HubSpot is synonymous with results-focused inbound marketing, and judging by the rich suite of marketing tools they offer for free, they rightly deserve it.
But apart from the widely used HubSpot CRM, just how far do you think HubSpot's free marketing suite can take your business?
Find out the collection of tools hidden in plain sight that will help you:
- Increase customer engagement across your marketing channels
- Generate more sales and drive predictable revenue
- Derive actionable insights for improved marketing efficiency
- Better automate your entire marketing machine
HubSpot Marketing Free: 5 Hidden Tools To Grow Your Business
- Lead generation forms
- Integration with Wordpress
- Live chat
- Customer support ticketing
- Custom insights reporting
You’re probably collecting your prospects’ contact information with forms (if not, you should be!). Approximately 50% of marketers say that website forms are their highest converting lead generation channels.
Designed as an easy-to-use solution, HubSpot forms enable you to:
Collect Website Leads With Minimal Friction
Used appropriately, web forms have proven to be the lowest hanging fruit in the digital marketing garden. Here's why: if a prospect is already browsing your website, it's assumable that they’re interested in your products or services and therefore, there's a good chance of closing them.
Combined with a good content strategy, web forms put relevant offers in front of customers at the exact moment they're interacting with related content (and possibly at an Aha! moment), increasing the possibility that they'll opt to know more.
Segment Leads
Based on answers collected from prospects via web forms you can segment your leads into specific groups such as persona, location, industry, company size, or pain point, providing a means to pre-qualify leads at the point of acquisition.
Additionally, proper lead segmentation at the acquisition stage ensures you're marketing relevant products and services to your prospects.
Pop Up Tool
Also worthy of note is the HubSpot popup form tool that lets you customize forms to appear as either a pop-up box, a drop-down banner, or a slide-in box. Other options include setting specific popup triggers that determine when visitors get served your popups, and as a result, increasing chances of them carrying out your target action.
PRO TIP: Your form strategy matters. The success of your lead generation efforts correlates directly with your form strategy. The number of questions you ask and the types of questions can both impact the volume and quality of leads you get. Here are some quick tips to nail your form strategy:
- Align the number of form fields with the value of the offer. For example, a new visitor that’s interested in a top of the funnel freebie may be deterred by a six-item form. On the other hand, a bottom-of-the-funnel lead who's ready to buy will readily fill out a six-item form. The more perceived value, the more effort a prospect will be comfortable spending on a form
- Only ask what you need. If you don’t plan to use the information to nurture the lead, don’t bother asking for it.
- Use progressive form fields. This means that a returning lead will see a new set of questions rather than filling out the same details.
2. INTEGRATION WITH WORDPRESS
If your website is built on WordPress, HubSpot's advanced free marketing suite enables you create a fully functional website lead generation system that tracks actionable impressions in real-time. By simply installing the HubSpot’s plugin on your WordPress site you'll be able to measure vital metrics such as traffic, average session length, bounce rates, etc.
What can HubSpot Analytics Do For Your Business?
When combined with information from the HubSpot CRM, HubSpot analytics enable you to see which of your prospects are visiting your website and when, enabling you to:
- Serve them personalized offers that are better aligned with their goals and needs and are more likely to get accepted faster.
- Address their individual objections.
A lead's interaction with your site offers insights on what their situation could be, making it easier to serve personalized deals that are more likely to be accepted.
- Know which of your services they're interested in and how to best market it to them. Since there's no one-size-fits-all in business, HubSpot's smart analytics can help you forecast which exact services prospects are interested in, making it easier to provide promotional offers such as upsells, discounts, etc for what they're already considering buying.
HubSpot enables you keep an eye on the leads already within your pipeline so you can focus on converting them faster.
3. live Chat
Compared to standalone live chat providers that may cost up to $1,000 per year, HubSpot's free marketing plan offers a high-end live chat app that lets you communicate with website visitors at the exact moment they're checking out your site.
