HubSpot Updates March 21, 2026: Campaigns, Help Desk, WhatsApp

Good morning, HubSpot Nation! Welcome to Wake Up with Customer Platform, your unofficial HubSpot morning show where we help you discover the platform value you already own. I'm Chris Carroll, joined by George B. Thomas and Madeline Donovan, as we make sure You're not sleeping on HubSpot's true capabilities. If you're joining live, drop a hello in the comments and let us know what you're building in HubSpot today. George and Madeline, how we feeling on this Friday, March 21st?

Feeling good, feeling ready for these updates.

Yeah, I'm ready to rock and roll. Ready to rock and roll, brother.

I think that's step one for everybody usually. Yeah, be ready for the updates. They will be here every day. Yes. So, so we'll dive in, uh, an interesting title that I need to know more about, uh, sensitive data comment notifications. Yeah, low impact. Uh, what is it? When commenting with colleagues inside HubSpot, users receive detailed comment notifications via email and other channels. These notifications contain the details of the comment threads, making it easy to catch up directly from your inbox without having to log into HubSpot to read the latest comments.

Oh, interesting. So why does it matter? If users enable the sensitive data setting in the data privacy settings, uh, their comment notifications will no longer contain any of the thread details to keep their data compliant and secure. And this means that users will have to log into HubSpot to catch up on their comment threads. Interesting.

Yeah, this, uh, this reminds me of the reason why a lot of like back office people often don't like, uh, logging emails and doing stuff in HubSpot, um, because there often is sensitive information. It's been very hard to, like, once you bring it into HubSpot, hard to permission it and make sure other people aren't seeing it. So like, if you're a HubSpot admin, you're forced into this situation where stuff should be logged and it can't be, and that, that's the kind of stuff that kills adoption. Um, I, I feel like there's like a disconnect between the what is it and the why does it matter.

They're kind of like Yeah, if you go down to the how does it work, it's a little bit more interesting too. Like one of the things I was breezing through here is that it's worth noting that if you do enable this setting to include comment notifications, it will only apply to new comment notifications, not historical ones. So that's something to note. But, um, Madeline, what are your thoughts on this?

Yeah, I'm curious when it, when it said sensitive data. I was imagining that it— HubSpot would be scanning the notifications or something like that. So I'm kind of surprised that it's a setting that you can choose to turn on or off and not like a combination of like some comments do appear in your inbox and some don't. But This is great. Like, notifications in general and being able to control those more is huge for admins trying to gain adoption across their teams who might not want to log into the portal as much as others.

So yeah, let's be honest too, like, the conversation of sensitive data in HubSpot is like a blip on the radar of like a massively long radar of non-existent. So The fact that they're building on this is a good thing as well.

Indeed, uh, love to see the progress there. Um, but definitely, so, so what we don't want you to do is make an assumption that this relates to all the other sensitive data, right, uh, stuff that's been happening, because it looks like it's a different setting and talking about your own data. Um, in HubSpot. So check that out. Number 2, multi-language support available for double opt-in emails in a private beta. What is it? Marketers and admins can set up their double opt-in experience in multiple languages if desired.

Oh wow, and why does it matter? For marketers serving a global audience, which is probably many of us, you can set up your double opt-in confirmation email and pages in multiple languages to ensure contacts receive them in their preferred language, enhancing user experience. There's the magic words, ladies and gentlemen. I'm just gonna say user experience and engagement.

Hmm.

This is great. I mean, the fact that double opt-in is so important in itself, you want, you want that assurance that your lead or your contact really wants to be hearing from you. So it only makes sense that you'd want that to be in their preferred language.

Yeah, because I think as George mentioned, it's probably more people serving a global audience. Than they might want to admit. These are the things where it's like, yeah, we would love to serve them more, but I can't necessarily hope they speak English because I can't do this in other languages. I think stuff like that is where AI is going to be super powerful in helping cross a lot of those gaps that have been, and stuff like this, like, of course, uh, to make that possible, like, there's so much AI happening behind the scenes to be able to, um, uh, you know, translate effectively. Yeah. And that being said, just always with all this multi-language stuff, like, check it out, uh, like before, and make sure it's, it's reading right. Um, that's the challenge that a lot of people have. Like, there's still a resource there that needs to be like making sure this stuff localizes like properly. It's not just, you know, Google Translate, um, which again, AI is getting a lot better there as well. Uh, number 3, new sidebar in the marketing email editor. High impact.

