HubSpot is constantly working to expand the list of tools that users have available to them. And, the more tools that you use on the platform, the more easily you can track all of your interactions with leads, prospects, and customers.
One of the tools that HubSpot provides is an Activity Feed that marketers, sales reps, and service team members can use to get a quick, “at-a-glance” view of interactions with your contacts.
What is the HubSpot Activity Feed? Who can use it? How can the various departments in your organization leverage it to maximize marketing, sales, and service results? Let’s investigate!
The HubSpot Activity Feed is a convenient location to track interactions with your emails, website, documents, and more. It’s part of the Prospecting tools in HubSpot, and is primarily used to track email opens, clicks, and other activities by your contacts.
The activity feed is available to all HubSpot subscribers and users. However, certain notification settings related to the activity feed may only be available to specific types of HubSpot subscribers.
For example, lead revisit email notifications are only available to users on a Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise subscription (though all users can still get them via the sales email extension). Meanwhile, the number of sales notifications you can receive each month may vary depending on your HubSpot subscription.
You can find the Activity Feed by clicking on the “Contacts” dropdown in the left of your main HubSpot navigation menu and selecting “Activity Feed” from the dropdown:
While there are many notifications that you can set up via your notifications settings in HubSpot, there are three types of notifications that you can set up specifically for your Activity Feed:
Your HubSpot subscription level and whether you have a paid service or sales seat affects how many notifications you can receive for various kinds of activities each month. For example:
The Marketing Hub, CMS Hub, and Operations Hub all include the same tools as the “Free Tools” subscription, so they have the same monthly notification limit (200/month).
To set up user notifications in HubSpot, first go to your account’s settings menu (the gear icon in the upper right). Then, go to “Notifications” in the left sidebar under the “Your Preferences” header (this should be the top header in the left sidebar).
From here, you’ll be given the chance to set up email, desktop, mobile app, and other app notifications:
Customize what you get notified about in your email notifications by clicking on the dropdowns underneath the “What you get notified about” section of the Email tab. This includes settings for:
That’s a pretty daunting list of notifications, especially when you consider some of these notification types have several different options under them. Most of these can be enabled or disabled with a simple click on the checkbox next to the notification type in the list.
If you want to keep your inbox clear of emailed notifications as much as possible, consider only enabling the notifications that matter most to you in your particular role. For example, if you aren’t in your company’s accounting department, you might not need payment notifications enabled—though you might want to keep these notifications enabled if you’re part of a services team so you can keep customers aware of when their payments clear or fail.
You can enable or disable three different types of live user notifications for your desktop browser in HubSpot:
Each of these notification types can be enabled or disabled using an on/off toggle in the card for each notification type:
Your desktop notification customization in HubSpot is largely similar to how you customize your email notifications. The primary differences are that different notifications are available and each notification type has three checkboxes: one for each of bell, pop-up, and browser notifications (with some exceptions).
This allows you to heavily customize your desktop notification experience. For example, you could set it up so that you get a bell icon notification and a browser notification for blog comments but not a pop-up notification. This lets you review blog comments at your leisure without interrupting your use of your browser.
Being able to quickly follow up with engaged leads is crucial for closing deals and maximizing revenue. To set up a lead revisit notification, you’ll need to set up your “Website visits” notification settings—which can be found in the email settings tab of your notification settings.
Under the “Website Visits” notifications settings, you’ll see a few subsections of notifications for contacts, companies, and prospects. You can set whether to receive notifications for each of these and how those notifications are delivered.
If you have a particularly busy website, you might want to restrict your visit/revisit notifications to just the companies and contacts you own. That way, you don’t get constant live alert pings for every lead your site generates or emails about 10,000 random website visitors!
If you want to set up prospect notifications, you’ll first need to create or subscribe to a view in the Prospects tool in HubSpot. If you haven’t done this yet, you’ll see a card saying “You haven’t created and subscribe to any views in the prospects tool yet. Go to Prospects.”
Here’s a screenshot showing the message:
Previously, website visits were under the analytics tools menu, but that menu changed in December of 2023.
To enable notifications about website visits from the website visits screen:
Once completed, you’ll see the views you’ve subscribed to listed under the “Prospects” section of your website visit notifications and can toggle them on or off from there. Here’s a quick video showing the process:
In this example, I stuck with the “All visits” default view, which was empty because I was using a sandbox demo account with no linked website to track visits from prospects. When you do this for your website, you should see a list of prospects with tentative company names or other identifiers based on their IP address information.
