Embracing a tool like HubSpot is one of the best ways to execute, manage, and measure all inbound marketing activities.
But…there’s one problem.
When presented with large amounts of data and functionality, many businesses find themselves fumbling and not sure what to focus on to achieve inbound marketing success and convert more leads.
This is unfortunate since leads translate into revenue and help a company grow.
With so much useful information and tools available in Hubspot, we reached out to 11 Hubspot experts to get their thoughts on what they feel is Hubspot’s most underrated feature. All of them have achieved extraordinary results for themselves or their Hubspot using clients.
Let’s discover how these Hubspot experts are converting more leads and discover their tips on how to utilize Hubspot to its fullest powers.
Matthew Wood, Head of Digital, Karman Digital
Intuitive A/B testing tool
HubSpot is a treasure trove of pretty cool marketing, sales service and ops tools, it can be really easy to miss some of the more hidden wonder tools that exist in the platform.
One of these hidden gems is the intuitive A/B testing tool for emails, website pages and landing pages. A/B testing is an incredibly important part of running any successful data driven campaign. Now, you won’t find it on any of the menu systems, but if you look closely in the email and landing page builders themselves you will find it as a link in the top left of the screen. It seamlessly allows you to create a B variation of your marketing asset, set up how each variation will be distributed, select the goal metric and set the test duration. Once you hit go and create the test, you can view the results in the email or page overview area and see which variation was the winner. Simple! You can make data driven decisions in a heartbeat.
Learn more about Matthew at: karman.digital
George B. Thomas, Inbound Evangelist of Impulse Creative
HubSpot Snippets!
After being in thousands of portals as a HubSpot trainer & consultant over the past ten years, the most underrated feature I've seen has to be Hubspot Snippets. The amount of flexibility that HubSpot Snippets affords you as a HubSpot user is incredible and is only surpassed by the amount of time it can save you.
Want to add multiple signatures to your Conversation inbox? Snippets. What to have pre-defined outlines for calls & notes? Snippets. Need to streamline your team's sharing of valuable content? Snippets. Need canned responses in your HubSpot live chat? That's right, Snippets!
I could share a ton more examples/use-cases for HubSpot Snippets you could use at your company. Bottom line, if you want to streamline your process, stay organized, save time, and build a consistent brand voice across your teams, start leveraging HubSpot Snippets in 2022 and beyond!
Learn more about George at: impulsecreative.com
Chris Grant, Sales Services Consultant
The Sales Analytics Area
People talk about things like snippets (very much underrated in terms of potential applications), the power and simplicity of the reporting and the ever developing automation functionality, but....
For me the most underrated feature of Hubspot is the Sales Analytics area. I'm constantly surprised that so many people don't even know it's there. It's in-depth and powerful, but also very easy to use and understand, every report is fully documented & defined and as a sales leader it gives you the chance to truly understand what's happening in your sales process. I know, for example, that in our own sales process a deal takes less time to win than lose, so I know that once a deal goes beyond a certain threshold, the win likelihood drops dramatically.
I can quickly identify coaching or training needs and see which reps are pushing close dates out more than others. The data that is exposed allows sales leaders to make data driven changes to their process that have a significant impact on the bottom line. Couple the sales analytics with the new call analysis tools and you have a huge amount of power at your fingertips.
Learn more about Chris at: babelquest.co.uk
Thalita Milan, HubSpot Consultant & Marketing Automation Expert
HubSpot's Snippets
Do you find yourself emailing the same thing over and over again? Whether it's a quick company bio or the answer to a Frequently Asked Question, repeating the same block of text many times is boring and time-consuming! If that piece of information is too short to be turned into an actual email template, you should take a look at HubSpot Snippets.
Snippets are pretty similar to email templates. Just head to Conversations and click on Create Snippet. Add the information that you are tired of copying and pasting, give it a cool internal name so that you can easily find it later on, and hit Save. Next time you are creating a 1-1 email, just click on the symbol Insert Snippet to add that block of text with one click only. Inside of Snippets, you can include links and even personalization tokens - an awesome hack to customize your message.
My clients love using snippets because 1-1 emails can take up a lot of time. Snippets allow you to create a customized and relevant email with just a few clicks.
