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For years, HubSpot Marketing Hub has been the go-to tool for marketers worldwide looking to connect all their relevant marketing information on a single platform.
However, with 50+ different features in this Hub alone, getting the hang of things can sometimes be overwhelming (especially if you’re new to HubSpot).
But no matter whether you’re new to the platform or have been using HubSpot for years now, it’s always a good idea to see how other brands are taking advantage of the world’s leading CRM.
So far, we’ve gathered feedback from 75 brands and wanted to share some preliminary results that you might find useful… so let’s dive in!
Here are the 10 best features of HubSpot that marketing customers can’t live without in 2023:
This article is a part of Databox’s broader research with SmartBug Media on “How Companies Actually Use HubSpot.” We’re still open to contributions and would love to hear your insights. Take the survey now to access preliminary results and have a chance to be featured in our final report. We also invite you to join SmartBug’s Benchmark Group for Top Performing HubSpot Customers
Looks like there’s one big common interest among all HubSpot marketers – email marketing.
According to our research, HubSpot’s email marketing feature is one that marketers used the most over the past quarter.
HubSpot email marketing tools cover all the important aspects of an email marketing campaign, from automated workflows to detailed reports and analytics.
For starters, there’s a range of customizable email templates to help users create visually appealing and effective campaigns. The user-friendly drag-and-drop interface allows marketers to easily design and customize their emails without requiring any coding skills.
HubSpot also offers content personalization features through tokens, allowing you to insert recipient-specific information (such as their name) into the email body, subject line, or other parts of the message.
Marketers can use the segmentation feature to divide their email list into smaller, targeted groups based on specific criteria, such as demographics, behavior, or engagement history.
Next up, you can set automated workflows based on specific user actions. For instance, you can send a welcome email to new subscribers, follow up with leads that have interacted with your content, or create cart abandonment sequences.
Lastly, to track the performance of your email campaigns, you can use HubSpot’s built-in analytics and reporting tools. These tools provide insights into metrics like open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and a lot more.
Noel Cabral of NoelCabral says that the email features “empowered us to streamline our communication with leads and clients.”
“By setting up automated workflows for email marketing, lead nurturing, and follow-ups, we’ve significantly improved efficiency and engagement. This has allowed us to effectively nurture leads throughout their journey, resulting in a 25% increase in lead-to-customer conversion rates.”
Luke Hancock of Bin There Dump That also mentioned how automated sequences are one of his favorite HubSpot features because it allows him to “ensure that the right message gets to the right person at the right time.”
“When someone opts into our email list, a sequence of follow-up emails is automatically triggered based on a marketing automation workflow we’ve created. These emails provide value and educate prospects on our services, with the goal of converting them into customers down the line.”
Want to get more insights? With Databox, you can use this free HubSpot Email Marketing Overview Dashboard template to track and measure the overall performance of your email marketing efforts. Track emails sent, opened, and clicked, as well as your overall open rate, click rate, and more.
Crafting persuasive landing pages is no easy feat, but things get even more complicated when you need several of them to test and refine to get the conversions at an optimal level.
HubSpot can be of huge help with this, and the main upside is that you can do it yourself without hiring any developers or designers.
The platform provides an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor that lets you quickly customize the layout and add images, videos, forms, and other interactive elements.
Once you have several landing page examples ready, you can use HubSpot’s A/B testing features to experiment with the different variations until you find the one that best resonates with your audience.
And if you’re creating a lead capture landing page, you can use the CRM integration to automatically populate your CRM with prospect data as you collect their information on the page.
Paul Eddison of Instant A.I. Prompt says that he loves how “consistently straightforward and user-friendly” the landing page feature is.
“You can create landing pages, web pages, and blog posts using nearly the same user interface, which makes the platform feel familiar to you.”
Anthony Guerriero of Manhattan Miami Real Estate agrees and adds that the landing page feature allows them to “modify the page according to our business agenda and customer interest”.
He also mentions that the thing he likes most is “how it helped us gain more leads, without any additional support.”
Like most marketers and marketing managers, you want to know how well your efforts are translating into results each month. Which sources generate the most traffic and leads? Creating a comprehensive report takes time and a lot of data combining, but with our free dashboard, you can have it ready in just a few clicks.
Our HubSpot Leads by Source Dashboard includes data from HubSpot Marketing with key performance metrics like:
New Contacts by Source – identify your most effective lead generation channels by digging into the number of new contacts acquired from various sources within a defined period of time with this plug-and-play free HubSpot Leads by Source Dashboard.
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your HubSpot account with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
We’ve briefly touched on workflows when discussing email marketing, but this HubSpot features covers a broader marketing area than just email sequences.
When properly set up, HubSpot workflows can make your marketing life a whole lot easier.
You can use workflows to automate various tasks, including email campaigns, list segmentation, lead routing, assigning properties, sending notifications, and more. All you need to do is set up the specific criteria that trigger the action needed for the workflow to begin.
