HubSpot Review

Detailed Reviews

HubSpot came into existence with the goal of assisting businesses to get bigger and better. They now provide a range of platforms which specialize in taking care of specific needs of a business. We will go through the one which helps with marketing and possibly skim across other tools along the way, as well.

Pros

• Multiple email campaign
• Allows A/B testing.
• Create and publish landing pages from the same platform.
• Helps with blogs.
• Automated workflow increases efficiency multi-folds.
• Incorporates the benefits of other HubSpot hubs.

Cons

• Not so easy on the pocket.
• Could have more provided more templates in most of the sections.

Introduction

HubSpot is one of the more prominent names when it comes to CRM, marketing, and sales. Some perceive it as a one-stop solution to take care of all their growth vows, whereas some think that HubSpot has got a better way of getting things done.

You may also find a selected few who may not speak so highly of this line of tools because of the pricing. HubSpot’s way of helping users is that they provide multiple tools to serve various purposes of an organization. The categories are CRM, sales, marketing, and services.

The one thing which attracts a lot of people towards these tools is that one can start for free. It’s apparent that there will be a lot of caps and limitations on the free version, but who would not want to get a taste of what one of the giants of the industry has got to offer.

Once you start feeling the need for some of the premium features of the service, you will have to shell out some bucks. In this review, we will be focusing only on one from the bunch, that is, HubSpot Marketing.

We will go through all the features on the free version, and then scale it up to the premium features to figure out if they are worth the price.

HubSpot’s way of working is that they try to provide all the possible tools in one place. It makes it difficult to compare them directly with any other tool since the scopes of both the tools end up being different.

Therefore, instead of trying to compare products, we will be comparing features. It will be interesting to find out if HubSpot fares well against the giants of their respective niches.

HubSpot markets itself as one of the innovations which take care of the needs of a customer. It elevates customer experiences to higher satisfactory levels, which ends up benefitting the organization.

We will keep a close eye at how good they are at taking care of the needs of customers. Even though the review will be focused on HubSpot marketing, we will have a brief look at other tools in HubSpot’s arsenal, as well.

By the end of this review, you will have a better idea if HubSpot is the right product for you, or if you can do away with other alternatives available in the market.

Setting up an account

Let us start from the very beginning. There are multiple ways for you to get started on HubSpot. We will take you through the steps that we had to follow because of the way our website is present out there.

They will first ask you if you are using WordPress for the website. We don’t use WordPress, but if were using it, then we might have got the suggestion to install the HubSpot plugin.

The subsequent steps involve you providing some more details about your website, goals, organization, role, etc.

Finally, they provided us with a tracking code to embed on our website. It will help HubSpot create better reports about the different campaigns and keep an eye on various developments.

HubSpot allows users to create and host websites on their platform. They offer a drag and drop website builder, which makes it extremely easy for users to create a brand-new website in no time.

The idea of creating a new website using HubSpot’s services may seem very enticing to a lot of users, but we would suggest you take any such step only after you have given a lot of thought to it.

Creating a website on the same platform may hamper down some or a lot of your mobility and freedom in the future. Make sure you do all the due research if you need to create a website from scratch.

HubSpot may provide you some excellent features if you host the website with them, but you need to be sure that you will stick with them for a long enough period or you will end up getting yourself into a lot more hassle.

Once the signing up process ends, they will provide you with some guides and tutorials to get familiar with the product. Following their lead is a better way to get to know the basic structure of the tool and how different features work.

The guide will also include brief introductions of the different hubs under HubSpot. And if you are new to this field, then it may help you identify the goals of the tool.

HubSpot comes with a simple, functional, and a neat interface. You get a top panel which shows the various sections of HubSpot’s marketing tool. You can navigate through them to find out about all the different things you can do on this platform.

On the right side of the top panel, you will get some of the usual options, such as the account button, notifications icon, settings button, etc.

Let us now jump into all these sections listed on the top panel and explore the tool.

Managing contacts

If you go through the extensive literature available on HubSpot academy and other sections, you will find out that they emphasize a lot on inbound marketing and consider it as one of the core values on which the tools are based.

