Why A FREE HubSpot Account Is Worth It

We take a look at all the pros of a free HubSpot account, and the added value you get when you take advantage of Velocity Media’s partnership with HubSpot.

CRM (customer relationship management) is a software tool used to optimise the full spectrum of business operations and client management. It’s a system which assembles, curates, oversees and optimises relationships with customers, as well as with other stakeholders, entities, companies, team members, investors, suppliers and vendors.

CRM’s mission-critical technology unifies your customer database, and supports time management, lead generation, communication and business organisation. Marketing automation introduced inbound and content marketing, transforming the way leads get routed to sale teams and data is integrated from marketing to sales.

By creating an audience persona through demographic and psychographic data, you gain a richer customer model, giving you insight into their lifestyles and decision-making processes, which in turn affect their buying patterns.

Which brings us to HubSpot CRM and how users have enjoyed the benefits of its free value-add for seven years, as well free marketing and lead generation software.

HubSpot’s intention in creating a free CRM was to remove barriers to smarter prospecting for all its users, and encourage them to stop using email, memory and spreadsheets to move their deals through sales funnels.

Here’s how:

• HubSpot found that cost and complexity were inhibitors in companies adopting core CRM tools. So HubSpot made it free. And for free products to work, the value proposition needs to be easily understandable and useful. HubSpot succeeded at both.
• Free products are all good and well, but the proof of the pudding is in profitability: the economics of scale need to sustain lifetime total value (LTV) to monetise adopter uptake. With its extensive database and highly populated platform, HubSpot’s CRM bypassed the need for scalability, avoided prohibitive cost and demonstrated proof of profit.
• Wide adoption of the free CRM model increased value and added meaning for the rest of HubSpot’s network, including its integration partners. The company overcame initial internal resistance to not charging for its CRM tool by focusing on defining its vision and owning its inspired decision. It paid off.

HubSpot offers one of the most comprehensive free CRM plans amongst its competitors. HubSpot’s maxim that “there is no better way to grow” is borne out by its modular CRM offerings of marketing, sales, customer service, content and operations, scalable to your business’ size.

It’s so simple to navigate, you won’t even miss the free plan’s absence of human customer support. There is a wealth of online knowledge, third-party tutorials, community help sites and even Twitter to choose from. HubSpot’s blog cannot go without mention here.

Let’s take a deeper dive into the HubSpot software items that come with a free plan and list the features below. There are pricing models for items with more features if you want to upgrade.

HubSpot Marketing Hub

• Forms: Embedded forms with GDPR options, external forms, pop-up forms and HubSpot forms. Free forms have HubSpot branding and no more styling options.
• Email marketing: Comes with a drag and drop editor and basic personalisation. Lets you create, edit and bulk send emails with HubSpot branding. A monthly limit of 2 000 emails.
• Ad Management: Create website audiences, monitor how your ads aid your goals and connect HubSpot with supported ad networks Google Ads, Linked Ads and Facebook Ads. Lets you connect two different ad channels, with a monthly maximum $1 000 spending limit.
• List segmentation: Personalise emails and digital platforms with 25 static and five smart lists. Lets you filter based on marketing email activity, contact properties and form data. Suitable for listing contacts with a specific persona, mailing contacts that have downloaded content and making a list of event invitees.
• Conversations inbox: Generate one shared inbox which consolidates email and chat conversations, with team access. Useful to see what support has been discussed with which clients.
• Live chat: A chat for one-on-one contact with website visitors, and comes with HubSpot branding.
• Conversational bots: Direct web visitors to the right content, and create tickets, qualify leads and book meetings. Comes with HubSpot branding.
• Dashboard: Lets you access three dashboards, each displaying 10 reports, giving insight into your marketing platforms and areas for improvement, as well as ROI insights and which ad campaign keyword generates the most revenue. You also get a bunch of standard reports in which you can do minor editing.

