HubSpot's Default Theme Change Brings Long-Term Potential & Short-Term Headaches

Did you know HubSpot replaced Growth as its default theme? Me either! I break down the good and bad stemming from the change, plus explore the new update to workflow testing and how to make sure you don't get hit with an unnecessary marketing contacts upgrade.

What's Inside:

1. On Your Radar: Quiet & Problematic Change-Up to HubSpot's Default Theme
2. Update Of The Week: Improved Workflow Testing
3. Admin's Assignment: Automate Marketing Contacts Cleanup to Prevent Unnecessary Costs

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On Your Radar

Quiet & Problematic Change-Up to HubSpot's Default Theme

Quick note: this is mostly for developers and other tech savvy folks that are comfortable in Design Manager, but I think it's good for everyone to be aware of. TLDR for non-developers is that you may want to think twice before building landing pages and webpages using the Elevate theme for now.

The other day one of my clients reached out to me with a request for a simple design change to their landing page template. What I thought was going to be a 10-minute task in the design manager instead evolved into much longer fact-finding mission with surprising discoveries - some exciting and some a bit puzzling.

The first thing I noticed was that the landing page this client was using was in the Elevate theme - one I wasn't familiar with. Diving in, I found that the template's code couldn't be edited because it was a HubSpot-provided theme. No worries, I thought, we'll just create a quick child theme, add the CSS they needed, and we'll be good to go. And that's where things got interesting.

The Elevate theme is nowhere to be found in the design manager. You can get to one page of code you can't edit by navigating through a webpage or landing page, but you can't find that file (or any other folders or files that are part of Elevate) in the left sidebar of Design Manager anywhere. This means you also can't easily clone or create a child theme of Elevate either.

So I joined the conversation in the HubSpot Developers Slack channel, and here's what I've learned:

• Elevate is the new HubSpot default theme for online assets like webpages and landing pages and it seems to have been quietly rolled out around November of last year. It is replacing the Growth theme as the default for new HubSpot customers. If you've had HubSpot for awhile, Elevate will be a theme option but it won't be automatically set as your active theme.
• Elevate is built using HubSpot's "developer projects framework", which is quite different than how HubSpot themes were built in the past (and how most are still built today).
• Themes built this way must be built locally and then uploaded with the HubSpot CLI (they cannot be built or edited in the Design Manager).
• The advantage of building themes this way is that they can make use of React. For non-developers, React is essentially a collection of building blocks developers can use to create themes faster and more easily. Sites built with React are also often faster, more efficient, and more future-proof/scalable.
• The disadvantage of themes built this way is that, as of now, they don't play nicely with the Design Manager. It seems HubSpot is working on a fix for this, but there's no published timeline I'm aware of.
• There is technically a way to create a child theme of Elevate in Design Manager. To do so, you create a new blank theme and add the line below to the theme.json file. But Elevate has a different folder structure than classic themes, so to understand that or get the code for its default modules and templates to use as a starting place, you still really need to fetch the Elevate theme via the CLI and explore it in a local environment.

"extends": "@hubspot/elevate"        

Honestly, I think HubSpot is putting the cart pretty far before the horse here. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad HubSpot is continuing to innovate in this area, and I think React will be a welcome addition to the theme building experience. But rolling it out as the default theme across new HubSpot portals without any (as far as I can find) announcement or warning, and without first making sure things are compatible with the platform's built-in Design Manager everyone is used to seems like a mistake to me.

For non-developers, my recommendation is to think twice about using the Elevate theme for landing pages and webpages right now.

For developers, my recommendation is to start getting familiar with this new way of building HubSpot themes. This documentation will give you what you need to know to get started.

Here's hoping that the Design Manager issues get ironed out quickly so we can all confidently take advantage of this new theme!

Update Of The Week

Improved Workflow Testing

Whenever I interview someone to join my team at Simple Strat, I always ask them to tell me about a mistake they've made. It's a great way to see if they take accountability for their actions and learn from mishaps. Almost always, if I'm interviewing for a HubSpot role, the mistake folks tell me about are related to a workflow doing something they didn't expect.

With this recent beta from HubSpot, I wonder if I'll start hearing this type of mistake less often.

That's because HubSpot has overhauled the workflow testing experience. Testing your workflow will now tell you much more than just some basic info about how the triggers and enrollment criteria apply to the test record. Now, you'll get:

• A detailed breakdown about why a record would or wouldn't enroll
• Clarity about which path a record will take through branching logic, or details about why HubSpot may not be able to accurately predict the path
• A button that allows you to get sent all the marketing emails your test record would receive
• A new look and feel that will better align with other recent updates to the workflows interface (basically it looks like the enrollment history feature they rolled out last year)

To get a rundown of all HubSpot's January updates + some practical and creative use cases for them, join me Wednesday, February 5th, for my monthly New & Now webinar!

Admin's Assignment

Automate Marketing Contacts Cleanup to Prevent Unnecessary Costs

If you have a Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise license with Marketing Contacts, this week's admin's assignment is for you.

The change to base pricing on Marketing Contacts awhile back was great - letting us store virtually as many contacts as we want in the CRM, and only paying for the ones we we're actively marketing to via emails and ads audiences. But it did add some work - we now have to make sure that contacts are being labeled appropriately.

Most of the time, I don't see too many issues with getting contacts labeled as Marketing Contacts when they need to be (shout-out to the recent workflows update that makes this even easier). But I still come across quite a few HubSpot instances that aren't as proactive as they could be at removing the label from contacts they're no longer marketing to.

For example, if a contact has unsubscribed or there's been a hard bounce on an email sent to them, they should no longer be a Marketing Contact.

Staying on top of this means you won't have to upgrade your Marketing Contacts tier as quickly or as often, saving you money with no downsides. And, lucky for us, this is easy to do with a single simple workflow.

Step 1: Identify criteria for updating contacts to non-marketing.

This should include contacts that have unsubscribed and that have hard-bounced, but you may wish to go further than that. Other common criteria include contacts who are unengaged (either by HubSpot's default criteria for the unengaged list it maintains or your own rules), contacts that have been disqualified, and contacts who haven't been sent a marketing email in a certain period of time.

Step 2: Create your workflow.

• Create a blank contact-based workflow.
• Add triggers based on the criteria identified in step one. For unsubscribed contacts, use the filter: 'Unsubscribed from all email' property is equal to true (if you don't have this property, use 'Opted out of all email' is any of 'yes'). For hard bounced contacts, use the filter: 'Email hard bounce reason' property is known. The rest of your filters will depend on any custom criteria you've identified.
• Make sure re-enrollment is turned on.
• Add the 'Set marketing contact status' workflow action and choose 'Set as non-marketing contact'.
• Publish your workflow (you can decide if you want to run existing contacts who meet the trigger filters through the workflow, but I recommend this as it's a nice initial clean-up).

And that's all it takes! If you want to make it easy to keep a closer eye on your marketing contacts and what's creating them, I also recommend building a Marketing Contacts Dashboard by following the instructions in this previous edition!

I publish this newsletter to help HubSpot admins navigate the firehose of HubSpot updates and tips to get exactly what they need to make an impact. If you find it helpful, please subscribe and help spread the word!

Happy HubSpotting,

The Orange Admin