Are HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Services Right For You?

If you are a marketing guru with loads of experience in the trade, you probably know all about inbound and outbound marketing. And the world absolutely needs people like you. But if you are like the rest of us, out there hustling, trying to get your product noticed and understood by the teeming masses, these terms are just more industry jargon gibberish.

Fortunately, Merchant Maverick is here to cut through the jargon for you! Basically, outbound marketing means pushing your sales message out far and wide, in hopes of connecting with a willing buyer. An inbound marketing methodology, on the other hand, means marketing yourself in such a way that customers naturally find their way to you, rather than employing more aggressive marketing efforts and strategies (like trade shows and cold calls).

What Is Hubspot?

Apps like HubSpot are designed to be the backbone of your inbound system. Visit the HubSpot website and you will see multiple references to the company’s commitment to inbound marketing. Specifically, HubSpot offers five Proseparate products that each address a distinct aspect of a business’s inbound marketing strategy:

1. Customer Relations Management (CRM)
2. Marketing Hub
3. Sales Hub
4. Service Hub
5. Content Management (CMS) Hub

What exactly do these products offer subscribers? And are HubSpot’s inbound marketing services right for you? Join us as we dive into the deep end of inbound marketing. We’ll cover HubSpot pricing, support, and more.

How Much Does HubSpot Cost?

HubSpot offers a range of price options, so you pay only for the services you need. The CRM tool is free, and each of the other tools also comes in a free version. If you want more functionality, you can add any (or all) of the paid plans. See each section below for information about what each different subscription level gets you.

If you’re interested in purchasing the total HubSpot package, you can choose a bundle option that delivers significant savings, especially at the higher levels.

Let’s dive into each hub and see what they’re all about.

HubSpot CRM

HubSpot’s CRM tool is free forever. Now, I have been writing and reviewing tech products for a while now, and I have come to expect a few things when I see the “free forever” label. Usually, a free version of a software has had most of the useful features removed. HubSpot’s CRM is not like that. There are no other subscription tiers, no other fees. HubSpot CRM is 100% free.

What Is HubSpot CRM?

Basically, this tool is designed to help you manage your interactions with customers. When adding a new contact into your database, the CRM begins cataloging every interaction. As you communicate with prospective customers, you retain access to your entire history with them. No more losing emails in the depths of your inbox. All the details are saved and easy to access.

In addition to the microscopic view of each contact, the CRM also provides you a broad perspective on your sales funnel. Using the dashboard, you can quickly identify which customers are locked in on the road to closing a deal and which ones might need more assistance. You can use this tool to automate those communications as well, ensuring no customer falls through the cracks.

How Much Does HubSpot CRM Cost?

The free HubSpot’s CRM is surprisingly robust. For example, you’ll be allowed to store up to 1 million contacts. And the $0 price tag cannot be beat.

HubSpot CRM Features

HubSpot’s generosity with this free program is surprising. When you use the HubSpot CRM — or any of HubSpot’s free versions — you gain access to all these tools, at no cost.

• Contact and data management
• See what contacts are doing on your website
• Records for every company in your database
• Store, track, and manage your sales team’s deals
• Store, track, manage, and report on tasks and activities with customers
• Insights about your customers’ companies
• Gmail and Outlook integration
• App Marketplace integration
• Custom fields
• View information about prospective customers who visit your site
• Log and assign customer issues as tickets
• Create forms to gather contact information
• Connect accounts from supported ad networks
• Shared inbox for incoming email and live chat that your whole team can access
• Detailed metric on sales activity and performance
• Email tracking and notification
• Create a bank of reusable answers to frequently asked questions
• Call prospects using VOIP through the hub
• Schedule meetings with customers
• Chat through Facebook Messenger

Who Should Use HubSpot CRM?

So do you need HubSpot’s CRM? If you are attempting to sell any sort of customizable product where different customers will receive individually tailored products, then you definitely want some kind of CRM service. And HubSpot’s is free. Not only that, but it works, and works well. So yes, you probably want to at least try it out.

HubSpot Inbound Marketing

You may have a way to manage your relationships with all your customers, but how do you get those customers in the first place? The obvious answer is that you need to market yourself somehow. Fortunately, HubSpot also offers an inbound marketing service that works seamlessly with their CRM product.

What Is HubSpot Marketing?

The idea of HubSpot’s marketing service is to attract customers organically by optimizing your website with original content. HubSpot provides drag-and-drop templates and a WYSIWYG editor you can use to create blog posts and email messages designed to look great across devices. As you create, you’ll receive SEO advice that helps your creations be seen, then use tools that encourage people to enter their information to your email list and start the customer relationship. You can even queue up a series of emails that automatically follow up with prospective customers until they make the decision to buy from you.

