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How to Use HubSpot: 10 Features Any Organization Can Use

Matthew Deal

HubSpot is a powerful tool for businesses looking to improve their marketing, sales, and customer service. It's packed with features to help streamline your operations, better understand your customers, and enhance your engagement strategies. The key to success with HubSpot is knowing how to navigate its wide range of capabilities.

This guide is designed for any business ready to make the most of HubSpot. We'll cover essential features that can make a significant difference in how you operate, from segmentation tools that offer deep insights into your customer base to scheduling capabilities that make meeting planning a breeze, and tracking mechanisms that monitor every step of a lead's journey.

Let's dive into how you can use HubSpot to refine your business processes and elevate your engagement with customers.

1. Segmenting Your Business Contacts

Diving into the core of what makes your business tick, you'll find your contacts — a diverse group with varied needs and behaviors. HubSpot's segmentation is a vital tool that elegantly organizes this complex web into clear, manageable segments. It's like creating a map of your contacts, helping you navigate and engage with them more effectively, whether in marketing campaigns, sales strategies, or overall business operations.

Imagine being able to send a tailored proposal to a potential client in a specific industry or follow up with customers who showed interest in a webinar last month. Segmentation in HubSpot allows for this precise level of detail. It enables your marketing team to design campaigns that resonate personally with different demographics, your sales team to focus their efforts on leads, and your operations staff to understand the workflow preferences of different customer groups.

Marketing professional crafting a segmentation strategy on HubSpot to personalize customer engagement and streamline business communication.

Segmentation allows each email sent is no longer just part of a mass broadcast but a personal conversation. Every product recommendation or service offered feels considerate of individual preferences and history. This alignment across departments not only creates a seamless experience for your customers but also fosters an environment where every interaction with your business feels thoughtfully curated.

HubSpot doesn't just offer a way to group contacts. It transforms how businesses understand and connect with their audience, turning the vast sea of data into actionable insights. 

2. Have Smarter Meetings  

HubSpot transforms the way your teams coordinate and conduct meetings. With its intuitive meeting scheduler, planning becomes a collaborative and streamlined experience. Say goodbye to the back-and-forth of emails and the confusion of time zones. HubSpot's scheduler integrates with your calendar, allowing clients and team members to book time with you within the slots you’ve predefined. It respects your time and theirs, ensuring meetings are set when everyone is available, avoiding the common pitfalls of scheduling conflicts.

Once a meeting is set, HubSpot doesn't stop there. It records the meeting details alongside the contact's record, keeping sales and marketing aligned on who met whom and why. This seamless integration means that follow-ups are more informed and personalized, reflecting the insights gained during each interaction. This unified approach ensures that no detail is lost, and every team member is equipped with the latest information, keeping the whole organization in sync.

3. Monitor Your Marketing

Effective marketing is about making informed decisions, and HubSpot's analytics provide the clarity you need to assess and refine your strategies. With its comprehensive tracking tools, you can evaluate the performance of your emails, scrutinize the traffic on your landing pages, and measure the success of your calls to action. HubSpot consolidates these insights into a single dashboard, eliminating the need to juggle multiple applications and allowing you to see the big picture at a glance.

A HubSpot analytics dashboard showcasing a graph of session totals over time, with a breakdown of new and returning contacts, demonstrating a key visualization tool for tracking marketing engagement and effectiveness.

This centralized view not only saves you time but also empowers you to understand what resonates with your audience. You can quickly identify which campaigns are driving engagement and conversions, and equally important, which ones aren’t. With HubSpot’s data-driven approach, you can continuously optimize your marketing efforts, ensuring that every email sent and every content piece published is poised for the best possible impact.

4. Organize Your Form Submissions

Simplify and amplify your form submission process with HubSpot's integrated forms. Instead of relying on an array of separate technologies or WordPress plugins that can clutter and complicate your workflow, HubSpot's forms streamline data collection. From downloading a white paper to signing up for a newsletter, every action a visitor takes is captured and organized within HubSpot. This cohesive system not only eases the way you gather information but also empowers you to evaluate which forms perform best, ensuring you're always one step ahead in optimizing your lead generation and customer insights.

5. Try Target Accounts

HubSpot's Target Accounts feature streamlines the way you handle important customer accounts for your business. It’s perfect for those who focus on personalized marketing and sales strategies, like when you’re trying to build strong relationships with certain high-value clients. This HubSpot tool lets you keep an eye on these special accounts all in one place. You can easily see how things are going with each account and decide what you need to do next, like setting up meetings or sending information that’s tailored just for them.

Hubspot’s “Target Accounts” feature lets you coordinate sales and marketing activities in a single place.

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Using HubSpot, you can also filter and sort these target accounts without hassle, so you can spend less time managing lists and more time connecting with your customers. This helps your marketing and sales teams work together more effectively, making sure everyone knows which accounts to prioritize and how best to meet their needs. It’s all about making the process as smooth as possible so you can focus on building strong, profitable relationships with your key clients.

