HubSpot Marketing Automation Review: Features & Pricing

HubSpot Marketing Automation is a feature-rich marketing automation tool from the house of HubSpot’s suite of CRMs. The software is made to assist companies of all sizes in streamlining their marketing initiatives and spurring expansion.

HubSpot is a potent tool for marketing strategy optimization thanks to its intuitive design, sophisticated automation features, and wide range of integration possibilities.

This article provides an all-in-one comprehensive review of HubSpot’s pricing, pros and cons, and feature set. It also gives you some alternatives to consider.

SMB Guide’s Verdict for HubSpot Marketing Automation

Based on our analysis, I’m giving HubSpot Marketing Automation an overall score of 8.8 out of 10.

Factor	Rating (out of 10)
Pricing & Plans	8
Marketing Automation Capabilities	9
Email Builder	8
Personalization & Customization	8
Campaign Performance Tracking	9
User Interface and User Experience	9
Integrations and Compatibility	9.5
Customer Support	9.5
SMB Guide Rating	8.8

In this review of HubSpot Marketing Automation, I’ve followed SMB Guide’s detailed criteria for evaluating the marketing automation software.

Pricing & Plans

HubSpot has a tiered price structure to suit the needs and sizes of enterprises. Small businesses and individuals can opt for the free plan to start and can also try the paid tiers using the 14-day free trial, before committing to the advanced tiers.

Free

The Free plan provides all the basic tools needed for email and marketing management. 

Price

• Free

Features

• Free marketing and sales tools
• Free content tools
• User management
• Up to 1 automated email per form
• Up to 100 products
• 1 automated action

Who it’s for:

• Individuals and small businesses that are just starting with marketing automation
• Users that want to try out HubSpot for the first time

Marketing hub starter

This is the best entry plan into HubSpot’s marketing tools. It offers the basic automation and marketing tools along with the free plan’s features.

Price

• $20 per month (billed monthly)
• $15 per month (billed annually)

Features

All features from the Free plan, plus:

• Limited to 1 inbox
• Remove watermark
• Mobile app and email reply tracking
• Up to 1 million products
• Email and in-app chat support
• Up to 10 automated actions

Who it’s for: Small businesses with limited requirements for automation

Starter customer platform

This is HubSpot’s most famous plan. Businesses prefer this plan as it offers the most comprehensive list of features needed to manage and automate marketing while not breaking the bank. 

Price

• $20 per month (billed monthly)
• $15 per month (billed annually)

Features

All features from the Hub Starter plan, plus tools like:

• Operations Hub Starter
• Content Hub Starter
• Service Hub Starter
• Sales Hub Starter

Who it’s for: Small to medium-sized businesses looking for some advanced sales and management tools while also satisfying the CRM capabilities.

Marketing hub professional

This is an all-inclusive marketing software for campaigns, reports, and automation. The features include dynamic personalization among other advanced options.

Price

• $890 per month (billed monthly)
• $800 per month (billed annually)

Features

All features from the Starter Custom plan, plus:

• Upto 100 inboxes
• Unlimited sub-domains
• Unlimited workflows and actions
• Upto 30 currencies
• Up to 15 million products
• Unlimited actions, and automation capabilities
• Mobile optimization
• Upto 10 teams management
• Video hosting and A/B testing
• Dynamic personalization

Who it’s for: Small and medium sized businesses looking for advanced features and tools for management and automation and especially with a huge audience base.

Marketing hub enterprise

This is HubSpot’s most powerful marketing automation program for enhanced flexibility and control. 

Price

• Starts at $3,600 per month

Features

All features from Professional plan, plus:

• Custom Objects
• Custom events
• Organize upto 300 teams
• Multi-touch revenue attribution
• Customer journey analytics

Who it’s for: Medium to large businesses with a lot of management and automation requirements.

Marketing Automation Capabilities

Businesses can design intricate processes and automations with branching logic and conditional actions using HubSpot’s marketing automation solutions, enabling highly targeted marketing campaigns.

A variety of triggers, including user behavior, dates, and external events, are available on the platform to start automated processes. Businesses can also ensure continuous communication and engagement with their audience by leveraging this flexibility to automate processes across many channels, such as SMS, social media, and email. 

One of HubSpot’s standout features is using recipient characteristics and behaviors to dynamically personalize email content within these automated workflows. This degree of personalization increases conversion rates and improves engagement by presenting pertinent content to the appropriate audience at the appropriate moment. 

HubSpot’s strong multi-channel automation and seamless integration make it a good alternative for firms trying to improve and automate their marketing activities across numerous touchpoints.

Although, do keep in mind that its SMS capabilities may not be as advanced as those of specialized platforms.