For sales team members, being able to promptly follow up on actions taken by sales-qualified leads can mean the difference between closing a big account and losing it to a competitor. There are two ways to set up sales notifications: Real-time and via the HubSpot Activity Feed.
The process for enabling (or disabling) real-time notifications may vary slightly depending on the app you use for your real-time notifications:
The first step is to install the extension for HubSpot sales in Chrome:
Note: Google admins for an organization can automatically install the extension for other users in the organization.
Once installed, you can look at your activity feed at any time by clicking on the HubSpot Sales extension icon in your pinned extension shortcuts to the right of your Google Chrome search bar.
Is the icon not in your pinned extensions? Click the puzzle piece icon and pin it to your extension list from the dropdown!
With HubSpot dropping support for the Microsoft Outlook desktop add-in, users may need to change to the HubSpot Sales Office 365 add-in instead.
To get started, you first need to install the HubSpot Sales add-in on the Microsoft AppSource store.
From your Outlook inbox, you can access the sales tools from your add-ins list by clicking on the HubSpot icon.
Note: Not all Outlook/Office 365 accounts support add-ins or the Outlook app on Mac. If you cannot access Outlook from your Mac device, please check with your account admin to ask about upgrading your account to one that supports add-ins or the Mac version of the app. Otherwise, you may need to create a new Office 365 account with a new email and register that email as your connected email in your HubSpot profile.
Okay, now that we know how to access the Activity Feed and get live notifications from your desktop or your browser, how can you put that feed to use?
Here are a few examples of use cases for the HubSpot Activity Feed for sales reps, marketers, and service reps:
The Activity Feed can be a core closing tool for busy sales reps who need to follow up on hot leads as soon as they demonstrate an interest in your brand.
For sales reps, one of the best uses of the Activity Feed (and of real-time notifications) is to track when a sales-qualified lead that they own interacts with their company’s website. With a real-time alert, sales reps can see what the contact did and craft a quick message to play specifically on their apparent interests.
For example, say an alert is triggered regarding a lead clicking on a “more information” prompt on a product page. If the sales rep assigned to that lead sees a live notification, they can quickly assemble an email message offering to talk to the lead about that product in a more formal sales call—something like:
“Hey, I saw that you wanted more information about [product name here]! I can hop on a quick call with you about it if you’d like!” After the message, the sales rep could add their contact information or a link to their personal call calendar. This helps to quickly follow up on the lead’s interest and catch them while they’re paying more attention to the brand—increasing the chances of closing a deal with them in the future.
So, how can marketers use the Activity Feed in HubSpot? One way is to identify marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) who are ready to transition into being sales-qualified—and perhaps even assign them to specific sales reps based on the customer’s apparent interests and the rep’s expertise.
For example, say an MQL opens a landing page for a content offer about engine checkups for an automotive maintenance business and fills out the form. A marketer could see an alert about that form fill and then mark the lead as a sales-qualified lead (SQL) in their HubSpot portal—then assign that lead to Bill since he used to specialize in engine maintenance before moving to a desk job in the sales department.
You might be wondering how service reps might use the Activity Feed and live notifications to help improve customer service. After all, they’re more likely to receive a ticket, get a call to the company’s support line, or get an email from a customer, aren’t they? While these are all important tools for keeping service reps apprised of urgent customer requests, the Activity Feed can help them proactively identify customer issues.
For example, say a current customer opens up an FAQ page related to a specific product and clicks through a specific question, but doesn’t mark the answer in the FAQ as helpful. A customer service rep or support agent could take note of this interaction and proactively send a message offering help to the customer with their issue. Such a message might read something like:
“Hi! I noticed that you checked out the FAQ for [product/service name] and didn’t find the answer helpful. Would you like to talk to me directly? Here’s my contact info:” followed by the rep’s contact information.
This could be a great way to keep customers delighted, as they see they’re being proactively contacted about issues they may be having. Also, if the rep can get on the phone with the customer and solve their issue efficiently, that can help to further improve the company’s reputation with that consumer—encouraging more purchases and turning them into a zealous advocate for the brand.
While we’ve covered a lot about the HubSpot Activity Feed and how to set up notifications, we know that it’s a lot to take in. If you need help setting up your Activity Feed and notifications so your internal teams can better meet their goals, please reach out to the experts at Bluleadz for more information.