degree of error checking by letting me know if an individual user was flooding my inbox. It seems like the easy solution to that problem would be to add the email address back into the subject line, as was done previously. Can this be added back in?

[abrown]

Hi @Shay

Thanks for the response. I understand the need to scale, and appreciate that HubSpot is taking the time/resources necessary to make this possible and that information provided is accurate. For us, that source drilldown url is vital information, and right now, the contact info provided in the HubSpot database is not sufficient. For instance, now we only see that a traffic source is Paid Search, and the campaign name, whereas before, with our source url we would see the campaign, keyword, whether it was accessed via tablet, mobile, computer, etc.--all valuable information to us, that was available at a glance by skimming an email. You mention you are looking at bringing this back--is there a time frame? 

[Habersham]

Congratulations guys! You just rendered your service useless with the new email notifications! AND your changes disabled all established filters to route the form submission notification emails. Whoever made this call needs to be made to read all of the fallout in comments - terrible move, HubSpot!

[Gail]

No wonder I haven't been able to find the information necessary to continue creating a page with a complicated drop down in the form.  The form was started over a month ago, and since taking over I've been nothing but frustrated!

[Shay]

Hi @Habersham, thanks for taking the time to get back to me here. I've added some context into the the reasoning behind these changes here: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Conversion-Tools/Your-New-Experience-in-Marketing-Free-amp-Starter/..., which should hopefully shine a little light on the importance of these updates. We do agree that the information available in these older emails was valuable, however in a lot of circumstances this information may have been either out of date, delayed or even may not have made it to your inbox. The above link explains a little more. 

This new email is built on top of a far more reliable and scalable infrastructure and actually now allows us to provide a lot more value and ensure the reliability we strive for. We're looking into our options to re-introduce similar information back into the email, however since we're now able to offer a more scalable and reliable email there's potentially much more we could do. Is there anything beyond what was previously available that you and your team would find useful in the notifications? Any feedback you can provide is very helpful as we look to make these improvements.

Regarding the information itself, this post should help shine some light on where you can find this info, and more, with this new record. If there is anything I can clarify, or if you had any follow up questions, please do let me know. 

Best,

Shay

EDIT: One thing I wanted to follow up with was a quick heads up that we're actually working on an update for the tools themselves right now that will make it possible to chose on a per-form basis where the notifications are sent to, offering the ability to route leads to specific members of your team directly from within the tool itself. This should help ensure that the notifications are always going to the most relevent team members, and offer that ability without the need for filters in the inbox.

[gregoryNSR]

Hi,

I just wanted to agree with everyone else here. The notification emails are worse in every way.

I've been using Hubspot for only a few days. I was initially enthused about the interesting info in the emails, now they are no better than any standard contact form notification. I'm pretty puzzled by the decision.

[nurango]

Echo everyone else. As we all get email subs anyway from ur website, that second HS email was only great due to the user path exposure.

Please bring it back :S

[dvpruitt]

Don't like this at all.  Former version provided all information right within email all on one page.  All I had to do is forward email to my agents for follow up which had all of the lead's search history right there.  Now, either I and/or my agents have to perform additional clicks to get to the same information.

[toddcavanaugh]

I feel like I'm just beating a dead horse, but I agree with all of the comments here. The new emails are prettier but basically worse in every way.

The whole usefulness of the emails was:

1. Seeing the originial source/referrer of the form. This provided a quick snapshot as to what lead gen methods are working, if the lead cost money or was organic, etc.
2. The history of the lead! Why in the world would you remove that from the email? This made it immediately clear how hot the lead was, what they were interested in, etc.

I don't want an extra 2-minute step of having to click into a CRM before responding. Terrible changes, please revert back to old style.

You have to remember what you've done to customers so far. This was a product called LeadIn that used to 1) be actually usable inside of Wordpress (which you have removed), 2) have the ENTIRE history of the contact (which you have now limited to one week I believe), and 3) send useful emails upon receipt of a form. This product has basically been stripped of everything useful about it that attracted your original users.

LeadIn was a phenomenal product. It was so helpful to the tens of millions of Wordpress sites that were looking for simple lead tracking. Whatever this has morphed into is disappointing, and I guarantee a better solution will come around unless you remember why people liked your product in the first place.