6. Streamline Email Health Monitoring

Keeping your email marketing on track is crucial, and HubSpot simplifies this with its built-in email health monitoring tools. Instead of getting tangled in data or fretting over falling open rates and increasing bounce rates, HubSpot gives you a clear view of your email campaign's health. This means you can quickly spot issues like poor click-through rates or emails that aren't being delivered. With these insights, you're equipped to make necessary adjustments, ensuring your emails reach your audience and engage them as intended.

HubSpot does more than just alert you to problems; it helps prevent them. By tracking your email performance over time, HubSpot identifies patterns that could lead to concerns before they become problematic. This proactive approach lets you spend more time crafting compelling email content and building strategies that resonate with your audience, secure in the knowledge that HubSpot is maintaining the pulse on your email campaign's well-being.

7. Identify and Deal With Unengaged Contacts

HubSpot offers a powerful solution for managing your contact list by helping you identify those who are not actively engaging with your messages. This insight is crucial because continually sending emails to uninterested parties can harm your campaign's effectiveness and sender reputation. With HubSpot's analytics, you can spot which contacts are less engaged — those who seldom open your emails or interact with your content — giving you the chance to clean your list or re-engage them with a new strategy.

The platform doesn't just highlight the issue; it empowers you to act. With HubSpot, you have the tools to either refresh your approach to rekindle interest or to streamline your focus towards more engaged contacts. This means you can experiment with different content, timing, and messaging for those unengaged contacts or you can choose to direct your resources towards nurturing relationships with contacts who are more likely to convert, thus enhancing the overall health and performance of your email marketing efforts.

8. Create New Fields to Personalize Contacts 

Personalization is all about making your customers feel like you're speaking directly to them. It's about using what you know — their name, past purchases, preferences — to create a connection. In HubSpot, you can add new fields to your contacts' information to keep track of these details. Think of these fields as notes that help you remember important bits about your customers, like their birthday or the last product they showed interest in.

A HubSpot email template editor showing the use of a personalization token to customize the greeting with the recipient's first name.

They pull information from the custom fields you've created for your contacts to add a personal touch to your emails. For example, when you're crafting an email campaign in HubSpot, you can insert a personalization token that automatically fills in the recipient's first name, last name, company name, or any other custom field you've set up. This way, each email sent out feels as if it's been written just for them, whether it's acknowledging a recent download, a product interest, or even wishing them a happy birthday.

By using personalization tokens, you transform a bulk email blast into a series of individual conversations. This level of personalization shows your audience that you're paying attention to their preferences and behaviors, significantly boosting engagement. It's a simple yet powerful way to make every customer feel valued and increase the likelihood that they'll respond to your call-to-action, moving them further along the customer journey from lead to loyal customer.

 

9. Identify Your Best Leads

Lead scoring in HubSpot is a straightforward way to determine which of your contacts are most likely to become customers. This process involves assigning a score to each lead based on their interactions with your brand — like the details they've filled out in forms, the emails they've opened, or the pages they've visited on your website.

The higher the score, the more interested and ready to buy they are believed to be. This helps your sales and marketing teams focus their efforts on leads that are most likely to convert, improving efficiency and potentially increasing sales.

Using lead scoring let’s you hone in on the contacts that have a high probability of turning into a customer.

 

Why does lead scoring matter? It's about prioritizing your efforts. In the sea of people who visit your website, not everyone is ready to make a purchase. Some are just browsing, while others are actively looking for a solution that you offer. Lead scoring helps you identify these hot leads so you can direct your attention and resources effectively. It's a vital part of any sales strategy in HubSpot because it streamlines the sales process, letting your team concentrate on nurturing the right leads at the right time, ultimately helping your business grow.

10. Targeting for Customer Lifecycle

Understanding a customer's lifecycle means recognizing the various stages they pass through in their journey with your company, from first hearing about your brand to becoming a loyal advocate. HubSpot's system allows you to tag and track these stages, such as a new lead, an interested prospect, or a confirmed customer. This tagging helps your team to clearly see how individuals progress over time and to tailor their outreach accordingly.

A HubSpot pie chart visualizing the distribution of contacts across different lifecycle stages, from new subscribers to evangelists, highlighting the customer journey tracking in HubSpot.

Tracking through lifecycle stages in HubSpot enables you to monitor this progression and gather insights on the most effective touchpoints. It allows your marketing team to see which campaigns are bringing in new leads and helps sales to know when to follow up with prospects who are ready to buy. In essence, lifecycle stages serve as signposts that guide your interactions with each contact, ensuring that you deliver the right message at the right time, fostering a smooth transition from one stage to the next in the customer's journey.

Considering HubSpot for Your Business

. At Vaulted, we're dedicated to guiding you through every step of the HubSpot experience, from simplifying contact management to mastering the art of lead conversion. If you're looking to enhance your inbound marketing and operational efficiency, our experts are here to elevate your strategy and ensure you make the most of your HubSpot investment. Let's connect and take your business to new heights with HubSpot.


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