Hubspot Landing Pages Review - Powerful Pages

Creating a digital marketing campaign can be complicated and costly. You want to ensure the best outreach effort possible to maximize your conversion rates and make the most of pay-per-click ads.

Landing pages are the perfect instrument to achieve this. How do you build one? Check out our Hubspot landing page review below to find out more about one of the best solutions available.

What Is Hubspot?

Hubspot is a multifaceted service that sells software for “inbound marketing.” Hubspot actually coined this phrase back in 2006, and it has since been adopted by the digital marketing industry at large.

This customer relationship management tool offers a plethora of solutions for your business. For our Hubspot landing page review, we’ll be focusing on the “Marketing Hub” package. Without further ado...

Hubspot Best Features

Hubspot is packed with features. We couldn’t go over all of them in a single Web Tribunal review, so we’ve spliced together a highlight reel. We present you with the ones most important for conversion optimization through landing page building.

Free Version

You can use a basic version of Hubspot free of charge. It’s not a Hubspot trial—there’s no time lock. No credit card information is required. This is quite rare from what we’ve seen surveying the industry.

Advanced features need to be paid for, but if you’re just starting out, this is an excellent way to test out the service while getting real-world results. Anything you do in the free version will carry over into the paid subscription if you decide to get one.

White labeling is only available for paid plans.

Hubspot Integrations

For any digital marketing platform, integrations are... integral. Hubspot offers over 500. Everything from Hotjar to MailChimp, from the behind-the-scenes tech to your customer’s experience, is covered.

A unique feature in Hubspot’s repository is its developer support. Have an idea for an integration app that doesn’t exist yet? Sign-up for a developer account to build your app on Hubspot and publish it to the marketplace.

Drag-and-Drop Builder

Hubspot’s landing page builder is extremely easy to use. It has a drag-and-drop design, so you can simply slide the elements you want into place and instantly publish the page. It also features a built-in optimization checklist that analyses your page and suggests edits/updates.

You can save “section blocks” to be used on your other Hubspot landing pages. This streamlines your process and helps maintain a consistent brand. The builder itself is a lot “stiffer” than others we’ve looked at. You can’t place elements wherever you want.

It has grids that elements snap into. While this is restrictive, it is also convenient because it allows the builder to adjust the pages as new elements are added automatically. It seamlessly translates the format between desktop and mobile.

Email Marketing

Landing pages are excellent for gathering sales leads, but you also need to follow up. This is where email marketing comes into play. The Hubspot software allows you to create emails and schedule their delivery. The send instructions draw on Hubspot’s lead management system, so leads will only receive emails that they’ve opted into.

Hubspot’s approach to marketing is focused on quality—giving people what they’re interested in. This ensures that your efforts are targeted to maximize conversion rates, increase your click-through rate, and make sure you’re getting a good return on investment (ROI).

Hubspot’s landing page best practices forbid the use of “bought lists.” Not only is this method an annoyance to those on the list, but it might hurt your business too. Remember—you want “hot leads” that are truly interested in your service.

Mobile functionality

In a digital world, access has to be as fast as content. Mobile browsing, according to numerous sources, now accounts for over 50% of all e-traffic. As such, your landing pages need to be mobile-optimized/responsive.

Hubspot pages are built to look good and be lightning-fast on all devices. You can switch between desktop and mobile view in the editor to see the page before publishing it. The builder format, being quite rigorous, translates the elements between formats.

But note that Hubspot doesn’t currently support Google AMP pages for landing pages and websites.

SEO Optimization

Inbound marketing aims to increase organic growth by drawing sales leads in. Search engine marketing is crucial for this purpose. The Hubspot page designer is SEO-friendly, with built-in suggestions and tools. You need to attract responsive demographics. Do so by tailoring your page to align with people’s searches.

The tools will analyze your website and tell you whether your metadata is efficient if your copy needs work, etc. SEO optimization is only available with the Professional Plan.

Analytics

To run a digital marketing campaign effectively, you need to oversee the performance of various elements. You can gather this information through A/B testing, heatmaps, and a combination of multivariate testing. Hubspot also supports Google Analytics.

A/B testing allows you to create two variations of a page and split traffic between them to see which performs better. Heatmaps show you where visitors are scrolling and what they’re clicking on.

With this information, as well as the Google Analytics traffic data, you can discover what is stoking visitor engagement and focus your efforts.

Real-time analytics for email marketing are also available. Adjust your leads according to your client’s responses. If someone is interacting with your emails, notify a sales rep. If someone is ignoring them, cut them from the list to avoid negative associations in their mind.

GDPR Compliance

Our Hubspot landing page review wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t take a moment to address data privacy. As a service provider, you need to ensure the online identity of your leads is protected to boost their confidence in you and cover yourself legally.