Email Builder

The drag-and-drop UI of HubSpot’s email builder makes it simple for marketers to produce eye-catching emails without the need for technical expertise.

With the ability to fully customize and adjust to your brand, the platform provides a large assortment of pre-designed templates that are mobile-friendly.

This guarantees optimal display of your emails across all screen sizes. HubSpot gives users with more experience more control over email design by enabling direct HTML editing.

Apart from its adaptable design features, HubSpot also has powerful preview and testing tools. By letting users preview their emails in a variety of email applications and devices, these features improve deliverability and guarantee that emails end up in the hands of the right people. 

Because HubSpot incorporates spam testing into the platform, it assists marketers in avoiding the spam folder, making it a dependable option for developing polished and successful email campaigns.

Personalization & Customization

Businesses can create highly personal and targeted marketing campaigns with HubSpot’s strong customization options. Users can customize email elements according to recipient attributes, behaviors, or segmentation criteria by utilizing the platform’s capability for dynamic content.

HubSpot offers a vast array of merge tags and personalization tokens that facilitate the effortless integration of recipient-specific data, such names, localities, or previous interactions, into email content.

Apart from its customization functionalities, HubSpot offers sophisticated segmentation choices that empower customers to target particular audience segments through demographic information, behavioral patterns, or past campaign engagements. 

By ensuring that marketing messages reach the appropriate audience at the appropriate moment, this degree of segmentation improves campaign efficacy and raises conversion rates.

All things considered, HubSpot is a great option for companies trying to send out meaningful and effective messages because of its extensive personalization and segmentation capabilities.

Campaign Performance Tracking

Users can measure important email marketing data including open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and ROI in real-time with HubSpot’s extensive campaign performance tracking tools.

This includes assessing campaign performance about particular objectives like lead or revenue generation by using the platform’s configurable reporting dashboards, which offer insights into campaign performance as it happens.

Additionally, HubSpot offers A/B testing, which enables users to determine the best email versions and enhance their campaigns for improved outcomes.

Furthermore, HubSpot easily interacts with external analytics tools like Google Analytics, offering a more comprehensive and in-depth picture of marketing effectiveness. Through this interface, companies may get even more insights by combining external analytics with HubSpot’s comprehensive campaign stats. 

HubSpot gives marketers the data they need to hone plans and increase campaign efficacy with its powerful tracking features and real-time analytics.

User Interface and User Experience

Because of HubSpot’s straightforward and user-friendly interface, email marketers can build, send, and manage campaigns with ease.

The platform makes it easy for users to locate the tools they require with its clear, well-organized structure and functionality arranged into logical categories.

With a large range of editable templates and a drag-and-drop email editor, creating professional-looking emails even for those without design experience is a breeze.

HubSpot also offers dashboards and shortcuts that can be customized, which improves navigation and the user experience in general.

To guarantee that emails appear as intended, the platform’s comprehensive preview and testing features are crucial for preserving consistency across various devices and email clients.

HubSpot’s customizable features also extend to its reporting capabilities, where customers may design dashboards that show the data that matters most to their particular organization. 

All things considered, HubSpot’s UI blends strong customization capabilities with ease of use, making it appropriate for both inexperienced and seasoned marketers.

Integrations and Compatibility

Because of its broad integration capabilities, HubSpot may be integrated with a variety of CRM systems, including Zoho CRM, Salesforce, and its own HubSpot CRM.

APIs that enable custom integrations, which let companies link HubSpot with other products and services to suit their particular workflows, add to the platform’s flexibility.

The marketing and sales teams may collaborate more effectively thanks to this interoperability, which also streamlines processes.

Furthermore, HubSpot interfaces with e-commerce sites such as Magento, WooCommerce, and Shopify, allowing for more efficient and customized marketing campaigns and a smooth synchronization of client data.

HubSpot integrates with social media sites for social sharing and performance tracking in addition to CRM and e-commerce platforms. It also works with analytics programs like Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics to track the effectiveness of email campaigns.

By enabling users to coordinate data with the desktop version and manage marketing campaigns while on the road, the mobile app improves accessibility even more. 

This makes HubSpot a flexible choice for companies aiming to improve their marketing skills without sacrificing system coherence.

Customer Support

HubSpot ensures that users have several options for assistance by providing strong customer care across a variety of channels, such as live chat, email, and phone support.

In general, the platform’s support staff members are informed and helpful, which facilitates the speedy resolution of problems.

HubSpot offers both novice and expert users a robust knowledge base with lessons, user guides, and documentation in addition to providing direct assistance. The Ascent emphasizes how user-friendly and well-structured these materials are, which improves the whole experience.