To inbound marketing, there is an outbound marketing, as well. If we are to describe these two ways of marketing, then outbound marketing involves aggressive marketing techniques which may seem like forcing the product and services on users.

On the other hand, inbound marketing is considered a more gentle and empathetic approach. It involves providing something of value to the user to attract him toward the service.

If they adhere to sound inbound marketing techniques, can be a subject of debate, but it’s apparent that customers should get a lot of attention under such a mechanism.

Turning a website visitor into a customer is not a simple process. It will require you to showcase all the different ways in which your organization can be of some assistance to the visitor and show how a relationship can benefit both the parties involved.

The first step of such a process is to gather some contacts. It is after acquiring the contact that one can proceed with the subsequent steps to turn a contact into a lead and then into a customer.

You will encounter a lot of different ways in which you can source more contacts under the marketing hub. We will explore those ways in later parts of the review.

If you have already got a contact list of prospects or customers, you can import in on HubSpot.

The import feature on this platform is dynamic in nature. You can use it to import so much more than just some contacts in a list. It makes you go through a series of choices which include specifying the way you want to import data, the nature of data, and details of items included in the data.

You can import a contact list or an opt-out list. The opt-out list refers to those contacts which you want to exclude from your mailing list and campaigns. If you happen to have a list of users who you don’t want to be a part of your campaign, then you can import it as an opt-out list.

HubSpot asks if you will import only one file or a combination of them. It needs to know if there will be only one object listed in the file or multiple objects. Finally, you need to specify if you are importing contacts, company details, deals, tickets, or notes.

You can select one or many from the available options. The kind of options available while importing files should be enough to give you an idea of the scope of contacts section of HubSpot.

You can have details of organizations and business you are working with, import data from the previous outreach tool you were using, and notes section can be used to import various kinds of data forms. You will have plenty of options to import all kinds of information.

You can save contacts under lists. Depending upon the extent of information you have got about the contacts, you can easily filter them. When you select properties to filter contacts, you will get some more options to choose the way you want to use that filter.

For example, if you choose ‘City’ as a filter parameter, you can filter options which have a particular city mentioned in the field, by those which don’t have that specific city mentioned in the field, those for which the city is known, and those for which the city is unknown.

You can see how you get four different ways to classifying contacts from just one parameter.

You can use these contacts for various campaigns and processes. You can use them in the email marketing campaign, to send out offers and notifications on the application, move them from one stage of a process to another and so much more.

Let us now get into how we can add more contacts using some the marketing campaigns, and how to use the already stored contacts for different strategies.

Email marketing

Email marketing is one of the most reliable techniques for marketers when it comes to reaching out to customers and prospects. Everyone has an email account, and the user gets to choose when she wants to check her inbox.

The option of checking out emails ensures that users don’t feel as if they are being unnecessarily harassed. The current regulations, which make it necessary for marketers to provide the unsubscribe button along with the email, give the user more power to regulate the kind of emails he wants to receive.

Additionally, features such as double opt-in during the lead generation stage, add to the possibility of success of the campaign.

Emails are excellent for marketing, but they can also help in a lot of other sections. You can use email to cater an online course, deliver blog posts, and do so much more.

HubSpot provides three ways to send out emails. Let us see what all these different methods have got to offer.

Regular emails

As the name suggests, you can use this option to send out regular standard email. HubSpot offers two ways to create emails. You can either use the drag and drop editor or create custom emails.

Under the custom email option, you can either create simple plain text emails or use the HTML editor to create more sophisticated ones.

But if you are like most marketers, the ones who are not so proficient in computing languages and do not prefer simple plain texts, then you can go for the drag and drop editor. It is a norm on all the email marketing tools anyway.

HubSpot’s drag and drop editor will welcome you with some templates. The templates come in two categories; basic and more. The basic type will offer you some minimalistic and dull email templates for various purposes. You will find labels such as promotion, simple, newsletter, etc.

The next category of emails will offer some slightly better labels and a lot better email templates. The ones under this category are much more colorful and appealing compared to the ones in the previous group.

However, if you look at the template options present on some of the prominent email marketing tools, HubSpot hasn’t got so much to offer. The number of templates is limited.