Yeah, it keeps getting better.

What is it? Starting January 9th, a while ago, we will be rolling out a refresh side navigation of the marketing email editor. So this must be, uh, going from beta to live.

Yeah, must be. So you might be wondering, HubSpot users, why does it matter? Uh, this sidebar in the marketing email editor has been refreshed to improve the accessibility and usability of certain tools and features, as well as introducing a new email contents tree.

I'm just noticing that I've been using this and didn't know that I was using it.

There you go.

Yeah, I think I remember when I first saw this, George. It's just like anybody using CMS, like, and the CMS toolset, a lot of, right? Like a lot of these are like, oh, okay, finally. Like we can start to build stuff, you know, the way that we always have in this spot. And the way that they've started to bring this into almost all of the tools that relate to creating like a digital, um, you know, front end experience, uh, we're seeing it in knowledge base now. Finally, I talked to customer portal team earlier this week and maybe it's coming there too. It's definitely on their mind. So very cool to see this.

Particularly the style button, I will highlight as one of my favorite buttons of all the buttons because If I'm not mistaken, I think you had to edit the style of an email, either all custom in the email, or you could go to your template email or your brand settings to make changes there. But now if I just want, if I made a bunch of changes in my email and I forgot to apply my branding that I wanted to, you can edit the style and it just changes it all for you. It's great.

I love it. And the fact that it's now like desktop and mobile email that you can do that in here. Anyway, it's, it's getting so good.

I'll leave the email to you guys if you don't, if you don't mind. Um, it's funny. Number 4, because I want to do stuff like this. Breeze Content Agent Create. Podcasts, uh, medium impact. What is it? Breeze Content Agent uses AI to create engaging podcast scripts, show notes, and artwork powered by your CRM data. That is a new line, I think, because this pro— this update has come up once, but that— I was about to ask you, George. Yeah, why should we do it here? Than in all the other tools that we're used to using?

Well, I mean, first of all, listen, scripts, show notes, uh, artwork— that's actually probably the hardest part of getting on and doing a podcast. Because like, getting on and doing what we're doing now, educating, adding value, like talking, that's easy. So, and though powered by your CRM data, um, again, this is content. So think about all the content that you already have think about all the things that it knows the way that you've said them or would want to say them, and, and think about like the creation of scripts. For instance, I go to my AI clone to ask it to create videos or to write articles or to— because it knows how I would say it and do it. So this, for you, if you're using HubSpot and the content tools, is, is it— so why does it matter? Let's get into that. Content marketing is more important than ever. #truth. However, 50%— uh, I'll just say they typed it, I'll say it— 50% of B2B marketers report that creating high-quality content consistently is challenging and resource-intensive. I feel like that number should be higher, but okay.

Yeah, probably the, uh, key phrase is high-quality content consistently. There. And I remember talking to Ankur when they first were bringing this out. And the part that I'm interested to run through again is like the art, the artwork, right? Like, because I've never— it's not like images on a web page or a blog where you can kind of abstract it if you want to. Like most artwork I've seen, it's like, it needs a title and it needs the name of the episode and And so I was just always, it was just always a step that I skipped. And that's where I think like the challenge is like the first movers into this, especially if you're trying to support people that have not done it before and they're used to, but they've got all this other stuff they've been doing as a marketing team. Like they need to be able to like align with that brand stuff So the creating artwork from scratch part, it's gonna be interesting to see how that progresses, I think. But the rest of it, yeah. And that's where like powered by CRM data on Anchor's case for a while. Like I know the podcast is an object. Like can I just use the CRM infrastructure please?

Right. Right, right.

Yeah. And I think like creating high-quality content consistently, I think that's— high-quality content doesn't just mean like it's worded well, it's, it's, I don't know, like concise. It, to me as a marketer, it means specific. And you're talking, you're, you're talking about examples and relevant examples to the topic that you're talking about. And so powered by your CRM data, like it has the resources it needs to pull into this content topic. So I'm really interested to see if this works.

