If you’re like me, when you first started using HubSpot, you were both amazed and terrified of all the nooks and crannies that it held within its virtual walls. HubSpot’s capabilities as a CRM spread far and wide across the sales, marketing & service spectrum – but with great power comes great responsibility. In this case, responsibility comes in the form of the learning curve to take advantage of everything that’s just beyond your fingertips.
But you don’t always have the time to do a deep dive on the knowledge base or let time tick away while you tinker.
Which is where we come in!
Over our years of helping organizations utilize HubSpot to its fullest, we’ve seen a consistent trend: Organizations know that HubSpot holds amazing tools. They just don't know where – or don't have the time – to find them.
Here are our Top 3 Lead Conversion HubSpot Features (That You Might Not Even Know About).
- Native Lead Scoring
- Collaborative Marketing Calendar
- Contact Attribution Reporting
- Bonus: Form Domain Blocking
- Finishing Up
Let's get caffeinated!
Native Lead Scoring
Leads are coming in from your inbound & outbound marketing channels – exciting!
For the first few, you’re able to track exactly what they’re doing and communicate with them accordingly. You’re following up directly with the leads that are opening and clicking every email you send them and downloading your content, and perhaps the not-so-engaged are being sent more educational and nurturing content. And that’s exactly what you should be doing!
But what happens when you start getting dozens of leads a day?
It can become increasingly time-consuming (and frustrating) trying to keep track of engagement behaviors and actions that your leads are taking, and inevitably, some start to slip through the cracks when you don’t have a system set in place.
Luckily, HubSpot holds native Lead Scoring functionality – that is, the ability to automatically track and ‘score’ behaviors and actions leads have taken, and weight them accordingly based on the level / amount of engagement, as well as where it falls in your Sales & Marketing Funnel.
I won’t go into full detail here, (check out our Ultimate Guide to HubSpot Lead Scoring for that) but here’s a quick breakdown:
For certain actions leads take that you’ve deemed significant in your marketing and sales cycle – e.g., visiting your pricing page, downloading content, or booking a meeting with a sales rep, you can assign point values. The more significant the action, the higher the point value associated.
You can add positive (or negative) values for significant actions your leads are taking.
With a solid lead scoring system, your team will be able to sort leads by their score from highest to lowest, and ensure that the hottest leads are being reached out to at the right time, without letting anything slip through the cracks.
Collaborative Marketing Calendar
Integrated marketing campaigns come in many shapes and forms, but there’s one thing in common with all of them – if they’re not meticulously managed, things can get very messy.
Luckily, rather than keeping your marketing campaigns organized in Google Sheets, Airtable (or even worse, in your head!), you can leverage HubSpot's collaborative marketing calendar. It will keep your campaign start and end dates, any assets the campaign holds – social posts, blogs, emails, landing pages, and more – all well-organized within a calendar that your whole team can see with just a few clicks.
Choose any marketing events you'd like to keep organized in your marketing calendar. Source: HubSpot
You’re already tracking campaign metrics in HubSpot (hopefully), so why not bring the organization of your campaigns within HubSpot as well? Using HubSpot’s collaborative marketing calendar will give your team a high-level view of your integrated marketing campaigns, as well as eliminate any reliance on third-party integrations for the organizational tools you may currently be using. More organization means your team can spend less time sorting through data and more time tracking leads through their customer journey.
Contact Attribution Reporting
Reporting on things like form submissions, email click-throughs, blog views and other actions taken by leads are great, and necessary, but they don’t always paint the full picture.
For example, you may have a lead that submits on your Free Trial landing page, but do you know exactly where they came from? Did they start on your blog, did they come from direct traffic to your website, did they click-through a forwarded marketing email, or perhaps somewhere else? You can certainly dig into each individual contact record and find out, but that can be a tedious and time-consuming process.
With Contact Attribution Reporting, you’ll be able to see exactly which assets are driving your leads, and assign the appropriate weight to each interaction based on where it happened in the contact creation process.
Attribution models can be a bit confusing if you’re unfamiliar with them, so here’s a quick breakdown of the standard models:
First Interaction: All the credit for contact creation is given to the first asset a contact interacted with before creation.
Linear: Equal credit is given for each asset a contact interacted with before creation.
Last Interaction: All the credit for contact creation is given to the last asset a contact interacted with before creation.
U-Shaped: The first and last interactions are each given 40% of the credit, with the other 20% spread evenly among the middle interactions.
First-Interaction Attribution Report. Source: HubSpot
Each model has its advantages and disadvantages, and there is no “right answer” when it comes to which one you choose, however, HubSpot does recommend using the Data-Driven model, so do with that what you will.
Pro Tip: If you’re on Marketing or Sales Hub Enterprise, you’ll also have access to Deal & Revenue Attribution Reporting.
Bonus: Form Domain Blocking
Tired of those pesky spam submissions on your website forms? Trust us, we’ve been there. Thankfully, HubSpot offers some pretty sweet features to help mitigate less-than-ideal form submissions.
There are two main sides to HubSpot’s form domain blocking features:
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Specific domain blocking – this is great for avoiding leads submitting their personal email, as well as blocking competitors from downloading your content.
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Free email domain blocking – HubSpot holds a running list of hundreds of garbage-mail providers (domains that are set up for the sole purpose of receiving one email, then being deleted).
After enabling both garbage-mail and specific domain blocking on your forms, you should see a serious reduction in your spam & unwanted submissions.
Not only will this help your team spend less time sorting through spam, but it will also greatly impact the accuracy of your reporting! Instead of having inflated numbers from spam and other unreliable submissions, you’ll have an accurate view of how your forms and landing pages are converting.
Finishing Up
HubSpot is full of useful tools, features and tricks for marketers and salespeople alike – but if you don’t know where to look for them (or don’t have the time), it can be frustrating. You don’t have to implement these lead conversion features all at once – master one at a time and continue to build, like a nice and slow drip coffee.
Or, if you’re more the quick shot of espresso type, book a call with us today and see if there’s a fit for us to caffeinate your digital marketing efforts!