But it was never a wise move to rely solely on templates. You can use the editor to create some beautiful emails on your own.

HubSpot provides a twin-panel email editor. On the left-hand side, you will get all the items you can add on canvas. The buttons go like image, text, button, etc.

There are some building-block elements under the layout section. You can use it to create exciting designs. You get the customization options for a component on the right panel only. You need to select the item on the canvas for the purpose.

There is a design tab which helps take care of all the formatting options. You can change templates from within this tab, change text styles, and take care of buttons and dividers.

The editor is easy enough to use, and the intuitiveness somewhat makes up for the lack of template options.

When you are done creating the email body, you can take care of the rest of the settings. You can manage the sender’s credentials, subject, preview text, internal email name, and so much more.

Finally, you can send out the email or schedule it for later. You can choose an appropriate list or enter contacts manually. Most email marketing tools come with a feature called segments. It allows one to apply filters over one or multiple mailing lists.

One can then save a segment, which will always check for items in the segment to satisfy all the filter conditions. It makes segments dynamic as contacts are automatically added and removed from a segment depending on the filters.

HubSpot provides no such feature. You will have to apply filters on each list and save contacts separately. You will also need to keep repeating the process each time you will want the list to be refreshed.

However, they allow for A/B testing. You can have two variants of the email and test them out. There is no limitation on the differences between the variants. You can create entirely different emails for the two test cases.

HubSpot has done a few things right with the split test, which a lot of email automation tools tend to miss. You can vary the distribution of emails. The test mails will go out in the same proportion, but you can choose what portion you want to dedicate to testing.

You can be specific about the winning metric. The three options for winning parameter are open rate, click rate, and click through rate. You can also specify a time limit for the test.

All these parameters can be easily modified, and you should not have much trouble testing out the emails.

Automated emails

You can also automate emails on HubSpot. You can create some relevant emails for different occasions and create workflows around them.

Automated emails are only a subset of Workflows on HubSpot. It includes setting up triggers and different responses based on the action and inaction of users.

Since HubSpot comprises of such a wide variety of tools, it is obvious that an automated workflow on HubSpot will have so many elements.

We have dedicated an entire section to Workflows on HubSpot. You will get a better understanding of the need and ways to set up emails to go out automatically.  

Blog/RSS

Blogs are becoming increasingly common on websites. Gone are those days when blogging websites used to have a separate niche. Since blogs help so much with the SEO side of things, websites and services tend to have a blog section.

Another advantage of having a blog includes better connectivity with the target audience and the presence of some good literature on the website to assist users.

Whether you have a blogging website or if it is just a part of the grand scheme of things, sending out emails for new blog posts is a common and widespread trend.

Using automated emails and RSS feed in tandem is among the easiest ways to take care of the task. HubSpot has a blog/RSS section for blogs.

It is similar to creating any other email on the tool. The only difference will be that you will have to specify the blog feed before you get to the editor.

Once the feed URL is accepted, you will get all the same template options and the same editor to modify the elements.

You can select the contacts and lists to who you want to send the email, and also pick the ones you want to exclude from the mailing list. You can set the send frequency of the mails, as well.

There is no option to ensure that emails go out only when there is a certain number of them in the pipeline. HubSpot could have been a bit more creative with scheduling and sending option in this case.

Landing pages and blogs

One of the primary goals of marketing is lead generation. You want to have a rich list of contacts who are more likely to be interested in your service. Having such a list means that not only the sales team will find it easier to close the deal, but the deals are highly likely to benefit users since they have already shown some interest in the topic.

Blogs and landing pages are among the most widely used tool when it comes to lead generation. We just explained how blogs are a good way of connecting with the audience, and one can leverage the influence of the blog for other deals and pitches.

Landing pages are slightly different beasts when compared to blogs. They highlight and illustrate the feature of the service or the product, but emphasize on the user taking action, which is usually beneficial for the service provider.

The action would also benefit the user since she would like all the features on the landing page, and therefore, feel compelled to take action.

HubSpot allows users to create both landing pages and blog posts. In fact, you can also create web pages on this platform.

But we would stick to the options used more often by users.