I love that you brought that up because I love learning like what other, Madeline, what other humans consider like high quality content. 'Cause for me, it's like, it hits me in the feels, it leads me to insight, and it makes me wanna take action. Like, that's high-quality content. Like—

Yeah, absolutely.

I don't know if, hopefully your CRM data will help you get to a place that it's easier for you to create that for the users that you're trying to create an experience around.

Right.

Yeah. And this is like, it's interesting to watch this. Like, so define the podcast idea by entering a topic for your episode. Uh, select from one of the suggested podcast episode titles, review and adjust the podcast episode outline. Click generate podcast. Once ready, you'll be redirected to the podcast episode editor. To edit and publish the episode.

That's interesting.

Like, are we— we don't have to record it at some point, or—

well, so no, I think this is the, um, is this the transcript into— yeah, like audio transcript into audio, which I would be a big fan of if I could give it my voice, right?

Yeah, agreed.

Man, I, I think I said it yesterday. We need like a content, I mean, content area, content agent, content remix, uh, episode, uh, workshop at some point just to dig into. Cuz this stuff, when it's right next to the case studies that we've been, uh, starting to use at Profoundly, and all this stuff can feed Content Remix now and you can use more than one thing at a time. Like, yeah. That's where once you get the strategy right and your brand, you know, the AI brand settings and stuff like that, man, talk about an Iron Man suit for content.

Which, by the way, I can't move on without telling my boy Onyx that I think he sounds dope on all my blog articles. The day that I can switch out Onyx for George B. Thomas on all my blog articles, homeboy, you got to step to the side. I'm just going to throw that out there.

Indeed, indeed. Uh, we'll keep moving. Uh, Breeze record summaries moving to the right sidebar. Uh, off the bat, not sure I like that part. Uh, what is it? The Breeze record summary card is now located in the right sidebar, helping you save space on your records. While ensuring you can see key details no matter which tab you're viewing in the middle of the page.

Interesting, because it used to be like center, but this update streamlines your records page by keeping essential information accessible at all times. Previously, the Breeze, uh, record summary card was located in the overview section of the record page, requiring extra clicks to reference while navigating tabs. Now With its placement in the right sidebar, you can quickly view the summary without losing context. My only question is, why don't you just give us the choice if we want to put it in the right side or the overview? Because maybe some humans liked it just where it was, but I get it.

We—

yeah, anyway, it's gonna, it's gonna be interesting when they, uh, maybe don't have the right sidebar.

Anymore, right?

Uh, interesting is, is a choice word.

Yeah. Uh, well, all the things that I've seen as far as, like, you know, there was a great admins hug about where they were going with the customer record, with the contact record, and, um, you know, uh, I think It's going to be interesting to see what they do between 2 columns and 3 columns. But they are getting a lot better at kind of creating these user design experiences with so much information on one, one screen. So I see this as like, I mean, they didn't tell us it was coming in the center and then it did. And now like, this is just, hey, by the way, we're doing some more testing here, basically. Yeah, that's probably what this is.

It may be the first iteration of 17 other iterations of where we'll find it in the future, to be honest with you.

Yeah. Um, and, uh, Willem mentions, depends on how it is coded. Some cards are only coded to work with a bit more screen real estate. It's a, it's a good point. Yeah. Thanks for joining today, Willem. Uh, we'll continue a smarter Campaign Goals Experience. Oh, that's a bold, bold statement.

Well, you know what? It probably is smarter if it's not just a text field.

Oh, there you go. Let's make sure.

We haven't even read anything yet.

What is it? Introducing the Campaign Goals Tracker, a smarter way to set, track, and report on your campaigns.

I love it.

A redesigned and more sophisticated goal setting, management, and reporting experience is available now.

So why does this matter to you? Okay, so campaigns depend on clear strategic goals, yet today's reporting experience lacks a truly goal-oriented framework. Hashtag truth. Until now, campaign goals have existed in two limited ways: as a default campaign goal property disconnected from the campaign reporting experience, making, uh, tracking difficult, or through a basic edit campaign goals modal, which allowed you to set targets for sessions, new contacts, and influence contacts, but with no guidance, validation, or flexibility to track other or new campaign metrics. Without an integrated approach, you may struggle to define the right goals, find inspiration, and measure success effectively. That's why we, HubSpot, uh, are— is introducing a smarter, more intuitive way to define, monitor, and report on campaign goals, ensuring every campaign is built for success. I'm hitting the join beta button.

