HubShots Episode 137: Decentralising identity, Cancelling HubSpot, HubSpot Activity Feed and multivariate testing CTAs

Welcome to Episode 137 of HubShots!

Welcome to HubShots, APAC’s number 1 HubSpot focused podcast, where we discuss HubSpot tips and tricks, new features, and strategies for growing your marketing results.

This episode we chat about canceling HubSpot, decentralising privacy and identity and how this will affect marketing in the future. Plus we look at the Activity Feed, and multivariate testing of HubSpot CTAs.

Listen to the show here: https://soundcloud.com/hubshots/137-decentralising-identity-cancelling-hubspot

HubShots, the podcast for marketing managers who use HubSpot hosted by Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found and Craig Bailey from XEN Systems.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCD3Uo4X-IxPJLE8ygPDQhNQ

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Recorded: Wednesday 03 October 2018 | Published: Sunday 07 October 2018

Shot 1: Inbound Thought of the Week

Decentralising privacy and identity control

Identity and privacy are becoming products:

https://render.betaworks.com/next-things-we-are-thinking-about-at-betaworks-9a7d73f22a08

“Identity and privacy are finally becoming products. Distributed, secure identity, and privacy tools are starting to be rolled out — some are blockchain-based, and some are client-side, encrypted, and don’t require the blockchain. Productizing identity is important; the tight coupling of identity and your social graph is central to the lock-in that Facebook and other social messaging services have achieved. Distributing and productizing identity and privacy make sense for end-users; it’s a solution to the attention harvesting that has taken place over the last decade and it’s consistent with recent regulatory shifts (i.e. GDPR, the California Consumer Privacy act).”

https://medium.com/@timberners_lee/one-small-step-for-the-web-87f92217d085

https://solid.inrupt.com/

“Solid changes the current model where users have to hand over personal data to digital giants in exchange for perceived value. As we’ve all discovered, this hasn’t been in our best interests. Solid is how we evolve the web in order to restore balance — by giving every one of us complete control over data, personal or not, in a revolutionary way.”

https://www.inrupt.com/

We can still unlock the true promise of the web by decentralizing the power that’s currently centralized in the hands of a few. How? By using the power of Solid.

Solid is the technically potent open-source platform built to decentralize the web. Inrupt is the company that’s helping to fuel Solid’s success.

See also our discussion about this in Shot 6 of episode 135:

https://hubshots.com/episode-135/

Where we mentioned Justin Theng’s post about decentralising consumer data and ‘blockchain as marketing’:

https://blog.justintheng.com/the-coming-of-decentralised-search-and-consumer-data

Key takeaway: the ability we have as marketers to reach people (based on them having given up their privacy) will be reduced over the coming months and years. The ad targeting ability we have today will reduce – mostly with the people we probably most want to engage with.

Shot 2: HubSpot Marketing Feature of the Week

Multivariate testing of CTAs

In this example, we tested a CTA with the word “New” in it. You can see from the result which one performed better in the email.

Note: you can only add multivariate testing to simple CTAs. Once a CTA is multivariate you can’t create a smart CTA from it (and vice versa: you can’t multi test a smart CTA)

Keep in mind you can test totally different things eg using an image instead of text button CTA

Key takeaway: go try to get a better click rate by creating a variation of your CTA. Note this is only available in Marketing Hub Professional up.

Shot 3: HubSpot Customer Code Item of the Week

Cancelling HubSpot

“At HubSpot, we’ve undertaken something we call the sharp edges initiative. An examination of all the places where we unintentionally make things harder for customers. One by one, we’re working to file all of them down.

We’ve reduced our cancellation notice window from 45 days to 10 days, with the goal of getting it to 0. This policy made sense for us (helped us forecast renewals), but it made no sense to our customers and was one of out top escalation issues. That’s a sharp edge that has to go.

We’re also rolling out functionality that will allow more customers (eventually all of them) to cancel “in portal.” We want to be more like Spotify and Netflix, companies that make no attempt to block the exit, and are as easy to end an agreement with as they are to start one.”

“I know, I work for HubSpot, so I’m biased, but I absolutely love this. When was the last time a major SaaS platform you depend on made it a company-wide initiative to make it easier for you to cancel whenever you want?”

We thought about all the SaaS products we use, like Google G Suite, Teamwork, Adobe Creative Cloud, Slack, Evernote, Xero, Skype, Zoom, Qwilr, Shopify, WP Engine, Teachable, AdWords, any advertising platform, MailChimp, Landingi, etc to name a few and they all have the ability to cancel at any time. So why not all versions of HubSpot?