Blogs

You can create blogs directly on HubSpot and publish them. There is nothing spectacular about a website allowing you to create a blog and post content. One can find plenty of ways to create blogs.

But since you get to create blogs on the same platform where you are working on a lot of other aspects of marketing, it becomes less of a hassle to create blogs.

You will be offered two ways in which you can create blog posts. The first one is draft mode.

Draft mode separates the part where you create content for the blog from the part where you take care of other aspects such as design and scheduling.

It starts with space for you to enter the title and content for the post. You will also find some formatting options in the same space. So, you can insert images and links, inserts bullets, etc.

One doesn’t need to worry much about the appearance of the blog or what elements will be present above or below it.

You can move to the editing section when you are done with the draft. This part will provide you a wide range of tools to improve both the quality and appearance of the blog.

You can see how the post will appear on screens with different aspect ratios. You will get some SEO recommendations from the builder, which will help your post rank better on search engines.

The recommendations will deal with the layout of the blog, meta descriptions, tags, word count, alignment, and so much more. You can also edit the different modules on the blog.

The next tab is for the user to mention the author, tags, campaign, and other related attributes of the blog. You can take care of the featured image, the one which will appear when you share the blog on different platforms.

The other way of creating blogs is inline edit mode. The only difference between the inline edit mode and the draft mode is that you can do all at one place in the latter one. There won’t be a separate section for writing down the content of the blog.

You can type in the content along with the recommendations and manage the settings along the way.

The blog section may make things a lot easier for users, especially the ones who are not much exposed to all the dos and don’ts of blogging.

Landing pages

Most people using the ‘Website’ section will be much more interested in this part. Landing pages are great for lead generation, sales, and whatever requires the customer or the visitor to take some action.

One can create a landing page even to get some petitions signed.

The landing pages you will create under HubSpot Marketing will be for lead generation. The primary focus, in this case, would be to get the users to fill up the entries and provide their contact details.

Creating landing pages is a straightforward affair in this case. You get plenty of template options for landing pages. You can find the ones available for free, or you can also pay for some of the more high-end and sophisticated ones.

All the templates follow the ideal layout for a landing page. You will find the selective placement of the CTA (Call To Action) button. And the page will have only the most important links. There won’t be any uncalled distractions, and the visitor will find it easier to take action you want her to take.

On selecting a template, you will reach the editor. A lot of the options will be the same as what we saw in the editing section of blogs. You can once again check the responsiveness of the page by looking at how it appears on different screens.

The optimization section is also there reminding you to take care of the SEO settings, adding alt text to images, and keeping the link count in check.

The most useful part would be where you get to edit modules. To take care of any section on the page, you either need to select the section or pick the module from the editing panel.

Depending on the nature of the panel, you will get appropriate modification options. The settings page will let you take care of the title, meta description, tag, header, footer, etc.

Once done, you can publish the landing page at the same time or schedule it for later.

You can achieve a lot with all the options available in the landing pages section. There are enough template options, there is an intuitive editor, and there is a recommendation section to take care of the SEO side of things.

We don’t think one could have asked for more from this section.

Automated Workflows

Automated workflows have now become highlights of a lot of services. More and more tools are now including this feature to flex upon others. The autoresponders of email marketing tools and chatbots of live chat software are among some examples of automation on services.

Since HubSpot encompasses such a wide variety of tools under its umbrella, you would expect the automation feature to incorporate the advantages of those tools.

The more features they allow to use in automation, the easier it will become for the user to delegate tasks to automated workflows and spend more time on other activities.

There are plenty of reasons for you to assign boring and repetitive tasks to automation. It will work tirelessly and continuously, and there won’t be any human errors involved, as well.

For instance, if you want to send a welcome email to everyone who joins your mailing list, the automation seems to be the most appropriate and effective way to take care of the tasks. With automation, you won’t have to manually send an email each time someone joins the community.

Autoresponders will deal with all the new subscriptions promptly, irrespective of the time of the day. And if you are particular about the time at which welcome emails go out, then you can set the autoresponder to send out the mail at a specific time too.

Autoresponder is among the simplest examples of possible automations on HubSpot. It is just the tip of an iceberg.