Learn more about Thalita at: thalitamilan.com/hubspot
Resa Gooding, HubSpot Certified Trainer
Smart Content
In my years of experience, I believe the most underrated (and underused) feature in HubSpot is smart content. This is a feature that allows users to personalize content for specific groups of contacts within their database or who fit certain criteria like country location or device they are using to visit your content.
It is available for marketing tools within HubSpot such as email subject lines, CTAs or even blocks of texts on landing pages or website pages that are built with HubSpot CMS. The way it works is you create a list or determine a group of persons who you would like to receive a different version of the message originally created and once a contact fits this criteria this feature kicks in.
Some examples of when this can be super useful are:
1. Creating a different message for a customer vs a new prospect. Imagine having a CTA button on your homepage that changes from "Book a demo" when a prospect lands to "Check out this latest feature" for an existing customer. The system will know the difference based on the Lifecycle stage.
Or
2. When sending an email to prospects instead of doing an A/B test (especially if you don't have the required 1000 contacts for an A/B test) you can use smart content for the subject lines to change the message for different groups of people in your database.
Learn more about Resa at: Cacaomedia.co
Andy Etcheto, Software Consultant
Sequences
If you nurture your contacts or leads sending the same sales/marketing emails, you can automate this process with "Sequences". This feature allows you to create and send a series of email templates on a set schedule, so you don't have to do it manually. Once the workflow is set up, you can enroll new contacts and the sequence will start. Sequences can also create tasks for you, so if the contacts didn't respond to your sequence emails, a follow up task will be created automatically.
This is a great feature that saves a lot of time and it's really easy to set up. You only need to write down the emails that you want to send. Any user in your organization can set up a sequence, making it accessible to everyone, without having to involve the account administrator.
Sequences is available on the Professional Plan of HubSpot Sales Hub.
Learn more about Andy at: blungo.com
Indira Carino, HubSpot Solutions Partner
Conversations
One of the features I love the most of HubSpot and sometimes doesn't get the attention it deserves is Conversations. It’s available from the freemium version and above and includes team inbox, live chat, and bot chat flows effortlessly and with no code required.
Using the team inbox has helped us collaborate better as a team, engaging with leads and prospects via email, live chat or Facebook messenger from one place. In addition, bots are a brilliant feature as they can increase visitors' engagement on your website by identifying what they are looking for before they are ready to talk with sales. For instance, you can use them to set qualifying questions and then hand them off to an active user, send relevant videos and links, book meetings, etc. depending on the buyer’s journey stage.
While bots are great for automating repetitive actions and saving time, nothing beats the human touch. Using these tools together to empower your sales team so they can do their best work as humans 😊
Learn more about Indira at: catmedia.ie
Samuel St-Amour, Team Lead - HubSpot Marketing Hub
HubSpot forms - "block free email providers"
One of the most little known – or should I say, hidden – functionality in HubSpot forms is the ability to prevent visitors from using a free email address whenever they are filling your forms. In some cases, you might be looking to get “official” corporate email addresses, and free email addresses just won’t do. In these cases, open the email field edit section in your form, and scroll to the bottom until you see “Email domains to block”. There, simply enter specific email domains you want to prevent visitors from using, or even better, just check the “Block free email providers” checkbox! By the way, the list of HubSpot’s known free email addresses is very long.
Now, enjoy your improved leads quality!
Learn more about Samuel at: globaliadigital.com
Shiran Sugerman, Head of HubSpot Onboarding
Lists
HubSpot as a CRM platform has several amazing features which can be used to enhance your business and streamline your processes. Having used HubSpot for over 5 years and working across several clients, the one feature I often see people under-utilized is the Lists. Whether you’re in marketing, sales, or customer service, building lists can help you not only segment your database, but also understand where to focus your attention.
For marketing, the more lists you have, the more options for personalizing your content and lead nurturing. For sales and service, building lists helps you understand how your prospects and customers engage with your business. You can even use Lists to facilitate your strategies or dig deeper into your reporting data. And when it comes to automation, lists ensure you’re talking to the right people at the right time.
Learn more about Shiran at: Spitfire Inbound
Johanna Sjölin, HubSpot Master Trainer
Smart Content
One of the most powerful features that I find a lot of HubSpot users don’t take full advantage of is Smart Content, even though the feature has been around in HubSpot for a while. But up until one (two?) years ago, you could only add Smart Content in rich text modules and when creating forms. Now that HubSpot has added Smart Content to all modules, including custom-coded ones, a whole world of opportunities to optimize for more conversions on your website has opened up.
