Choosing the right HubSpot subscription depends on the size of your business, how many contacts you need to manage in the CRM and the kind of features you’re after. After all, companies come in different shapes and sizes, and what works for one might not work for another.
HubSpot’s strengths lie in its ease of use, analytics tools and flexibility. There is no other platform that has been designed so comprehensively around the needs of a digital marketer. How far you go in terms of functionality is entirely up to you and your business goals. The great news is that HubSpot is scalable so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t start small and add features as your business growth dictates.
Here’s a run-down of HubSpot’s subscription bands to help you decide which license is best for your business today, and to help you plan for tomorrow.
Breaking down HubSpot’s Marketing licensing options
HubSpot’s CRM is free and contains some powerful tools to help manage your contact relationships and nurture your leads. This is a great way to get familiar with HubSpot and learn the ropes. However, it is limited in terms of functionality so if your business starts to grow quickly, you’ll probably soon realise you need a little more from your marketing platform.
The next step up from Free is Starter where for a small monthly subscription you can start to use some of the tools HubSpot has become famous for. HubSpot branding is removed as well as soon as you start paying, making the experience of interacting with your business more streamlined for your users.
Starter
Starting at only £42 per month, HubSpot’s Starter licensing package adds in a few more marketing tools and sales tools for you to use. Some of these include:
- Phone and email support
- Email marketing
- Lists
- Mobile optimisation
- Live chat
For the price, Starter is an excellent option for a small business just starting out in the world of digital marketing. If you’re not sure if digital marketing is going to work for your business, but you’d like to give it a try and see for yourself, Starter is the way to go.
Basic
From the Basic subscription, you have the option to purchase the website add-on, starting at £80 per month.
For inbound marketing to fire on all cylinders, you need to be able to easily manage your website content including calls to action and to make sure you’re optimizing it all for SEO. You’ll also want your website to be linked with your CRM for contact data capture. This means either migrating your current site over to HubSpot or for best results, building one from scratch that has been designed to get the most out of HubSpot from the start.
A Basic subscription empowers your marketing team with a few key tools to take their efforts up a notch. It comes in at £165 a month and, unlike Starter, includes a more advanced set of marketing tools such as:
- Blog and content creation
- SEO and content strategy
- Social media
- Calls-to-action
- Landing pages
- Analytics dashboard
- Standard SSL certificate
- Subdomain availability
Best suited for small to medium businesses with some experience in digital marketing, Basic is great for marketers with ambitions to take their efforts to the next level.
Professional
Probably HubSpot’s most popular option, Professional pulls out all the stops and offers its users a wealth of features. It costs from £655 a month and includes access not only to the marketing and sales portals but also to HubSpot’s new services offering. Among the features made available are:
- Marketing automation
- Goal-based nurturing
- Integration with Salesforce
- Smart content
- Attribution reporting
- A/B testing
- Sales automation
- Multiple deal pipelines
- Predictive lead scoring
- Quotes
- Ticketing
- Chatbots
- Meeting scheduling
And the list goals on. It’s a full-service package that would best suit businesses that have some experience of digital marketing and how to bring a good strategy to life with multi-faceted campaigns. Professional helps growing businesses create a more engaging experience for their customers from first click, to sales through to ongoing customer services.
Enterprise
Hubspot’s Enterprise option starts at £1,960 a month. It offers the full HubSpot spectrum of marketing tools, designed to scale with your business and help you manage your entire online presence, across multiple websites and subdomains. The real difference with Enterprise is the measurability features. This license brings superior reporting and contact management tools – specifically aimed at the needs of larger businesses.
Besides including all the features present in the Professional option, Enterprise adds:
- Custom revenue reporting
- Custom event reporting
- Custom event triggers
- Predictive lead scoring
- Contacts reporting
- Event-based segmentation
How to decide which license is right for you
It might be tempting to want to go straight for Enterprise but bigger doesn’t have to mean better with marketing tools. The important thing is to determine which license is right for you today, because you can so easily scale up to the next level in the future.
Ask yourself
- What are my marketing and sales needs and goals for the coming year?
- How long is my current sales cycle?
- What is my current cost of customer acquisition (COCA) and my customer lifecycle value (CLV)
- Am I prepared to commit 20% of my goal revenue to my marketing efforts?
- Am I prepared for the long-term commitment associated with seeing results?
- Am I willing to put in the time to familiarise myself with HubSpot and its features to my best advantage?
This last question may seem like an odd one, but it’s valid. HubSpot is intuitively user-friendly and offers plenty of automation and ease of use. However, you’ll get the most out of the platform if you take the time to do the free HubSpot certifications and training on offer and spend time on the platform – and if your marketing team does the same.
Still not sure which option will be the best fit for your business? Let us help you make the right call by dropping us a mail or giving us a call for a quick chat, no strings attached. We’re HubSpot Diamond Partners, and we love helping others make the right choices to get the most out of their chosen HubSpot option.
