Key HubSpot Features You Could Be Missing Out On

HubSpot is a very well known player in the marketing automation software world. There are three different levels: Basic, Professional and Enterprise. Each level has its own bells and whistles, with the Basic account being, well, the most basic. Depending on your business and/or what you are trying to accomplish with marketing automation, any of these accounts might be the right fit for you. Below, I point out a few of the key features to consider when deciding on the right plan for you.

Blog: While not all marketing automation software programs include a blog, HubSpot includes a blog at all levels, so checks across the board for Basic, Professional and Enterprise. A nice feature of the blog is the SEO recommendation tool, which recommends keywords, internal link opportunities, and points out missing CTAs.

Subdomains: This is definitely something to consider when comparing the different plans within HubSpot. Limiting yourself to one subdomain can be tricky. At SyncShow, we recommend having at least two different subdomains, one specifically for the blog (example: blog.website.com) and another for landing pages (example: info.website.com). If you plan on creating additional microsites within your website, Enterprise will be the way to go. Below are the available amounts of subdomains per plan:

• Basic: 1
• Professional: 4
• Enterprise: Unlimited

Email: Another important feature to consider is the amount of emails you are able to send with each plan. With Basic, you cannot exceed 1000 sent emails. For both Professional and Enterprise, you are capped at 10 times your contact tier limit (you can talk with a HubSpot team member to determine what the right contact level is for you). Within email there are a few other important options to consider as well:

• Email lead nurturing is only available at Professional and Enterprise levels, which means no drip campaigns or workflows at the Basic level
• A/B testing emails is only available at the Enterprise level 

Lead Management: Do you need your HubSpot account to integrate with your CRM system? If so – a Basic account covers this need. Along those lines, lead scoring is another important feature to help manage your leads. Professional and Enterprise both allow for custom lead scoring. 

Landing Pages: All levels of HubSpot allow for forms and mobile optimization, which are both necessary features of a landing page. In addition to forms and optimization, Professional and Enterprise also have the ability for smart forms, smart content and progressive profiling. So what does all that mean?

• Smart Forms & Progressive Profiling: These are forms that help improve the user experience and conversion rates with returning visitors. If a user has previously submitted another form, their information is stored in HubSpot, and not only do they not have to re-fill in their information, the fields do not even appear.
• Smart Content: In smart content fields, you can provide different content or types of content (i.e. rich text fields, images, links, CTAs, etc.) to different users based on where they are in the marketing or sales cycle.

Calls-to-Action: Commonly referred to CTAs, HubSpot allows for custom CTAs at all levels. The catch here is that smart CTAs are not included in the Basic package. Similar to how smart content works, there are perks to using smart CTAs.  For example, if someone is reading your blog and sees a CTA for a Top of the Funnel  (TOTF) offer, they fill out the form and download your offer. Later you publish a new post on your blog, and instead of seeing that same TOTF CTA, they will be shown a Middle of the Funnel (MOTF) CTA. 

Finally, only the Enterprise level includes A/B testing for CTAs. This is a great feature that helps improve your click-through and conversion rates because you can create different versions of the same CTA and see which performed better.

In this post we took a look at what I would consider many of the “heavy-hitter” features within HubSpot. You can see a full breakdown of what each plan includes here: http://www.hubspot.com/pricing-comparison.

Are you currently on HubSpot? If so – which version are you on? If you realize you are missing out on some key features, feel free to reach out to chat more about potentially upgrading your account.

Another post by Lauren about marketing automation:
Marketing Automation & CRM: A Match Made in Heaven

Image: Inbound-Marketing-Fundamentals by Keith Gutierrez via Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0