20 tips to get more out of your HubSpot account

HubSpot is a powerful tool that can support your business in Marketing, Sales and Service. However, if you do not use the system to its full potential, you are leaving opportunities on the table. You could, so to speak, buy a Ferrari, but if you barely drive it you might as well have bought a Toyota. In this blog, we have listed 20 tips to help you get more out of your HubSpot account and put your marketing, sales and service to even better use for your business.

1. Use meeting links to let people book appointments directly in your calendar

It often happens that you want to schedule an appointment with a prospect and then end up emailing back and forth several times to find a date. With HubSpot meeting links, your prospect can book an appointment straight into your calendar. The meeting tool reads your calendar and identifies your availability. Efficient for your staff, and it gives the prospect control over whatever time suits them.

How do you create a meeting link? Go to Sales > Meetings and simply create a meeting link with the conditions you set yourself. In the end, you get a personal URL that you can share with your prospects by email, on social or on your website.

2. Use lead scoring

Within HubSpot you have the option to set up lead scoring. This allows you to rank your prospects based on how interested they are. You attach values to certain actions they have taken or information they have absorbed. This approach lets you distinguish quality leads from weaker leads, or leads that may not be that far along yet.

For example, if a lead fills in a form on the website, you can assign a point. If they then indicate in the form that they operate in a certain industry, you can award another point. When they subsequently fill in a contact form, you assign them 5 or 10 points. You do this for every important touchpoint. It could also be that you deduct points when, for example, they provide a personal email address instead of a business one. This way you can indicate priority within your leads, so your sales and marketing team can act at the right moments.

3. Call your contacts directly from HubSpot

As a salesperson, you will largely fill your day calling prospects, leads and customers. During the call, you jot down all sorts of relevant details on a notepad, only to have to decipher these notes later. This is obviously not convenient for future conversations or follow-up, and it simply costs a huge amount of time.

When you use the HubSpot CRM, you can call this person directly from the customer profile. Your call is recorded without any effort, so you can effortlessly type digital notes into the customer profile.

4. Merge duplicate contacts

It can happen that duplicate contacts end up in your database. You could of course manually clean up this data by deleting one of the two contacts. However, HubSpot has a handy solution for this: merging duplicate contacts.

Suppose Sander Adriaanse fills in a form on your website with sander@addmark.nl and then, a few days later, fills in another form with his personal email address. You would then have two contacts within your HubSpot CRM. This takes up unnecessary space.

HubSpot itself flags it when the system detects that there may be duplicate contacts. At the push of a button, you can merge these two customer profiles into a single customer profile. You do need to decide in advance which of the two becomes primary, so you stay in touch using the correct contact details. This way, relevant information is not lost and you can keep your database clean.

5. Make use of CTAs

On your website, you probably use various buttons that trigger an action. If you want to change a particular button and roll that out across every page, you would have to go through them all one by one.

By using Call-to-Actions within HubSpot, this is no longer a time-consuming task. When you adjust a button, this is immediately applied everywhere on the website where that CTA appears.

It also gives you more insight into the performance of your buttons. You can analyse all your CTAs based on views and conversions. You can even refine this further by analysing based on placement, colour or text.

6. Smart CTAs to personalise further

With Smart CTAs you can change the content of the button based on the visitor. So instead of showing the same button in the form of ‘Get in touch’, you could adjust the CTA based on the customer journey and, for example, show ‘Book a demo’ when this fits the visitor.

It is also possible to adjust the CTA based on other information such as product interests. This way you make the visitor’s experience personal and tailored.

7. Analyse your social media posts for optimisations

With HubSpot it is not only possible to schedule and track your posts on your social media channels. You can also analyse every post on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram to determine what does and does not work.

When you analyse your posts, you find out whether certain words or phrases might drive engagement. Whatever it may be, you can use this information to refine your posts further to make even more impact with your target audience.

8. Use your data within reporting

HubSpot offers built-in analytics to give you insight into every detailed report. From website data and landing pages to emails and call-to-actions. This way you get insight into all the key statistics in one central place. You can then easily share the data with your entire team.

With the data in hand, you can also track the entire customer journey and take action. By evaluating customer behaviour on your website, you can also trigger automations. This helps with measuring the performance of your marketing campaigns and deciding which assets perform best.

9. Remove navigation within your landing pages

The main goal of a landing page is to convert your visitors into leads. You therefore want to offer as little distraction or opportunity as possible to click away from the page. So remove outbound links to make your landing pages ‘distraction-free’. This allows visitors to concentrate on filling in the form.

10. Make sure workflows stay up to date

The success of a CRM system depends heavily on how up to date the information stored in it is. Think of email addresses, lifecycle stages, contact details or other information your sales team needs to do their job.