You can create comprehensive and long automation sequences of HubSpot. Sequences which would involve actions, use logic, branch out into different categories, and do so much more.

You get the option to create two kinds of automation on HubSpot marketing. The first one is Workflows, and other ones are called Sequences.

Sequences involve you sending out a set of emails in a specific order and with a set time gap between subsequent emails.

Now we have some exciting and some not-so-exciting news for you. The latter one is that ‘Sequences’ can only be used when subscribed to a starter pack. Therefore, we were not able to test out the feature.

And the good news is that we had access to ‘Workflows’ in the trial offer of the pack we were testing out. As we go on to explain the scope of workflows, you will realize that sequences are merely a subset of them.

Even though you will not have everything on a platter when creating an email sequence using workflows, you will end up getting the same results in the end.

Let us now get into the workflows and find out what else we can automate other than email sequences.

When you start creating a workflow, you will realize that you will have plenty of options right from the beginning. Right from the option of choosing triggers to the various actions you can take.

Any workflow will have a trigger event to start with. A trigger event depicts events or actions taken by visitors or customers. You can choose the kind of trigger event which will initiate the workflow.

One can be extremely specific when it comes to describing such an event. You will get the option to choose a trigger event from five different categories. The options include contact-based, company-based, deal-based, ticket-based, and quote-based.

These options also show the vast range of functions covered by HubSpot. Depending upon the tool you will be using, some of these trigger options might be inaccessible for you.

You might get some more options for triggers depending upon the parent trigger you choose.

Once you choose the trigger, you will reach the canvas or the editor for the workflow. Here, you will get to design the roadmap for the subsequent actions of the workflow.

HubSpot allows you to set goals for a workflow. We don’t encounter this part very often when going through automations. One may, at times, miss the whole point of setting up a workflow. The goal may act as a guiding beacon in such case, especially when the workflow tends to be a long one.

You will get to specify the trigger event by clicking on it. The available options will be based on the choice you made at the beginning. After defining the trigger event, you can go on and add the next event in the workflow.

Sticking to its theme of providing options, HubSpot will give a lot of options for subsequent events. They have even sorted them under various categories.

The first category is building blocks. It contains delay and branching events. These blocks do not signify any significant event but can have important roles. As the name suggests, you can have the delay event to add a buffer, and the other one to take care of two possible outcomes in the workflow.

Delay events are helpful in cases when you don’t want to overwhelm a user with a series of emails. You can introduce appropriate time gaps between two mails or any other event in this case.

If/then branch events will help you incorporate different outcomes that may arise from any event. For instance, you might have different strategies for recipients who click on the link provided in the email and those who don’t.

The next set of blocks is labeled Productivity. These ones have got more to do with internal affairs and collaborating between various team members.

One can create tasks, send internal SMS, and send out notifications using these blocks. You can notify the sales team if you successfully acquired a lead or you can create tasks for some member to modify the subject of emails since the current one is not good enough to even make the users open the email.

Marketing blocks allow one to send out emails, to both users as well as team members. You will also find the blocks to add and remove contacts from the static list. Needless to say that these can come in handy in lead generation campaigns.

The next two block categories are Sales and Service. You can create and rotate deals with the blocks under sales and generate tickets with the service one.

Contact properties and Company Properties follow these categories. You can change some attributes for contacts and companies saved in your database. There are blocks for creating new properties, clear properties, and to copy properties, as well.

These blocks will help you mark contacts appropriately, and therefore, allow you to keep a close eye on all the modifications.

Finally, there is a block category for Triggers, if you feel like introducing more triggers to the workflow.

You can create an incredibly complex and efficient workflow using all these blocks. It’s easy to edit all these blocks and be very specific with what you want from the workflow.

If we are to be extremely skeptical of the tool, then there is one thing missing. One can’t create loops in the workflow. Some workflow automations allow you to have control over how you connect nodes between various block.

Such a feature entertains the possibility of creating loops in the workflow if you wish steps to be repetitive. However, it is not that big of a deal-breaker, especially considering all the tricks you get to have up your sleeves while creating workflows on HubSpot.

Reports, analytics, and the dashboard

Once you start using the software, you would want to see fruition for all your efforts. The reports section can help you understand whatever data you were looking for.

