Orange Marketing
From cleaner data and improved customer experience to better sales reporting, this week's HubSpot updates offer some big wins across your entire HubSpot portal. Let’s dive into the details.
For the week ending April 25, 2025, we’re highlighting three features we think are worth your time:
- Phone Number Property Validations and Auto-formatting,
- Clients Can Close Tickets in the Customer Portal, and
- Connected Email Analytics Rates in Custom Report Builder.
Phone Number Property Validations and Auto-Formatting
You’ll now be able to set validation rules for phone number properties. Additionally, you will be able to set a default country code for phone number properties that will automatically be applied to updates to phone numbers via Import and manual data entry.
Why does it matter?
Improving the quality of phone numbers is important to ensure that reps aren’t calling ‘junk’ phone numbers or doing the work of finding the right phone number themselves. Phone numbers that contain random text or are missing country codes make it more difficult to contact customers.
Validations will allow you to enforce consistency and quality of your phone number data. Additionally, a default country code will make it easy to bring in valid phone numbers that are missing a country code - HubSpot will prepend country codes automatically.
How does it work?
Objects>Settings>Properties>Edit Property
1. Phone number validation rule
- The phone number validation rule ensures that the property value matches E.164 format, which is the international standard for phone numbers. Specifically, this validation ensures that the phone number:
- Include a valid country code, starting with a plus sign
- Match number formatting for the chosen country code
- Contain between 4 and 15 digits
- Contain only numbers and a leading plus sign (+)
- Phone numbers will continue to be saved without formatting. In HubSpot, numbers will display using the regional format. For example, +1(888) 482-7768 would be saved as +18884827768 but displayed as +1(888) 482-7768.
- You can apply this validation rule to both default and custom phone number properties.
- Once you apply the validation rule, users will no longer be able to ‘remove phone number formatting’ from phone number properties when editing in the CRM.
- The validation accepts extensions in the following format: +18884827768 ext 123.
2. Default country code
- The default country code can be used to validate phone numbers which do not contain a country code. This makes it easier to bring phone numbers into your portal that may not have a country code, but which are valid with the right country code.
- To use this feature, you must select a country code.
- If the phone number is valid with the country code selected, this country code will be added before the value is saved.
- For example, if the property Mobile Phone Number has a default country code set to United States, when a value such as (888) 482-7768 is imported, this value will be validated as +1 (888) 482-7768 and the country code +1 will be prepended upon being saved to the CRM.
- The default country code is applied on manual data entry and Import. It is not applied for updates via API/integration.
- You must apply a validation rule to a given property in order to set a default country code.
- The default country code does not prevent phone numbers with country codes that are different from the default country code from being entered.
Clients can close tickets in the Customer Portal
Customer Portal clients can now close their support tickets without waiting for an agent! With one-click, clients can “Mark as Closed” when their issue is resolved. Empowering your clients to manage their support requests prevents unnecessary confirmation on resolved issues and improves SLAs so your support team can focus on active tickets.
Support teams will remain able to revert the status to Open or another stage as required.
Why does it matter?
Clients in the customer portal have a limited set of actions they can take on tickets. They can create, view, and reply to a ticket. However, they can't close tickets when they consider their issue resolved. This leads to unnecessary back-and-forth and extra work for support teams and their clients. Give your clients more control with the option to close a ticket in the portal.
With this update:
- Customers can close tickets immediately when they no longer need assistance.
- Support teams can focus on active issues rather than manually closing old tickets.
How does it work?
- Go to Customer Portal settings
- Navigate to the Ticket Actions in the General tab
- Click Allow customers to close tickets from the portal
- To enable this feature, you must configure all pipelines to their corresponding closed ticket stages. If you only have one closed stage in your pipeline, it will be selected by default.
- Click Save
Once enabled, clients in the portal can mark a ticket as resolved. Changes may take a few hours to take effect in the customer portal once enabled.
Connected email analytics rates in Custom Report Builder
HubSpot reporting just keeps getting better. With connected email analytics, you can now track and report on your 1:1 email open, click, and reply rates directly in the custom report builder.
Email performance metrics provide valuable insights into your sales team's effectiveness and engagement with prospects. By tracking these rates over time, you can:
- Measure the impact of your efforts to improve sending reputation
- Identify trends in prospect engagement
- Make data-driven decisions to optimize your sales communication strategy
How does it work?
To access these metrics:
- Navigate to Reports > Create custom report
- Select Activities as your primary data source
- When building your report, you'll find these new metrics available: Email Open Rate, Email Click Rate, and Email Reply Rate
Alternatively, access a pre-built report in sales analytics:
- Navigate to Reports > Analytics suites > Sales > Activities & leads
- Select the Emails report
- Customize and save the report as needed
Expert HubSpot Support
Want to see HubSpot in action? Check out our case study: Automating Custom Order Management with HubSpot Sales Hub and learn how we helped a client streamline their sales process and eliminate manual work with smart HubSpot automation. We can help you, too.