What’s more, you can integrate HubSpot’s workflows with other popular tools like Slack and Zoom.
Kevin Lamberth of Central Carolina Scale says that the workflows feature is his favorite because it’s “easy to use, makes our jobs easier, and gives customers and prospects better experiences.”
“Our business has been able to scale as our teams and responsibilities have increased thanks to the automation of previously manual chores made possible by workflows. HubSpot workflows have been used to do tasks once or repeatedly as contacts or businesses match the required criteria.”
His strategy is to “route leads to sales, construct lists and segment them and run email nurturing programs all using HubSpot workflows. Furthermore, we can now instantly alert our team members to updates, such as new leads or chats, thanks to the Slack integration.”
Rubia Naseem of Rubia Naseem shares the sentiment, “My favorite feature in HubSpot has to be the automated marketing workflows.” She goes on to explain how this feature has been a game-changer for their team, allowing them to segment their audience and deliver targeted content at the right time. “It’s saved us countless hours and has significantly improved our customer engagement metrics.”
Abhi Bavishi of Zopto says that he first “enriches data points in the background and then builds workflows on top of it.”
“That way, I can use HubSpot as my database, enrich the information using external APIs like Apollo, and build highly profitable lead acquisition or nurturing funnels that run on auto-pilot.”
“I first enrich the data points in the background and then build workflows on top of it. That way, I can use HubSpot as my database, enrich the information using external APIs like Apollo, and build highly profitable lead acquisition or nurturing funnels that run on auto-pilot.”
Abhi Bavishi
Growth Marketer at Zopto
Want to get highlighted in our next report? Become a contributor now
HubSpot’s analytics and reporting capabilities are crucial when understanding your marketing campaigns’ performance.
You can create dashboards with a centralized view of your key data points and have the information set up in a visual and easy-to-understand format.
Marketers can monitor various marketing areas and metrics, from website traffic, lead generation to conversion rates and email engagement.
And one of the main advantages is the ability to track the entire customer journey. From the first touchpoint to the final conversion, you can follow the path that leads take through their interactions with the brand. This holistic view is great for better understanding user behavior and identifying areas for improvement.
Furthermore, you have real-time reporting, allowing you to access up-to-the-minute data on campaign performance.
Jonathan Delfs of ELISA.io specifically mentioned using traffic analytics to get a “better overview of traffic, leads, and conversions.”
“This is important information – and helps us make more robust marketing plans and sales funnels. In this way, we can analyze and evaluate our marketing efforts and build more content for those channels essential to us. Both paid and organic. In both the upper and lower funnel, we tend to see organic search as a driver of important traffic for our customer’s first and final visits before converting into a free trial or demo.”
He adds that “this information is vital. And we need to keep track of it in traffic analytics as well as in our sales dashboard. We see that customers have thought about our tools and services before they even contact us or book a free demo. This adds some ease to the sales flow and converts customers better.”
“We would be lost without this information, and we would be using too much time on highest hanging fruit – instead of them hanging the lowest.”
Interested in more comprehensive HubSpot marketing tracking? Download this free HubSpot Marketing Dashboard template and gain insights that can help you increase traffic, convert leads, and prove ROI.
HubSpot’s form builder solution allows marketers to create and embed forms on websites, landing pages, and other digital touchpoints to capture lead information.
The form builder interface is also based on a drag-and-drop principle, and you can easily add and customize form fields, questions, and formatting options.
A major benefit of this feature is that forms can be connected to contact databases, which leads to an automatic population of lead data. This integration also extends to marketing automation workflows, ensuring the data collected through forms can trigger personalized follow-up actions and communication.
To ensure maximum conversions, each element on the landing page needs to be optimized – and that includes even the CTA button at the end.
HubSpot knows this, so they also include a CTA Builder inside the Marketing Hub.
With the CTA Builder, you can quickly and easily create your brand’s own CTA buttons using drag-and-drop editing. You can upload custom designs, use custom templates, or build a button from scratch.
Once you finish creating the CTA, you can easily insert it into specific landing pages, blog posts, or emails to test them out.
HubSpot allows you to monitor the performance of all of your CTAs in one comprehensive dashboard, so you can easily track how many clicks and conversions each button is getting.
Related: How to Write a Call to Action: Increase Your Conversions with 16 Proven Tips for Crafting CTAs
Reporting is one of the biggest headaches in marketing (we should know *wink*).
But HubSpot can lend a helping hand here as well.
With HubSpot reports, you can get a birds-eye view of various metrics and KPIs that are essential for making informed decisions about your marketing strategy and fine-tuning it.
For easy review and analysis, you can connect the platform’s attribution, out-of-the-box, and custom reports to your existing dashboards.
When your reports are ready, you can email them to team members or shareholders, modify them for different dates, or limit the access to only a few members. The important thing is that you can use them to instantly check real-time customer data and identify room for improvement.
Like every other HubSpot interface, reports are fairly simple to create, and you should be able to collect your most important data within just a few minutes instead of spending hours doing it manually.