Keep in mind that you will need a website for this to work. If you’re using a hosting service like Squarespace or Wix, you will need to add a few lines of code (provided by HubSpot) to the source in order to integrate with HubSpot. If you use WordPress, on the other hand, you can simply install the HubSpot plug-in.

The Marketing tool connects with HubSpot’s CRM and other tools to automatically record and organize customer interactions. The more money you spend per month, the more automated this process becomes.

How Much Does HubSpot Marketing Cost?

You can start using HubSpot Marketing for free. If you like what you see, there are three paid plans you can upgrade to.

• Starter: Starts at $40/month, billed annually
• Professional: Starts at $800/month, billed annually
• Enterprise: Starts at $3,200/month, billed annually

HubSpot Marketing Features

The free version of the Marketing Hub gives you access to all the CRM features listed above. When you add a paid plan, you add more functions. The Starter plan includes these tools:

• Convert and capture leads
• List segmentation
• Email marketing
• Ad retargeting

The Professional plan allows you to access more features:

• Automate and personalize email
• Blogging, SEO, and social media tools
• A/B testing
• Call-to-action buttons
• Video hosting and management
• Traffic and conversion measurement

Finally, the Enterprise plan adds the icing on the cake with these features:

• Team and brand management
• Automated A/B testing using artificial intelligence and machine learning
• Revenue analysis and auto-triggered responses to customer actions

You can use the free-forever version of this product, but you may want to consider adding one of the paid plans to allow HubSpot’s inbound marketing abilities to shine. Most of the marketing that you will do with this product involves creating content that draws prospective customers to you.

Who Should Use HubSpot Marketing?

Do you need inbound marketing services through HubSpot? In my opinion, yes. The free version is impressive, so you may want to start there. I suspect you’ll soon find that the extra features offered are worth the subscription price of the paid plans. You’ll have to decide how much you want to spend on drawing customers to your site and converting them.

HubSpot Sales

So now you have a way to attract potential customers and manage your relationship with them. But really the whole point is to convert those leads and prospects into sales. Once again, HubSpot offers a product to fill that gap.

What Is HubSpot Sales?

The HubSpot Sales Hub is all about communicating with customers, nurturing leads, and centralizing the process of negotiation so you can focus on the warmest leads without sacrificing the others.

Like all of HubSpot’s products, the Sales Hub is built with centralization in mind. All your leads are kept in the same place, organized to prevent them from getting mixed up or lost. The focus in Sales, though, is on communication with customers. All subscribers gain access to HubSpot’s calls feature, which simplifies the process of scheduling phone meetings with customers. You also get access to powerful email marketing tools, allowing you to track which customers read your messages or downloaded your attachments.

How Much Does HubSpot Sales Cost?

The free version of this product is relatively viable and includes meetings, calls, task tracking, and more. However, by paying for a plan, you also gain features like live chat, prospects, and dedicated customer support. You can also automate your sales process, as well as unlock HubSpot’s excellent Salesforce integration. Here’s how the plans line up:

• Starter: Starts at $40/month, billed annually
• Professional: Starts at $400/month, billed annually
• Enterprise: Starts at $1,200/month, billed annually

HubSp0t Sales Features

In addition to the sales features available under the free program, you can choose to subscribe to a paid plan.

The Starter plan includes these features:

• Tools to track and manage your sales pipeline
• Call, schedule meetings, and live chat with customers
• Detailed sales and performance metrics
• Manage your sales team with quotas

The Professional plan adds the following features:

• Management tools for your sales team
• Create and schedule automated email followups
• Build a product library and track sales
• Calculate commissions and splits
• Add digital signatures to quotes

Finally, the Enterprise plan contributes these bells and whistles:

• Team management and control tools
• Rank and score sales leads
• Transcribe calls
• Custom sales reports

Who Should Use HubSpot Sales?

As with all HubSpot’s products, the free version of the software is definitely worth a try. There’s really no downside to using it. If you find you like your experience with the free version, consider paying a higher price for some more advanced features.

HubSpot Service Hub

HubSpot’s Service Hub is another square in the grand customer management quilt that HubSpot has created to cover all your sales and service needs. As with all their other products, the key to understanding the Service Hub is organization. The goal is that you will be able to keep all your customer interactions organized and arranged so that no one gets left out.

What Is HubSpot Service?