I'm so excited about this. I, and like that last part, I, I think you said define, I forget the middle word, and monitor.

Define, monitor, and report.

Yes. That's, that's so essential. And I was just thinking as you were talking, George, like as marketers, we use it marketer to marketer. We use a lot of words when we're talking about campaign goals.

Yeah.

But that doesn't mean that your leadership team or your sales team or whoever else on your team knows what the heck you're talking about when it comes to goals for a campaign. And when you want to show them, hey, we wanted to do it for this, whatever reason, and look, it's working. You don't even have to know what we're talking about, but it's working because we have this nice graph. It, it, that's huge. So yeah, super excited.

Uh, yeah, this looks amazing and think we should maybe, uh, all of the updates to the campaigns, uh, tool recently yesterday, right?

And like now there's media in there and documents in there. And so, so it literally is becoming this like sales and marketing campaign tool that now we can do better goals with. Anybody getting the feeling that you should be paying attention to creating campaigns, which means that you probably create content, which means you probably need to show up to the world adding value and educating humans on the things that you do to help. Oh my God.

Yeah, I think let's build campaigns with Madeline Donovan should be something in the future. But campaign, as you mentioned that, Madeline, I think campaign, as I started to move from like production and quality control into sales and marketing, campaign might have been that first word where I was like, oh no, I could do without this in my day because everybody thinks of a campaign differently and you got Salesforce campaigns and look nothing like, like marketing, like HubSpot campaigns and I was just like, is it an email? Is it a set of emails? Is it the whole year? Uh, everybody would have a different definition.

So, bro, for years I've had to teach this tool of like, it could be email, it could be PPC, but let's be honest, the way I'm gonna teach it to you today is this is what an inbound campaign is. And then I would literally teach them the things that they should build around that, but Anyway, right.

But now we can add stuff like sequences and stuff like that, right?

Playbooks is huge. Yeah.

Documents is huge.

Yes.

So it's literally like, let's just get to like customer campaigns, like revenue campaigns.

Sales enablement campaigns is huge.

Yeah. So wonderful to see that. Great job.

There's a new show. Campaign show, I'm telling you.

Anyway, Help Desk Spaces. Okay, high impact, uh, private beta. What is it? Admins now have more effective ways to organize their teams in Help Desk. We're excited to introduce Spaces, dedicated team-based working areas Designed to bring structure to ticket management and enhance focus for your support teams.

Interesting.

Wow. This is interesting. And I literally have to go to your screen to read this because I, in the portal I was in and went to my portal, I can't find it anywhere. Dang on it. Anyway, why does it matter? High volume support teams rely on effective organization to keep up with the constant flow of tickets. Without this, support teams face bottlenecks. Redundant work, and lack of focus, all of which slow response times and frustrate both agent and yes, me, the customer. Spaces addresses this by providing dedicated work areas built around team tickets. With Spaces, high-volume support teams can focus on the right tickets without distraction and ultimately deliver faster, Customer support at scale. My friend Aaron, I know you're probably not watching this. I'm going to send you an email later. You need to know about this right now. Oh my God. Okay, there. I'm, I'm, I'm done. Sorry.

Uh, hopefully Aaron has Service Hub Enterprise.

Uh, I think Aaron has all the things around. He is highly focused on help desk, uh, support, and so Yes, Aaron, I hope you do have Service Hub Enterprise because let's go.

Yeah, this looks— man, the user management and the workspace management and like—

yep.

Yeah, and I think something that's been missing for a while, um, is like there are different types of tickets. People use tickets in so many different ways. We use tickets obviously in so many different ways, and so your team needs to see those in different ways and compartmentalize those reasons for those support streams. So that's, that's great.

Do more, do more in your HubSpot, do more teams in there.

Just when you thought you couldn't, HubSpot does an update. I'm just saying.

