Best HubSpot Features According to Partners

As a long time HubSpot partner agency, we live in it every day; we’re not always thinking about what the product looks like from the outside. These awards got us thinking: What is it, exactly, that has made HubSpot so popular and essential in the marketing space? What’s the best feature of the best software? And why?

Combing reviews from HubSpot users shed a little bit of light on the subject:

• “What I LOVE about HubSpot is how it integrates with everything...I am so impressed by its versatility.”
• “My favorite aspect is that it is a one-stop-shop. I was using 10+ apps before to accomplish what I am able to do with HubSpot alone.”
• “HubSpot is great for a team of any size. From a 1-person marketing team like me, to a team of 100, HubSpot can do it all and it really does make my job much easier.”

But we wanted to go deeper.  So we asked the people who know it best — the HubSpot integration partners. Here’s what they had to say!

The 5 Best HubSpot Features:

1. Website Tracking Codes (& Tracking Integrations!)

HubSpot Integration Partner NUACOM told us how much they love HubSpot’s built-in functionality for setting up visitor tracking on your website. It’s easy to install the tracking code on pages you want to watch, and HubSpot compiles robust data on your visitors (and their actions). 

Most marketing folks understand the basics of a HubSpot website tracking code, but HubSpot Tracking might do more than you think. It’s much more than a simple log of the number of visitors on each page or clicks on each link. You can access data on the specific pages each user visited, which links they clicked on (if any), and their time-on-page in each location.

These insights can really level up your game. As Mylvio Mendes, the Marketing Manager at NUACOM, told us, they deeply appreciate the ability to “find out what content on our website a particular lead checked. We also get notifications when a lead returns to the website, which helps the sales team to proactively call at the right time.” The all-in-one VoIP software produced by NUACOM is designed to accelerate sales and support calls, so full integration with HubSpot is perfect. The HubSpot website tracking tools arm them with live alerts for the most timely contact possible — a huge benefit. 

Data could show that a visitor spent more time on a particular page (which would help marketers target their nurturing emails). Only a brief visit may signal that it’s not the time for a sales call quite yet.  However, multiple return visits are a sure sign that the visitor is deeply considering what you have to offer.

The trick is to balance these insights with a tactful approach.  If you sound like you can read minds, the lead might be creeped out.  Rather than outright telling a visitor, “Hey, I see that you viewed X page Y times for a total of Z minutes,” simply think about the intentions of their actions and send resources that position you as the solution.

External Tracking Integrations

HubSpot’s platform is robust, but the company knows there are plenty of other great resources used by their customers. Perhaps your website was built in WordPress. No problem! HubSpot’s website tracking code is easy to install on WordPress sites.

Many of us are huge fans of Google Analytics. Fortunately, it’s super-easy to install Google Analytics on all HubSpot pages and blogs, too. In fact, many of your favorite tracking tools are likely to have integrations with HubSpot’s platform.  Detailed social media page tracking is already possible within HubSpot, but plenty of other user-preferred tools — like Oktopost — integrate cleanly to expand your insights into social media timeline events and social clicks.

2. HubSpot Analytics

If there’s any HubSpot feature that helps you tie marketing to revenue, it’s HubSpot Analytics. These flexible reporting tools take all of your tracking data and turn it into actionable insights.

Gabriele Tontini, the CMO and Head of Content at LeadsBridge, put it this way: “HubSpot's Analytics is the best, because it allows our teams to deeply and [easily] understand the strengths and weaknesses of our acquisition and retention campaigns. Moreover, everything is accessible in just one place.”

The personalized dashboards and custom reports put all of your critical metrics in one place, filtered down to only the things you want to see. You can break down the complete customer lifecycle, from anonymous visitors to loyal customers, across every digital channel (email, website, social). Multi-touch attribution from HubSpot Analytics finally closes your revenue loop — so marketers get concrete indicators of their results and can adjust strategy towards the things that are working best.