They provide multiple analytics tools for you to assess the performance of campaigns and processes at all stages. You can generate detailed reports for these and customize them according to your requirements.

Let us go through some of the tools available on this platform.

The first one is Traffic Analytics. This one will show you all the parameters affecting the traffic on your website. You can formulate relations between the traffic and parameters by analyzing the trends and numbers.

Traffic analytics comes with multiple sections. The first section is ‘sources,’ and it gives you a breakdown of traffic sources. You get to see what percentage of traffic is from referral and how much of it is from direct sources.

You can see the trends for both kinds of traffics and figure out what strategies and campaigns have been working good for you.

The next section on this tool is topic clusters. This one is more focused on keywords which can help with SEO. You will keyword difficulty, keyword suggestions, search volumes, etc. You can get more specific by choosing regions for these results, and therefore, stay focused on your target audience.

The next section would be pages. You must have already guessed that it helps users analyze individual pages and their performance. You can differentiate between various categories of pages such as landing pages, blogs, website pages, etc.

Since it is possible to have different expectations and parameters for different pages, things only get easier if you can assess them separately.

The next tool available in your arsenal would be Website Analytics. You can consider it a more advanced and glorified version of the one we just covered. This time you can analyze individual pages and websites not only for views but for other metrics as well.

Depending on the kind of website you have and the type of content structure it has, you can check for submissions, click through rates, new contacts, time on page, and a lot of other parameters for the website.

Once again, you get the option to apply various filters to make the results more appropriate for you.

The next tool is Campaign Analytics. You can create and add campaigns into this tool to keep an eye on the progress.

To make things easier, you can be specific about what is it that you are investing in the campaign, and what kind of results you expect to get in return.

You can mention the intended goals of a campaign, such as if you want more traffic or want to have more sales. They allow you to specify budgets and assets for the campaign.

You can create tracking URL’s after you have dealt with the specifics of the campaign. This particular tool provides a very convenient and effective way to make sure your campaigns keep doing well.

Marketing email analytics gives you a detailed overview of all kinds of emails you have sent. You can analyze the performance of individual campaigns or assess email marketing campaigns having a lot of them.

It will show you the open rate and click-through rates for emails. You can see how many of the contacts unsubscribed and how many reported the email as spam. The performance of emails can also be assessed over time for these metrics.

It lists out the top emails making it easier for you to identify common agents across all the better performing emails.

Finally, there is Contact Analytics. It will give you the number of contacts you have and break them down under sources for those contacts. The listed contact sources can be referrals, direct traffics, and offline sources.

Based on this data, you will know which section needs more effort and which one is doing well for the lead generation campaign.

These analytics tools provide a lot of details about the element they deal with. So much of information may not always be necessary. You can always have what is necessary in the reports.

HubSpot lets you create custom reports where you can add specific data charts. You can create multiple custom reports for various sections.

You can customize the dashboard in the same manner. You can have those charts readily available which you feel like looking at more often than others. You can eliminate the need to get into the reports section again and again with customized dashboards.

There is so much under the HubSpot umbrella

Most of you might know that HubSpot assists users with more than just marketing. There are other parts which help with sales, services, and other related fronts. HubSpot CRM takes care of a mind-boggling number of subjects and areas.

Even though this was only a review of the HubSpot Marketing hub, it would be unfair not to talk about other parts, especially when these are inter-related in one way or the other.

Sales

Selling more products or getting more clients for the service are among the fundamental goals of any business. However, it is not as easy to reach these goals as much as it is to define them.

There are so many variables when one gets out to acquire some sales. The process begins way before a sales representative contacts a potential customer. There is a lead generation process which involves identifying the potential clients and getting their contact info.

We have already seen how HubSpot can assist with the lead generation process. For sales, they follow a slightly different approach to help users.

One of the sections under the sales tab is deals. The idea behind this section is that everyone follows a set process to close a deal.

This process can be divided into various stages. The length of this process and the number of stages may vary from one organization to another, and they may even vary from one sales executive to another within a team.

You can have these sections as columns of a table and place contacts and leads into a column depending on the progress stage for that contact. It is equivalent to a Kanban system where one can move the project through various stages of completion.