The Service Hub comes with several communication tools, including a live chat and enhanced email inbox to ensure your customers never feel ignored. Additionally, you can create a knowledge base of self-service articles to allow your more independent customers a chance to figure out their problems on their own. There is even a feature allowing you to create chatbots to increase the efficiency of your customer service interactions. And you can access comprehensive data insights to make sure you are getting optimal interactions every time.

How Much Does HubSpot Service Cost?

You can gain access to excellent basic customer service tools through the free version. If you want more features, take a look at the paid Customer Service plans.

• Starter: $40/month, billed annually
• Professional: $320/month, billed annually
• Enterprise: $1,200/month, billed annually.

As your plan price goes up, so does the number of features that come with it.

Hubspot Service Features

The Starter plan comes with these features, in addition to those offered with the free plan:

• Live chat
• Conversations inbox
• Calling through VOIP through your HubSpot account
• Conversation bots
• Connect team emails
• Automation triggered when tickets are received and closed
• Create a bank of premade responses to common questions
• Create and use email templates
• Schedule meetings
• Productivity and sales reports that show volume, category, and response times

The Professional plan adds these features:

• Ticket routing and status
• Task automation
• Split tickets into different pipelines, such as by product line or region
• Build a knowledge base of help articles for self-service
• Create and share personalized videos
• Custom reporting
• Surveys
• Insights dashboard

As with other hubs, the Enterprise gives you even more features:

• Build a library of “playbooks” to guide your sales team
• Create team goals for customer service
• Manage multiple teams and businesses
• Enable self-service through webhooks

Who Should Use HubSpot Service?

The Service hub will be most useful if you have a lot of customers every month. Of all the HubSpot products I have reviewed in this post, this is the one I would recommend most users skip, at least at first. Having said that, if your products require extensive customer service, this might be a great option for you.

HubSpot CMS

In the spring of 2020, HubSpot launched a new hub, this one aimed at content management. The CMS hub gives you the option of migrating your existing website or building a new one yourself or with the HubSpot team. Currently, a free two-week trial is offered, so you can test it out before you purchase a subscription.

What Is HubSpot CMS?

Content Management Software, or CMS, uses a database to manage all your online content. HubSpot’s CMS integrates with all the other hubs available to provide an all-in-one solution to sales organizations. It includes your website, blogs, and email, and it’s designed to be easy enough to use that non-technical marketing folk can edit and update. It comes with HubSpot hosting.

How Much Does HubSpot CMS Cost?

HubSpot CMS comes in two levels of paid plans. Currently, there is no free option.

• Professional: Starts at $240/month, billed annually
• Enterprise: Starts at $900/month, billed annually

HubSpot CRM Features

When you sign on with a CMS plan, you get access to a range of features, depending on which plan you choose. The Professional plan includes the following:

• Drag-and-drop web editor
• Website themes, pre-built or using modules, styles, and layouts
• Database-driven pages automatically generated and updatable
• SEO recommendations across your site
• Conversational bots to qualify leads, book meetings, and more
• Smart content and reports
• A/B testing on landing pages and other pages
• Contact attribution reports
• Content delivery network
• Reliable uptime
• Security monitoring
• Standard SSL certificate

When you upgrade to the Enterprise plan, you gain access to more features:

• Serverless functions like event registration and guest books
• Reverse proxy support
• Membership that restricts certain pages to groups like internal audiences or paying customers
• Scaling options including activity logging and custom dashboards
• Two brand domains
• Adaptive testing
• Accept multiple currencies

Who Should Use HubSpot CRM?

I wouldn’t rush to transfer to HubSpot CRM if you already have a website that’s doing well for you. However, if you’re looking to build a new website or to build a better website that delivers the sales you need, it’s worth giving HubSpot CRM a closer look. The 14-day free trial could be a good option in that case, letting you see how HubSpot’s CRM can enhance your website performance.

Why Choose Hubspot?

HubSpot provides products that cover every facet of customer interaction, from marketing and sales to leads to customer service to content management. Supporting all other products is the Hubspot CRM, which serves as the bedrock product that makes the others work smoothly.

But do you need HubSpot? Frankly, I think you do. If you are trying to market or sell a product on the internet today, you will want to use these kinds of products in some way, even if you use low-level or free subscriptions for some of them. The only possible exception would be the customer service hub, depending on the level of service required by your product.

Fortunately, most of HubSpot’s products have a free-forever option, so you can try before you buy. I recommend signing up and putting the different apps through their paces before committing to paying a monthly subscription.