Low-Cost Hubspot Alternatives We Use Everyday
Unless you are new to the world of Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation – you have no doubt heard of Hubspot. You might have even seen a demo or viewed a webinar. Speaking from personal experience as former Certified Partners, Hubspot is the cream of the crop. They offer an incredible array of features and insight into your visitors. There’s just one problem – not everyone can afford the price tag! The entry level packages start at $200/month, but in order to get the most popular features, you are looking at $800-$1000/mo for a minimum number of contacts. One of the main reasons Hubspot is so expensive is that they cover so many things on their platform. Email, Contact Lists, Lead scoring, Content Management, Social Publishing, SEO Analysis, etc.
So What are some Hubspot Alternatives?
One thing we found when we used Hubspot was that being a WordPress user, we weren’t taking advantage of a lot of Hubspots features – but we were sure paying for them!. So, as much as we loved Hubspot, we decided to take the time to find alternatives that would cost much less, while offering the same results. We get a lot of questions about hubspot alternatives and decided to write this post to cover some of our favorites. We hope you will find them useful as well!
Hatchbuck – Marketing Automation
Hatchbuck, which starts at $99/mo, is the most full-featured of the products we chose to facilitate our marketing automation. Hatchbuck’s standard features include: contact management, lead scoring, form generation & conversion tracking, CRM, email creation. and mass-email service. In a nutshell – Hatchbuck serves as the core of our marketing automation system. It handles our marketing emails, automated drip email campaigns, and more. Hatchbuck keeps track of each visitors activities on our site and wraps it all up in an easy to use contact management interface. All in all – we couldn’t be happier with Hatchbuck.
WordPress – Content Management
One big criticism many have of Hubspot is their content management system. It isn’t that their CMS is bad, to the contrary, it is a very robust CMS. The bigger issue is that there are so many great CMSs out there – why would you want to reinvent the wheel? There is also the risk of something happening to Hubspot, and your site data is locked in a proprietary CMS that you do not host. We have long been fans of WordPress for its ease of use and for the fact we can make a WordPress site look any way we wish. It is a great platform for Content Marketing and is very SEO friendly. Best of all – WordPress is absolutely free! Wordpress is by far the most popular CMS out there (in terms of installations, not personal opinion here). It is also completely open-source and non-proprietary, meaning you can take your site anywhere.
Gravity Forms – Lead Generation
First of all, Hatchbuck lets you build forms and embed them in WordPress. However, there are times we would rather control that process entirely on the website. Gravity Forms makes it quite easy to set up a landing page form with downloadable content hidden behind a form. Gravity forms is inexpensive ($39 for a single site license), and allows the user to create practically any type of form imaginable. With their free addons, there is virtually no limit to what you can build. Order forms, surveys, quizes, and of course – general contact forms. One of the best things about Gravity Forms is the flexible confirmation and notification options. You can develop custom notifications based on conditional logic. For instance – you might have the user choose “general contact” or “technical support” when they fill out the form, and you could display a custom notification based on the choices they make. These notifications can be used to deliver whitepapers, ebooks, etc.
Lead In – Lead Intelligence
Lead-in is a plugin for WordPress that was actually developed by Hubspot. The idea was simple – to bring Hubspot-level visitor intelligence to WordPress, and NOT charge for it. Lead In is a free plugin that offers a lot of additional functionality through “Power-Ups”. Power-Ups include specialty stats, connectors for popular email services, pop-up forms and more. Out of the box, Lead In pulls in a good bit of detail about a visitor, once they have filled out a form. It tracks return visits, gives you detailed drill-down paths so you can study their behavior, and much more. Lead In can often get the users company name and information, size and even social profiles, making it easy to get some background information on a lead before you reach out to them.
Mailchimp – Email Marketing
Personally, we route all of our email through Hatchbuck. However, we have a lot of clients that don’t need that level of marketing automation such as drip campaigns, etc. For those situations, it is hard to beat Mailchimp. For the record, you can actually set up drip campaigns in Mailchimp – however, if you plan on doing that a lot, you need to look at a system designed for that sort of activity. At its core, Mailchimp provides a fantastic interface for creating and designing emails, managing your contact lists, and sending out mass marketing emails. Mailchimp is free as long as your contact list stays under 2000 members (and you don’t mind the little monkey at the bottom of your emails). When it becomes time to pay for your account, it starts out at $20-$30 per month. Very reasonable!
A Final Thought…
This is certainly not an exhausting list of Hubspot Alternatives – if you are truly interested in apples-to-apples competitors of Hubspot, there are a few out there. Google “marketing automation” and you will find a slew of products that fill this space. Be warned though, many are equally expensive and some are even more! If you have that kind of budget, you can’t go wrong with Hubspot. For start-ups and small businesses, however, part of being a nimble and adaptive business is diversifying your tool-set. Don’t put all your eggs (data) in one basket. With the tools we mentioned above, you can put together a customized marketing automation suite that does just what you need.
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