Marketers have their hands full these days. Between trying to manage customer interactions, build effective landing pages, and set up marketing automation, you probably need help finding the time to do it all. Enter HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing and customer relationship management software designed to make the busy marketer’s life much easier.
In this HubSpot review, we’ll showcase the different products available, showcase features, list pros and cons, and discuss pricing so you’ll know what you can expect if you decide to sign up.
What is HubSpot?
HubSpot is most widely known as a customer relationship management (CRM) software, but it’s more than that. It’s an all-in-one inbound marketing, sales, and customer service platform. With HubSpot, you can track every step of the customer journey from initial contact to closing the deal. It offers robust marketing and sales tools, an intuitive drag-and-drop website builder, excellent customer growth and retention tools, email and marketing automation, and content and social media marketing features.
What Products Does HubSpot Offer?
HubSpot offers products in various categories, or hubs, for marketing, sales, customer service, content management, operations, and commerce. For this HubSpot review, we’ll focus more on the marketing and sales tools available with the platform instead of operational tools. Let’s dive into each product’s features so you’ll better understand what each includes.
HubSpot Marketing Hub
HubSpot’s marketing hub is excellent for generating leads with forms, building effective landing pages, incorporating live chat, and managing your contacts and campaigns all in one place.
With HubSpot marketing animation, you can create automated email campaigns to capture leads and create targeted content and messaging sent at specific times. These can be based on the lead’s behavior, interest, and stage of the buying process. You can also automate marketing tasks that would otherwise be repetitive, such as lead scoring, segmentation, and contact management. However, to take advantage of most of these features, you must sign up for at least the Professional plan, which comes with a pretty hefty price (more on that later).
HubSpot Sales Hub
With HubSpot’s sales hub, you have many tools at your fingertips. You can create and track emails, set up email automation, track calls, and use AI tools to draft engaging emails or click-worthy calls to action (CTAs). Its customer relationship management (CRM) software is the best in the business, integrates with the sales hub seamlessly, and comes with an impressive free plan to help individuals and business professionals manage every aspect of the sales process. You’ll also gain powerful insights into your company’s completed sales activities, allowing you to measure their success rate.
HubSpot CRM software allows you to create and manage deals, tasks, and notes, which can help you stay on top of your sales and convert more leads into paying customers. Compared to other CRM software, such as Zoho, some users find HubSpot easier to use. However, reviews for HubSpot on various outlets, such as G2 and Trust Pilot, tend to put HubSpot more in the difficult-to-learn category, so be prepared to do your homework to get up to speed.
HubSpot Service Hub
HubSpot’s service hub is designed to bring you closer to your customers than ever before. You can deliver top-notch customer service within one platform with tools like a customer portal, omnichannel messaging, live chat, inbound VoIP calling, and a fully integrated CRM. With HubSpot, you can maintain excellent customer service no matter how big your business gets.
One of the best features of the service hub is the shared inbox. With this incredible tool, you can track all your customer engagements, including chatting with customers, addressing concerns, creating support tickets, and more. You can also create a customer knowledge base, allowing customers to search for answers to their questions on the fly. The service hub also provides an advocacy tool, which helps you collect customer feedback, address concerns, and turn your customers into loyal promoters of your business. However, a paid plan is required, like most other advanced features of HubSpot.
HubSpot CMS Hub
HubSpot CMS is one of the key features of the platform. It’s designed to help you manage your contacts and customer relationships more effectively. With HubSpot CMS, you can easily organize and segment your contacts, track their interactions, and gain insights into their behavior and preferences. It automatically captures and tracks your website’s visitors and turns them into sales leads. You can create customizable pop-up forms to appear anywhere on your site, including clicking on a specific page or spending a certain amount of time browsing your site. This means you can quickly follow up with potential customers who express interest in your products or services.
HubSpot CMS includes a drag-and-drop visual builder for building landing and web pages, plenty of themes and templates, and fully integrates with HubSpot’s CRM. They even provide a free A/B testing kit to help you determine what works and what doesn’t. Plus, HubSpot serves as an all-in-one hosting solution, allowing you to connect your domain and host your files all within HubSpot. The security features are comparable to some top hosting platforms, with DDoS protection, a web application firewall, HTTPS and SSL certificate support, a 99.95% uptime guarantee, and routine vulnerability scanning.
However, suppose you prefer another platform, such as WordPress. In that case, HubSpot has an excellent WordPress plugin that bridges the gap between one of the best content management systems in the world with a powerful CRM and marketing platform.
Notable Features of HubSpot
Now that you have a basic understanding of the four main products, our HubSpot review will go more in-depth to identify key features of the software. These include a user-friendly interface, a wealth of integrations, and various lead-generation tools.
User-Friendly Interface
HubSpot provides an intuitive interface, making it an excellent choice for individuals and businesses. However, it has many tools to learn, so getting up to speed with the software takes time. Thankfully, you’ll have access to HubSpot Academy, a knowledge base, and other resources to help you learn your way around in no time. In addition to its user-friendly interface, HubSpot offers various tools to provide users with an all-in-one marketing mega-experience. Our HubSpot review will walk you through each one so you’ll know what is possible.
Email Marketing
One of the biggest draws to HubSpot is its email marketing services. It covers every aspect of the process, from automated workflows to reports, so you can set up, manage, and critique your email campaigns. There are many templates, and users can use HubSpot’s drag-and-drop builder to build them quickly.
With higher-tiered plans, such as Professional, you can perform A/B testing for your email campaigns, gain access to campaign reporting, integrate social media platforms, and set up omnichannel marketing automation.
Predictive Lead Scoring
As a small or large business owner, discovering customer behaviors and engagement is crucial for building an effective marketing strategy. Thanks to HubSpot’s lead scoring feature, you can find more in-depth insights into who your customers are and what they want. Lead scoring helps predict conversion rates, optimize sales conversions, and prioritize leads for maximizing prospect-to-customer sales conversions.