HubSpot Sales Hub

• Live chat: Automated conversations get sent to the right page (the free version has HubSpot branding at the bottom.)
• Automatically create tickets, qualify leads, and book meetings.
• Access to one conversation inbox, where team members can see what’s being discussed with clients.
• Create and share professional-looking quotes.
• Calling: Each user can call for up to 15 minutes monthly. Phone conversations can be recorded, and logged in the contact record automatically.
• Email scheduling: Personalise emails for prospects and schedule sending them at the appropriate time.
• Email tracking: Lets you track emails and notifies you when opened or are clicked (up to 200 notifications per month).
• Email templates: Generate, save and reuse best-performing emails, and share them with your team for consistent communication with prospects. Gives you an option of five templates.
• Snippets: Produce five snippets − pieces of reusable content − allowing you to add regularly used texts to your email, or answer frequently asked questions (FAQs).
• Documents: Make a library of sales documents to share with prospects. You’ll see when your emails have been opened and can decide if receivers need to supply their email addresses in order to open your doc.
• Meeting planner: You get access to one personal meeting link which shows a calendar with your availability. Does away with the need for email volleyball, and comes with HubSpot branding.
• Dashboard: Three dashboards with 10 reports each convey your sales activity data, which activities benefit you the most and indicates how to improve.
• Data pipeline: Track your deals and the chances of closing them.
• Messenger integration: Assimilate your free HubSpot account with Facebook Messenger to save contact info, create chatbots and let your target audience contact you in a second.
• Custom properties: Where all your contact, company, deal and ticket data gets stored. You get 10 custom properties to personalise your own properties for deals, contacts and companies.
• HubSpot mobile app: With features like business card scanning and easy viewing for contacts and companies, you can access HubSpot wherever you are (supported for iOS and Android).

HubSpot Service Hub

• Ticketing: Log, organise and assign tickets to team members to resolve, based on priority and urgency.
• Live chat: This widget lets you chat to and help your customers in real time from your website.
• Single mailbox: A single repository for conversations between customers and your brand, whether mail, chat or social messaging.
• Response templates: For easy email and chat functions.
• Conversations inbox: Manage personalised customer communication at scale with an inbox shared with your team. Incudes customer questions, live chats and emails.
• Calling: Allows you to call prospects via VOIP from your HubSpot account, with the option to record and auto-log the calls.
• Conversational bot: Use it to create tickets and send visitors to the right service rep or knowledge-based article.
• Team email: Tie team email address to the conversations inbox, and convert incoming emails into tickets or send them to the shared inbox.
• Canned snippets: Build a reservoir of repeatable answers for prospects’ FAQs to add to emails and live chats.
• Email templates: Reuse your most valuable emails to save time.
• Tickets closed reports: Customer service campaigns are measurable with this tool which provides detailed reports highlighting response time, volume and category.
• Rep productivity reports: Get productivity and response times for each rep, and use them to spot the high performers and those who need coaching.
• Time-to-close reports: See how long customers wait for their issues to be resolved, and use the data to improve response times and processes.
• Reporting dashboard: Obtain marketing, sales, and customer service performance metrics to make improvements.
• Email tracking and notifications: Track one-off emails to contacts and get real-time notifications when emails are opened or clicked.
• Messenger integration: Automatically capture contact information, converse with your audience, create chatbots, and report on chat volume through Facebook Messenger.
• Custom properties: Link specific data points with contacts, companies, and deals.

HubSpot CMS Hub

• Premium cloud hosting: Straight off inclusion ensures the best end-user experience.
• Themes: Pre-made website themes come with a customisation option. Eliminate lopsided navigation, logos and design with a cohesive website.
• Drag and drop editing: Create, publish and update pages without interrupting the run or the need for code.
• Landing pages: Embed forms, calls to action and streamline lead generation on landing pages for lead conversion.
• Blogging: Attract traffic and generate content with the free features of one blog, 100 posts, 20 authors and 50 tags.
• Website pages: Originate a limit of 25 webpages with HubSpot's webpage building tools.
• Multi-language content: Manage multiple language domains and toggle between them, optimising each one for SEO.

Partnering With Velocity Media As A HubSpot Affiliate

Velocity Media (VM), the inbound digital marketing agency, is inimitable, imaginative and innovative: a progressive fusion of cyber and consultative. Peopled by business analysts, developers, designers, copywriters and digital marketing professionals, it propels business performance by creating opportunities to market, connect and engage with localised B2B customer segments.

Take advantage of VM’s Platinum partnership with HubSpot to further enrich your CRM activities, increase your conversion rates with HubSpot-based chatbots and enjoy the power of a VM-designed website built with HubSpot CMS expertise.