It allows you to:
- Connect immediately with website visitors
- Provide a convenient method to get in touch (beyond a phone number, email, or form)
- Answer questions quickly
- Convert visitors into leads
The live chat functionality of the free marketing plan goes above and beyond by delivering a varied range of controls that gives you hands-on control. A few of the control options are the alternatives to show live chat pop-ups on certain pages and not on others, based on factors such as page content or gauged visitor intent. This ensures that you’re being helpful and assistive at the moment when a customer is looking to get an issue resolved.
Live chat has repeatedly proven to be an immense revenue booster for businesses by:
- Providing real-time customer feedback.
Why wait to run an A/B test to find out what customers think when you can ask them right away? Live chat lets you get instant feedback on what your prospects and customers think about your business and services.
- Increasing prospect-lead time by over 400%.
According to a study carried out by Drift, just a ten-minute delayed response to a prospect’s contact could decrease conversion rates by 80%, while slowly going to zero once 30 minutes elapses without a response. Conversely, being instant with customer outreach guarantees that you’ll capture up to 400% more customer inquiries and instantly begin funneling them down the pipeline as leads.
- Boosting customer satisfaction by over 90%.
If you had the option of either letting a business know what you think about your last purchase right now and without any stress or heading over to your email client to draft out a lengthy email that you’re almost sure no one will read, which would you prefer?
Live chat, of course!
And the same applies to your customers. Sure, you could handle customer outreach via other channels such as email and telephone, but when placed side-by-side with live chat, it grabs the trophy by giving customers the best experience in the least time.
Live chat lets you engage with customers like the real-life humans they are.
4. Customer Support Tickets
Whether you’re an entrepreneur, small business, or corporation, customer service plays a key role in ensuring your customers keep coming back and send referrals your way.
When customer issues arise, instead of having your customers write out lengthy emails, HubSpot provides a better alternative that not only enables you to handle support requests proactively but also, to efficiently organize your entire customer support structure for success.
Hubspot Marketing Free automates your customer support by plugging into the HubSpot CRM, ensuring that support tickets can be tracked and resolved easily by options such as:
Creating support tickets from conversation channels
Whether you're having a Messenger chat, live chat, or email conversation when a customer reports a support issue, you can immediately open a support ticket and attach it to your prospects' profile within your CRM.
This helps get you more proactive with addressing customer support issues across all your conversation channels, instead of sticking with phone calls.
Creating support tickets from contact profiles
Assuming a prospect calls or contacts via a medium that's not linked to your Hubspot CRM, HubSpot ticketing makes it possible to manually create support requests from the HubSpot dashboard and attach them to the relevant contact profile. Using pinned notes, you can post updates to a customer's request so that your entire team stays in sync regarding any particular support request.Support Delegation
Maybe you're not the right person for a support inquiry. Don't sweat it; delegate it to the most appropriate person on your team and follow through on the request's progress until it's resolved.
Feedback
You're only doing as well as your customers agree you are. With the feedback feature, you'll be able to instantly discover what your customers think about your support system and record any suggestions they might have.
Support Automation
With built-in analytics, HubSpot Marketing Free helps you uncover support requests trends. This way, you can create a knowledge hub where customers are directed to check out tips to get their issues resolved.While building your inbound marketing machine, outstanding customer service is your engine and HubSpot is the oil that keeps it functioning at maximum capacity - at no extra cost.
5. Custom Insights Reporting
Building on whatever data you have available on your prospects, HubSpot analyses it and generates detailed, actionable insights that enable you to gauge where you’re at in your marketing.
What's more, HubSpot Marketing Free lets you customize standard reports or create your own custom reports from scratch in order to get your own view on your marketing, creating
From traffic analytics that sync with the HubSpot website plugin to return detailed information on your website visitors, to the funnel report function that gets you a closer look at what’s going on in your funnels so you can track how exactly your prospects are interacting with your campaigns, HubSpot reports give you a use for all the data inevitably collected across channels, enabling you to diagnose any shortcomings in your marketing stack and to fix it fast.
Now, What?
Now, you have a better, broader idea that there’s more to HubSpot’s free marketing plan than meets the eye and that it’s the missing link between your business and marketing success.