You will find some columns already present in the section. These contain the standard processes in any sales process. You can use the existing one or modify it according to how you deal with stuff.

The major advantage of using such a system is that you can get a lot of things done automatically. For instance, if you want a specific member of the team to get notified when a user shows interest in a particular service, you can set the column to send out notifications automatically.

Imagine how easy it would be to get things done if you can change tags, create tasks, send out emails, notify others, etc. by merely moving a contact from one column to another.

The deals section can help increase efficiency multi-folds, reduce errors, and keep everyone on the same page.

The next section under the sales tab is ‘tasks.’ Getting things done is all about getting tasks done. With the help of this section, you can create specific tasks for individuals and teams in the organization.

You can specify dates, deadlines, and so much more in these tasks. It can be for the marketing team to come up with a new email template, for someone in the sales team to reach out to a prospect, for someone to update offers, and so on.

There is a documents section in which you can place all the data that you may need to pull out when conversing with a potential customer or something which you need for reference quite often.

With this section, you can have all the necessary files at one place and skip the part where you switch from one folder to another looking for a file.

There is a section to take care of meetings and appointments. Instead of conversing over a series of emails and messages to decide upon a suitable time for meeting or a phone call, you can simply show the empty slots in your calendar to the lead.

It helps both the parties reach a conclusion much faster and fast track the process. In some cases, time can be of the essence, and this feature will help you be efficient when necessary.

Services

Marketing hub was there to help find potential buyers, customers, and clients for your products and services. With the sales hub, you were able to turn a lot of these prospects into actual deals to benefit the organization.

However, all is not done even when someone subscribes to your service or buys one of your products. You want the subscribers to stay subscribed, and the customers to keep returning to you.

It means that you need to show the same interest in addressing a client’s issues as you showed when they were mere prospects. It will not only help you keep that particular client interested in your service but probably help reel in a few more. After all, there can be nothing more appealing than the word of mouth advertisement.

Some service providers may be so confident about the thing they have to offer, that they may not put much thought to what happens in case things go down south for a few instances.

With HubSpot services section, you can create a robust mechanism to deal with customer grievances and assist them when necessary.

There is a tickets section, where you can keep track of all the issues registered by users and assign them to competent individuals in the support team.

You can ensure that help is provided at the right time and in a professional manner so that there is no damage to the organization and its reputation.

There are so many things worth discussing under the scope of Service hub, that we can have a separate review for that section.

One can be exceptionally productive using all these different tools from HubSpot. However, they are not so easy on the pocket, especially for smaller organizations.

You might find some features to unlock only when you subscribe to one of the expensive plans. The return of investment may vary from one organization to another since the needs can be different.

Conclusion

This conclusion is not a wrap-up of how we feel about all the HubSpot tools collectively, but only for the Marketing hub.

There is no doubt that it provides a wide range of tools to take care of most of your marketing needs. They covered email marketing, forms, blogs, landing pages, and so much more that one doesn’t expect to see on a marketing tool.

There are some apparent benefits of HubSpot’s expertise in other areas, such as sales and services. Everything you do is entirely scalable and integrable with other hubs in the ecosystem.

There were a few noticeable shortcomings here and there. For instance, one can’t create or make use of segments for sorting contacts. It makes the whole process of picking the right contacts a bit longer and tiring.

They could have provided a few more templates and customization options for forms and landing pages. We would have loved to see the possibility of creating loops in the automated workflows. Things could have been even better if we were allowed to move events just by dragging them around on the canvas.

These were the only few areas of improvement we were able to find on the Marketing hub. The positives clearly outweighed the shortcomings since almost everything else was a noteworthy feature.

One can easily create different kinds of emails and launch campaigns. You can expect some great assistance when creating forms or landing pages. They would even help you take care of blogs.

The automated workflow turned out to be a great avenue to gel together all the features of Marketing Hub at one place. The analytics section is a great help when it comes to keeping a close eye on all the progress.

If your needs are such that you might be a using most of the sections on the hub, then it makes a lot of sense to subscribe to it. And if not, then there are some excellent alternatives out there to take care of individual sections.