Separate Separate WhatsApp transactional and marketing subscription types. What is it? Introducing separate opt-ins, opt-outs for WhatsApp message types: WhatsApp marketing and WhatsApp transactional. You can now manage and obtain distinct consent for marketing and transactional messages, enhancing your communication outreach strategies and overall customer experience and not getting wrecked by the new update that's coming April 1st from, uh, Meta, I guess, that is changing the rules in the US related to, you know, WhatsApp marketing messages, uh, which is somebody behind the scenes here.

By the way, somebody needs to just do a whole like WhatsApp HubSpot course. Yes, like there's a ton of questions, people are confused, they're not really sure of the power, like This is one area where I wish somebody that was just like a WhatsApp and a HubSpot nerd would be like, and I'm going to build education around it because it would, it would create fire on the internet. Anyway, why does it matter? Enable separate opt-ins slash outs for marketing versus utility WhatsApp template messages. This matters as any business-initiated messages sent outside of WhatsApp 24-hour conversation window require portal users to use a pre-approved WhatsApp template, and businesses can only send template messages to users who have subscribed to receive messages from them on WhatsApp. This approach will address the need of businesses that may lose critical communication opportunities— ooh, critical communication opportunities— due to previous broad opt-outs and provide a pathway to resp— oh, help me, Jesus— a pathway to respect customer preferences while maintaining necessary engagement like order confirmations, account alerts, etc. It's all about the humans, ladies and gentlemen.

You got anybody using WhatsApp out there, George or Madeline?

I don't, like, well, at least that I know of, because we never talk about Yeah, and I, I think it, it's not tried because people don't even want to touch it, or they don't see themselves or their network as people who need it.

And let's be very careful, as three Americans, right?

Exactly.

Americans feel this way.

Exactly.

A whole other world that is like, we've been using WhatsApp for the longest of times. Humans like Exactly.

Thank you for voicing that for me. Well, and I think too, it's a global marketing— it's huge for global marketing. So between this and the multi-language support, it's great to have this option. And I love that keyword respect and your reaction to it.

Yeah, there are two communicative monsters that I, um, battle with understanding which one would be the most powerful, or if I should be using both, to be honest with you. And they are WhatsApp and SMS. Yeah, both of those. I sit here as a marketer, as a salesperson, as a business owner, and go, I don't, I don't know. I, I don't know.

Yeah. And you start to see a little bit of the, like, because this, because this change only impacts US WhatsApp. And when you think about it and what we see in HubSpot, like Lucy and I just had a— we talked about emails yesterday on the Let's Build a Superhuman or Super Admin. Same thing, right? About all the different email types that there are in HubSpot now, one-to-one, transactional, marketing, and how like everything used to be tied to marketing, even the, the transactional email add-on, uh, she was telling me, which I didn't really know, like requires Marketing Hub to go on to you. But we've seen them start to move away. Like we can do things with sequences, uh, like Commerce Hub is just chock-full of transactional emails happening. We can do Service Hub, we can, uh, do surveys just with Service Hub now in workflows. So I think what's happening here is like, because regulation didn't require it in the US, it was just one, like WhatsApp marketing, like just do whatever you need to do. But everywhere else in the world that had to deal with regulation has already been set up for this, you know, separation, uh, to my understanding. And now that was the big change. So, um, what we see is per Meta policy, any template messages require users to have subscribed to receive messages on WhatsApp. And there's a nice link to learn more about what's happening. So if WhatsApp's important to you, check this out. And that's all we got. Only, only, uh, so we will, we will wrap there. Uh, thanks so much to Madeline and George for, for diving into these updates. Uh, remember folks, you probably already own the solution you're looking for in HubSpot, and it might be called campaigns. Uh, sometimes you just need to wake up to it. Uh, join us on Monday where Madeline again will be filling in for Casey all next week. Casey, hope you're enjoying your vacation out there. Anne will be with George to continue exploring what's new in the ecosystem. Drop your biggest takeaway in the comments and let us know what capabilities you want us to wake up to next. Until then, I'm Chris Carroll.

I'm George B. Thomas.

I'm Madeline Donovan.

And this has been Wake Up with Customer Platform. Now go build something amazing. Have a great weekend, everybody.

Bye, everybody.