Since HubSpot Analytics fully integrates with your CRM, proving marketing ROI is effortless. All contact interactions are tracked and attributed — how they got to your site, what content they consumed, which messages they’ve opened, and more. You can generate filtered graphs and charts to show broad progress on goals or check in on the performance of individual campaigns.

Perhaps most exciting is that this top-notch feature is available completely FREE on a one month trial, so you can see what you’re getting before you commit.

3. HubSpot Workflows

The “Workflows” tool automates every email touchpoint in your marketing flywheel — lead acquisition welcome email to thank you letter post-sale. 

It’s no wonder Denis Lunev of DepositFix says, “We love HubSpot Workflows.” The satisfied HubSpot integration partner explains why, in his eyes, it stands above all other HubSpot features: “It's a very powerful feature, especially with combination with other tools. We utilize them a lot for our clients: to send payment receipts, custom payment plans, [and] failed payment recovery.”

HubSpot Workflows is also perfect for deal-based workflows in the sales pipeline. Use workflows to follow up signed quotes or contracts with automated email confirmations and additional messages that walk customers through next steps.  HubSpot can handle standard procedures while reps stay available for 1-1 conversations and live demos.

The HubSpot VOIQ integration takes convenient workflow automation even further. Now you can automate sales calls in the same workflows you use to automate email, chatbots, and other channels.

4. Cross-Channel Automation

Speaking of multi-channel automation, HubSpot can now streamline your marketing efforts both online and in print.

Michael McCarthy, the founder of Inkit, is most excited about the cross-channel power HubSpot’s robust digital automation tools give to his customers. When paired with his own company’s direct mail automation software, he says, “it makes it easy to connect online and offline marketing efforts and achieve — as our partners at Blueshift.com call it — a truly customer centric cross-channel strategy.”

As a data platform, Blueshift is a huge proponent of multi-channel attribution that puts the customer at the center, no matter where they came from. This is one reason they’ve been proud to work with a HubSpot Integration partner like Inkit that makes cross-channel automation and attribution a reality.

Inkit can trigger automatic, same-day printing and shipping of direct mail, personalized on a 1:1 level using data right from the HubSpot CRM.  Add direct mail to any automation workflow that you’ve built in HubSpot.  Just design your postcard template in the drag-and-drop template builder, decide who should receive it, and add it to the HubSpot workflow with the “trigger a webhook” action.  

5. Email Video Integration

Finally, we’d like to give a shout-out to HubSpot’s full integration with the Vidyard video browser extension — one of our absolute favorite HubSpot features here at Market Veep!

The social distancing of the COVID-19 pandemic has starved us all of human contact. Market Veep Founder and CEO Jennelle McGrath says that the HubSpot-Vidyard integration “is a great way for salespeople to create a connection during this time of COVID, more personal and relationship-driven than a simple email.”

Vidyard makes it so quick and easy to record (and send!) videos directly to prospects or clients that we’ve started using it as a go-to video voicemail tool.  Your recipient just has to click the thumbnail in the email, and it’ll send them to an auto-generated landing page where they can watch the video.

It certainly feels good to put the face back on customer interactions after so long cloistered from the outside world!  HubSpot features like Vidyard can make messages more human but also more fun. And since Vidyard works through your CRM, it’ll track views and clicks like anything else.

Zap a quick video message instead of going back and forth with meeting invitations or booking calendars.  A one-minute video can show your contacts exactly what they need to see (yes, it can screen-record too!).  

We can’t speak highly enough about it, honestly. Especially in an isolating time of crisis like this.

The Partners Have Spoken!

When you take a step back and look at everything HubSpot can do, it really adds some perspective.  No matter whether you’re in marketing, sales, or service, we all have the opportunity (should we so choose) to take advantage of these versatile HubSpot features.  If you’ve discovered something on this list that your team hasn’t tried before, take a closer look!  It could become a valuable tool for your brand — and another worthy reason to consider HubSpot “the best.”