[tedium]

Hey there, I appreciate the upgrades to the tool, but the old emails had some signifiant advantages over the new ones. Among them:

- The old emails bundled based on individual user, rather than by type of message. This came in handy because it told me if there were any issues with the form that were causing problems for my end users. If a user had trouble with the form, I could quickly add them manually if I so chose, for example.

- The emails no longer tell me *where* a user came from, and it requires digging to figure this out on the website as well. In terms of my CRM needs, the MOST IMPORTANT THING to me is knowing what is drawing in new subscribers to my email newsletter. Now, this is no longer clear. If a link to my website is going viral, I could immediately tell this by the emails I was getting previously. I can no longer do that with this.

- There's too much of a focus on CRM with the new updates. I signed up for this service to help me gain a better understanding of my email subscribers, and I feel that the updated product moves away from that. CRM is great, but not every use case of this tool is based around trying to communicate with individual users. I personally use it as a funnel to my email marketing tool: I'm getting people to sign up to a newsletter that I send out twice weekly, and I want a better understanding of how they sign up. This takes away from that use case.

[cristianethiel]

Thank you for the innovations.

But you have to correct the email sender it is set "noreply"...

It used to be Leadin and then Husbpot.

[klaas]

Hello Shay,

I really liked the old emails, since they showed directly which pages a visitor viewed before converting. They also gave me valuable insights on where things went wrong. 

I really miss that information in the current emails. I know this information can be found under "contacts", but ... is there a way to configure my emails back to the way they were? 

Thank you very much in advance,

Klaas

[Shay]

Hi @klaas, thanks for your message here, apologies for my time to reply, I've been without reliable travelling these past could days.

We also liked these emails, however there were a few important reasons for the move to the standard HubSpot Forms notification email which should help shine some light on it. 

The page view timeline in the legacy email used by lead flows and collected forms was built some time ago and as the our user base for the tools expanded, the email and it's corresponding infrastructure did not scale successfully with it. Our goal with these emails is to make sure that you are notified about all new leads on your site the moment they convert so that you can reach out and start a relationship with them while they're still engaged and looking for help. Due to the nature of this older email, best case scenario the email would take 2 minutes to generate and send to you, but in more cases it would take at least 20 minutes to send, and in some cases fail to send completely. This was not ok as we wanted to be sure that you were notified of every single lead that you got, and any failures meant you did not get notified of that lead. 

On top of this, the data itself wasn't always as accurate as it should have been as the traffic source information can take some time to fully process after a conversion had occurred, and the email may not have included the most up to date source information. 

These reasons were what drove the decision to move to the more up to date email infrastructure used by the HubSpot Forms tool, found in other tiers of HubSpot Marketing. This new email has a far more robust sending process and you should find the notification in your inbox instantly after the conversion occurs, ensuring you can strike while the iron is hot, so to say. In saying that, we are indeed looking into ways to build upon this newer email and bring back some of the older data found in our legacy email, including the traffic source and pages visited. It sounds like this info did provide value, and if there was anything else in there that you found useful, please do let me know and we can look to incorporate it into this newer email too. 

I hope this helps shine some light on the changes. If there is anything I can clarify or if you have any follow up questions please do let me know.

[nurango]

Thanks for the official explination.

I was also really using the last click data for website analytics and to help me know exactly which CTA button was clicked, as each of our CTAs had a different utm code.

Now I can only turn to google analytics which tells me someone clicked the top fold, but I have no idea who it was..Please at least include this in the account history along with the users flow 😞

[klaas]

Hello @Shay,

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I now understand the underlying reason for taking this direction, thank you for clarifying that. 

Additional uses I found for the old emails, apart from the ones already mentioned:

- I very much liked the fact that the old emails showed insight into all form submission attempts, even when unsuccessful. Seeing the information my visitors would fill in, even when running into an error message, helped me finetuning my forms' settings as well as the error messages. 

Furthermore, I caught many submissions that didn't get past the first error message - leads that would otherwise be lost entirely.

Nowadays, I use this information to filter out form submissions from other countries, that aren't served by my branch. 

- A use of the traffic source mention would be to immediately see whether a campaign was catching on or not. I don't always have the time to monitor my Google Analytics situation, but I can often find the time to skim an email. 

- Knowing which path a visitor walked across the website gave me an insight in what they actually wanted from us, even when they didn't fill in much of a message. 

At any rate, thank you very much for taking these points into consideration.

Keep up the good work! 

Klaas

[livergenex]

I 100% agree with this. Having the source and page history within the email is what made LeadIn the top plugin that is now.