Michel Bonvanie of Webiteers is one of the respondents that mentioned reporting as one of the “most helpful tools.”
“This is because most of the data is integrated within HubSpot, and it is quite easy and intuitive to set up. It gives our company and the clients we work with more insights on how the business is moving forward.”
Mike Rumble of LieDetectorTest agrees and adds that reporting allows him to “get an aggregated view of my marketing activities, gain insights into customer interactions, and make data-driven decisions quickly.”
Related: HubSpot Reporting: How to Use HubSpot to Build Better Reports for Your Department
Are you consistently generating enough leads for your sales teams?
If not, you can take advantage of HubSpot’s lead capture capabilities to simplify the process. We already discussed using the form builder as a starting point, but HubSpot’s lead capture capabilities go much further than that.
Once your forms start collecting visitor information, you can use HubSpot’s CRM to organize that data automatically and build different segments for your email marketing or retargeting campaigns.
This is a huge relief from having to spend hours in different apps and spreadsheets to Frankenstein the data together. Instead, the lead capture software instantly funnels the information into the CRM and gives all marketing team members access.
Furthermore, you can use scoring to prioritize “good leads” based on specific criteria you set up. The lead management software lets you store all contact details in a single place, including the lead’s first brand interaction, history, company information, progression timeline, and more.
This later helps your sales team organize their time better by focusing on high-intent leads.
Lucas Vitale of SEO Assistance says the lead management capabilities basically provide a “centralized database for managing contacts and leads, and it has allowed us to store and organize essential information about our prospects and customers.”
This feature enables Lucas to “have a comprehensive view of our customers’ interactions, track communication history, and effectively manage our marketing pipeline.”
Nick Leffler of TechStructional integrates HubSpot with WordPress to get data from other form plugins and is impressed with how well he’s able to track leads.
He says that HubSpot “includes where the lead came from as well as their path on a WordPress website. That, tied together with all the tracked contact points and phone integration, makes it a great tool to track lead journeys.”
“The lead management capabilities basically provide a centralized database for managing contacts and leads, and it has allowed us to store and organize essential information about our prospects and customers. This feature enables us to have a comprehensive view of our customers’ interactions, track communication history, and effectively manage our marketing pipeline.”
Lucas Vitale
Co-Founder & CEO at SEO Assistance
HubSpot’s marketing automation software is probably the best in the industry.
You can use it to set your marketing messages on autopilot across different channels to boost the efficiency of your campaigns (and take a rest from doing everything manually).
The automation capabilities come in different forms – email trigger sequences, automated workflows, chatbots, and more.
For email marketing, you can set different automation to make sure your leads stay warm and avoid any missed business opportunities by constantly moving them further down the funnel.
Targeted workflows are another form of automation you can implement, and they’re also fairly simple to build. You need to use the proper segmentation to store leads in the right databases.
HubSpot also allows for simple task automation, such as lead scoring, trigger notifications, follow-ups, and more.
Jarik Oosting of SmartRanking says that HubSpot’s marketing automation has “enabled us to streamline our outreach efforts and nurture leads more effectively.”
“By setting up automated workflows, we can send targeted emails, messages, and content to our leads based on their actions and interests. This has not only saved us time but also improved lead engagement and conversion rates. We can guide potential clients through the sales funnel with personalized content, ultimately enhancing our overall conversion success.
He says this feature “has been pivotal in optimizing our sales and marketing processes, resulting in increased efficiency and better client interactions.”
Lastly, marketers have been using HubSpot’s blog software to improve their content marketing strategy over this last quarter.
The blog software comes with up-to-date SEO recommendations, editing suggestions, and more.
You can do all the necessary formatting – adding images, text formatting, linking – within the blog editor directly. If you’re collaborating with team members, you can also leave comments and share feedback.
With the scheduling feature, you can make sure that the blog posts get in front of your audience at the right time when engagement is likely to be at the highest point. Plus, you can automate email notifications that let subscribers know when you release a new post.
Related: How to Improve the Organic CTR for Your Pages & Blog Posts
With dozens of different features in the marketing hub alone, it’s safe to assume that no two companies use HubSpot’s marketing features the same way.
Here, we just scratched the surface of everything HubSpot Marketing Hub has to offer. But there’s so much more.
What do you think about the features we listed? What other ones do you use in your everyday marketing activities?
We’re not just asking this as a courtesy… we really want to know.
Our survey about how companies actually use HubSpot is still open for contributions, and we’d love to hear how you use it in your business.
We also have a Benchmark Group for Top Performing HubSpot Customers that you can join for free and instantly compare your HubSpot numbers to industry peers (both your and their data is anonymized).
If you’re a HubSpot user, this is a great opportunity to get more context on your numbers instead of chasing down industry reports and looking for business owners willing to share their data.
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Filip Stojanovic is a content writer who studies Business and Political Sciences. Also, I am a huge tennis enthusiast. Although my dream is to win a Grand Slam, working as a content writer is also interesting.
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