Hubspot provides the most extensive GDPR compliance we’ve seen from any CRM software. While most services offer guidelines and procedures, Hubspot has GDPR-compliant tools and settings.

Hubspot landing page and email templates can be brought to compliance by enabling a GDPR “global toggle.” With this active, your landing pages and emails are prevented from being published if they’re not up to standard. Landing pages must display your cookie policy. Emails must contain information about what you retain and a link to privacy management settings. Hubspot takes care of all that.

The GDPR only applies to EU citizens. You’ll have to mark them in your leads database. If you’re publishing a page or email that won’t reach them, you won’t have to worry about these settings.

We haven’t seen any other reviews mention this, but it is undoubtedly an underrated feature that will become more important as time passes.

What We Disliked

The Hubspot cost and the complexity of some of the features are our main concerns.

Stick with us as we explain why.

Complicated System

There’s a lot going on with Hubspot. The number and intricacy of its features can be intimidating. While most users will be able to perform basic tasks (demos are included to help with that), the advanced features are a lot to take in.

Of course, you can consult the Hubspot webinar library, but it contains hours of video material, so it’s quite a time investment. Support is also available (more on that further down in this review).

The Price Increases Quickly

Most other services raise their prices in increments.

As many users note in their reviews of the Hubspot landing page builder, this goes from zero to 100 (or $45 to $800 in this case) real quick. While the basic and free plans are great, you’ll want access to the features in the higher tiers soon enough.

Hubspot Pricing

Hubspot's pricing plans are complicated.

For the purposes of this review, we’ll be looking at the Marketing Hub plan only.

It contains everything we’ve reviewed so far.

Additionally, the Professional Plan grants your pages SSL Encryption certification. Check out our in-depth SSL guide if you’re not sure what that is and why you need it.

The latter two packages also come with live telephone support with an agent. Let’s see what that entails.

Hubspot Customer Service

Support scales depending on your plan. Free users can consult community forums and use live chat. Starter users can contact agents via email and the advanced live chat. Professional and Enterprise users have access to phone support.

The “HubBot” was our first point of contact. We wanted to learn more about Hubspot's custom domain support.

The bot connected us to an agent in less than a minute. They were friendly and answered all of our questions promptly. After the chat, we discovered that we’d been emailed a transcript for reference.

Next, we sent out a few emails with queries about white labeling and Hubspot WordPress support. The responses were less personal than expected, referring us to info links. Our questions about WP were answered, but the white labeling email was off the mark.

Still, our experience was overall positive. Note that the higher your price plan, the more you can expect.

Hubspot User Reviews

To complete our Hubspot review, we looked at some user reviews. The reviews are mostly positive. Customers praise its ease of use and the number of functions it offers.

Many complaints focus on the limitations imposed on ecommerce store websites, but those reviews are typically older. Hubspot has been making strides year after year. Hubspot reviews for 2022 are looking good.

There is one feature that is polarizing, though, and that’s the drag-and-drop page builder. As we noted, the builder is stiff—you can’t drop things wherever.

On the upside, pages are translated between desktop and mobile more easily this way. Also, when you add a new element, the others shift in a sensible way, which saves you a lot of effort.

Some of the hot-takes on Reddit, in particular, criticize the landing page builder’s limited range of motion. But apart from that and the occasional complaint about pricing and refunds, the Redditors dig Hubspot big time.

Is Hubspot Worth It?

Hubspot is interesting in that it appeals to both entry-level users and power users, leaving a large gap in between. A free user can start seeing real results with the free plan, while a big business has a lot to work with utilizing the Enterprise plan.

But the middle-range packages are amiss. The paid Starter Plan lacks a lot of what you’ll need for conversion optimization on a Hubspot landing page. The Professional plan is a big leap in cost. With that in mind, we recommend Hubspot for larger businesses and B2B marketers.

Hubspot Alternatives

If Hubspot seems a little too complex for your needs or too heavy on your budget, you should consider one of the following alternatives:

Hubspot vs Unbounce

Many consider Unbounce to be the best landing page builder. It’s easy to see why—it supports over 1,000 integrations and sports some impressive conversion intelligence tools. Its focus is entirely on landing pages, and it gives you complete freedom.

If you want complete coverage, however, Hubspot is the better option. Its service packages take care of any aspect of digital marketing.

Hubspot vs Leadpages

Leadpages is one of the cheapest options available. It has a lot of the same tools as Hubspot, plus a decent website-building functionality. On Hubspot, you need to own a domain to make full use of the service.

Leadpages is a fraction of the cost, but it doesn’t offer the same level of support and technical strength.

Final Verdict

After trying out the software, testing the support, and reading hundreds of reviews on Hubspot's landing page-building capabilities, we can confidently say—Hubspot packs everything you might need for your digital marketing campaign.

Its main faults are that it comes at a steeply increasing cost and can be overwhelming for new users.

Still, it is a solid choice for businesses looking to up their game.