In addition to these standard help choices, HubSpot promotes a feeling of community by giving users access to a lively user forum where they can exchange advice, pose queries, and gain knowledge from one another.

HubSpot also provides training materials, including webinars and online courses, for individuals who want to gain a deeper comprehension of the platform. 

GetApp points out that these materials are made to assist users in mastering the platform and maximizing its potential, which makes HubSpot a helpful partner for companies of all kinds.

HubSpot Marketing Automation — Unique Features

HubSpot Marketing Automation has its own unique features that set it apart from competitors.

Predictive lead scoring

Predictive lead scoring is a feature of HubSpot’s marketing automation software that uses machine learning algorithms to determine how likely it is for leads to become customers within 90 days.

HubSpot gives each lead a probability score based on data from past customers and leads.

This helps companies rank their sales and marketing campaigns according to the likelihood that a lead will convert.

By concentrating resources on leads who have the highest likelihood of becoming customers, this feature helps maximize return on investment and improves the efficacy and efficiency of marketing campaigns.

All-in-one marketing & sales platform

One system that manages marketing, sales, and customer care all in one place is HubSpot. In order to enable users to develop customer journeys, build landing pages, design smart forms, post blogs, start social and email campaigns, and monitor performance—all within a single ecosystem—the platform centralizes historically independent tools and activities.

Users save time, procedures become simpler, and there is less need for numerous tools because of this thorough integration.

Furthermore, centralized customer data management is ensured via a free CRM that is tightly connected with HubSpot’s marketing automation technologies. This promotes personalized and targeted campaigns and enhances team cooperation.

Educational resources & attribution reporting

Through “HubSpot Academy,” which offers a variety of courses, certificates, and tutorials to assist users develop their marketing knowledge and skills, HubSpot provides unique educational tools. 

The Academy is beneficial for users of all skill levels because it covers everything from fundamental marketing concepts to sophisticated tactics.

Additionally, companies can monitor the success of their marketing initiatives across a variety of touchpoints using HubSpot’s comprehensive attribution reporting feature, which offers insights into which campaigns and channels yield the highest returns.

What the Experts Say About HubSpot Marketing Automation

The HubSpot Marketing Automation tool has got rave reviews and ratings from reputed websites like G2.com and Capterra. It has gained a total of 4.4 out of 5 starts, based on 11k+ reviews from G2.com, and 4.5 out of 5, based on 6k+ reviews from Capterra respectively.

Here are some of the highlights.

I built three websites, which I manage completely via the Hubspot tools. I’m able to generate inbound traffic through various marketing efforts (blogging, emailing, posting on social media, website building,…). I manage all the incoming traffic via various analytics and insights. It is satisfying to notice that my hard work pays off.

Charline F., Communication Manager – Verified Capterra review

Overall, its a pretty good experience, everything is extremely streamline, although I hope more features will be added in the future. I would continue using this just for like newer customers and keep older customers on our old system only because the migration is very time consuming. Each customer would have to be recreated due to the lack of migration tools.

Norma C., Customer Relations Director – Verified Capterra review

HubSpot Marketing Automation Alternatives

While HubSpot is a powerful marketing automation platform, there are several alternatives available that may be a better fit for certain businesses.

Here are a few of the top alternatives to consider.

ActiveCampaign

It stands out with its native CRM and advanced marketing automation. Unlike HubSpot, ActiveCampaign offers more powerful email marketing through its CRM. It also offers sales automation, which makes it ideal for businesses looking for an integrated approach.

Sign up for your free trial of ActiveCampaign

Constant Contact

Constant Contact excels in event management and provides an extensive library of templates. However, unlike HubSpot, it lacks advanced personalization and segmentation options.

The good thing is that it offers a solid foundation for email marketing campaigns.

Start your free trial of Constant Contact

Klaviyo

It excels in personalization and e-commerce-focused marketing. Like Omnisend, Klaviyo offers deep integrations with e-commerce systems like Shopify and WooCommerce. It also includes advanced functions like customer segmentation and product recommendation.

Get started with Klaviyo for free

Getting Started with HubSpot Marketing Automation

For companies looking for a complete marketing automation solution that works well with other business tools, HubSpot is still one of the best options.

HubSpot’s user-friendly design, wide range of customization options, and powerful feature set make it an excellent choice for organizations of all sizes seeking to optimize their marketing initiatives.

HubSpot provides the tools you need to accomplish your business objectives, whether you’re wanting to manage customer interactions, automate email campaigns, or combine your marketing efforts with a CRM.

Get started with HubSpot Marketing Automation for free

FAQs

Related reading:

• HubSpot vs. ActiveCampaign
• HubSpot vs. Klaviyo