So make sure your workflows keep up, so you can automate keeping data up to date as much as possible. This is not only efficient, it also results in fewer errors being made. Think of manually changing a contact owner within HubSpot. You can automate this with a simple workflow without any effort.

11. Make use of progressive profiling

Forms on your website are hugely important when it comes to converting a website visitor on your landing page. So you naturally want to make sure there are no issues with your form and that it is simple to fill in.

The so-called ‘queued form fields’ are fields you can add to your form. When a visitor has already fully completed a form on your website before, the queued form fields surface, and you can ask the visitor different questions.

Suppose a visitor has already filled in their job title and company before, it is obviously irritating if you keep asking the same questions. The queued form fields replace these questions with other additional questions to learn more about the visitor. The sales team will be hugely pleased with this, because they have more information to work with and can sell your product or service better.

12. Block free email providers

It may not be convenient for your business to receive leads using email addresses such as gmail.com, hotmail.com or other free email providers.

Within HubSpot forms you can block this with the click of a button. You choose the form you want to edit, click on the email field and tick the box ‘Block free email providers’, and that is it.

If you operate within B2B, this will potentially result in more quality leads.

13. Work more efficiently by using chatbots

When your support department gets busier, you can choose to improve staffing. But there is another way to tackle the workload, namely a chatbot.

You can set up a chatbot to catch the first questions and, if needed, use your knowledge base to refer to. It is even possible to have a chatbot create a support ticket, so a customer knows their problem is being picked up as quickly as possible.

Of course, it is also possible for a chatbot to start a live chat when someone is online.

14. Personalisation within your emails

Using email within HubSpot saves you a lot of time when you want to send the same email to a segment of your contacts. Logically, sending a generic email will not land well with everyone. That is why it is good to add personalisation within your emails.

How can you send a personalised email to all your contacts that also matches their individual interests, without spending too much time on it?

Simple, you can use an email template within HubSpot. Within the template you can set up a structure of the most important elements. This way you can adjust it slightly for each contact, so it fits the person.

Within this email you can also add personalisation tokens. A personalisation token is an easy way to use the data you have within your CRM. Based on this information, for example, a first name, last name or company is automatically filled in within your email.

When you use the email template tool, it will also give recommendations to optimise your email. Think of recommendations such as the length of your email.

15. Use tasks to remind yourself

Have you just finished your meeting, or just had a prospect on the phone with important information, then you do not want to forget these to-dos. With tasks within HubSpot you have an overview of your to-dos in no time, and you can also assign tasks to others. You can also easily set reminders for these tasks. You have the option to receive a reminder by email, notification within HubSpot or in the HubSpot mobile app.

The tasks you create can optionally be linked to the relevant contact, so the context is immediately clear.

16. Standard filters for your entire team

Make use of filters for every team, so they can prioritise their work based on the most important leads. You can simply filter your contacts, companies and deals as you wish and then share this ‘view’ with specific people or teams.

This way, everyone works within the same view with the data that matters to them.

17. Pop-ups to increase your conversion

With the lead flow tool from HubSpot you can show pop-ups, slide-ins or a dropdown banner. This allows you to offer your content to your visitors at the right moment to increase conversion on your website.

You use certain triggers to determine when your pop-up, or other lead flow options, appears. For example, the time they have spent on a page, how far they have scrolled, or their intention to leave the page.

It makes it easy for your website visitors to get in touch with your business.

18. Automatically ask for feedback from your customers

Within HubSpot you can easily set up and send NPS surveys to your customers. This way you keep a finger on the pulse of what customers think of your business. Sending an NPS survey is the first step, but following up on the responses is of course important.

Based on the survey results, you can set up an automation for people who are dissatisfied, neutral or satisfied.

For example, you can ask satisfied customers for testimonials, or follow up to find out why customers are dissatisfied. With this information you can optimise your service or product further and turn the dissatisfied customer back into a satisfied one.

19. Automatically clean up your data

Keeping your data clean is an important element for every business. It provides both a clear overview and a structured overview of your data. Something that may sound familiar is that over time your database ends up containing, for example, phone numbers filled in different ways or names written without a capital letter. With Operations Hub you can use automations to keep this data clean, so no data jungle is created.

20. Mapping out a content strategy

Within HubSpot you have the option to use the SEO tool to set up a content strategy. You determine the topics and immediately see the search volume. Here you can also immediately set up related subtopics, so a content cluster is created. HubSpot will help you along the way, as the system immediately offers suggestions. By creating a so-called content cluster, you connect the content topics with each other and can see how these topics perform together and individually.