Having helped a lot of clients with inbound strategies and website builds, one of the greatest challenges businesses face is related to creating targeted content. When you have multiple products or services, each targeted to different audiences or personas, Smart Content allows you to take advantage of the data collected through your CRM to play around with different messages and layouts. Tailoring your website experience based on your persona, their interests or their stage in the buyer’s journey (and for those of you not using the CMS Hub - not to worry! You can also use smart rules to personalize embedded CTA’s, emails, and even sales calendars).
Knowing this, your marketing creativity will probably tell you to ‘go loco’, but I recommend you to slowly dip your feet into Smart Content strategically. Learn about your website users and their interests in different topics or products, and start off with one type of Smart Content set-up for a specific period of time. You may want to start with something like this:
- Tag your audience based on their interest in your topics, products and services, what actions they have taken, or pages they visit on your website.
- Implement small tweaks to your messaging, CTAs, images or even full product offerings based on those tags of interest. This will make your contacts receive information that is both well timed, highly relevant and it makes you as a customer feel understood - and delighted.
- Once your smart content is live. Sit back and relax for a bit, and monitor the results and success, and use the knowledge and insights you gain to refine future content even more.
The benefit of Smart Content even goes beyond the power of personalization, though. We usually have less time than we’d like to get to know our customers, their backgrounds, and their needs. Having automated processes around this frees up time to make better use of the resources available and eliminates the potential for error or oversight - giving our customers an overall better experience.
And the best part of it all? HubSpot data backs this up, mentioning personalised CTA’s result in a 42% higher conversion rate than standard CTA’s with one of their studies also showing that 99% of marketers say personalization helps advance customer relationships. And who can argue with that type of data?
Learn more about Johanna at: Avidlyagency.com
Romi Dexter, Director & Co-Founder of Hype & Dexter
HubSpot for internal operations
My most underrated feature - this is a hard one! But it is probably using HubSpot for your internal operations.
HubSpot is renowned for its exceptional Sales and Service experiences, but I still see a lot of organizations that use HubSpot still rely heavily on spreadsheets and other tools such as Monday.com, JIRA, Asana, etc, to manage simple operational tasks. Don't get me wrong, many of these platforms are amazing at high-end project management, but I would argue that HubSpot is just as strong, or stronger, in repeatable operational processes. i.e. As someone who has managed a lot of digital teams across many organizations from startup, to agency, to corporate - managing numerous platforms has always been a major pain point for me. Sure, every new platform comes with additional licensing costs - but it also comes with major admin and other considerations, e.g. security, training, integration, etc.
We have a large focus on consolidation and removal of spreadsheets from our business - we have moved lots of functions such as ICT requests, Recruitment, Onboarding, Marketing Requests to HubSpot, removing numerous spreadsheets and other point solutions from our ecosystem. This has significantly reduced admin costs, user administration and licensing costs, has simplified the process for our team, improved our insight and confidence around data integrity, provided us far greater visibility on our internal team and operation costs and efficiencies, removed lots of security challenges with having to manage access and users across multiple platforms and has opened up lots of opportunities for automation.
The other bonus of using HubSpot for your internal operations is that you can leverage features such as Knowledge Base, Feedback (for employee pulse and surveys), Marketing Emails and the new Customer Portal to manage a full onboarding and internal comms strategy.
At H&D our team is everything, so making it easy to onboard, communicate, upskill and find what you need in an easy straightforward way is a critical part of our culture and creating a great environment.
SEE: How we used Service Hub to master customer onboarding for World Solar
Learn more about Romi at: linkedin.com/in/romidexter
Bonus Feature - Convert more leads by integrating with Bonjoro
As these experts pointed out, there are key features you could be using within Hubspot that help your marketing team close more leads. Hopefully you can incorporate some of these tips and start giving your marketing team a smart advantage.
And if there's one new feature we think you MUST check out, it's our very own integration with Hubspot that lets you send personal videos at the perfect moment to convert more of your hard won leads. Send a video when a contact has been added to your Hubspot account, when a deal has been created or updated, and at other events that take place.
Watch the video below to see what Bonjoro is all about, then sign-up for our 14-day unlimited trial.
