For a smaller organization that can't support a full marketing staff, finding a solid marketing automation software if vital to the success of your marketing program. It saves money in the long-run, keeping you from having to pay salary and benefits for the additional 1-2 people that would be required to support your email marketing campaigns and social communities.
There are many great marketing automation/content management systems on the market so your organization has its pick. There are a few important things to keep in mind while you're doing your research.
Things to Know Before Beginning Your Comparison
Size Does Matter (In Marketing Automation)
And I don't just mean a software that offers all the tools you need. What I mean is that if you're a small dental health provider who has 3 full-time employees, you shouldn't pick a marketing automation platform that was designed for Enterprise users. You will likely be paying for more functionality than you need.
Also, being the smallest fish in a giant pond full of Enterprise-sized fish means that you're not going to have much pull when it comes to support, or flexibility in pricing or contract negotiation. You are not the primary target market for that software, and they will treat you as such, maybe not intentionally, but because they have bigger fish to fry.
Interested in learning more about the different tools & functionality HubSpot offers? Download our complete pricing breakdown here.
You'll also need to have some metrics on-hand before you begin to estimate your cost.
Monthly Website Traffic
For example, you should know your website's average monthly traffic. You can use a tool like Google Analytics or Alexa (still owned by Amazon, but not the tall skinny cylinder you're thinking about) for this.
Contact Database Size
You'll also want to know how many contacts are in your database. Most automation software will limit the number of contacts, or use the number of contacts to help build your pricing model. The reason for this is pretty simple: Every contact in your database is one more contact taking up space on their server, or the server they're paying for. So someone with 30,000 contacts should probably be paying more than someone with only 300 contacts.
Pro Tip: An easy way to save some money on your software cost is to import your most active contacts and then run opt-in campaigns and clean house on you contact database. Take out any bad email addresses. Any contact that hasn't interacted with your email marketing in 1-2 years should probably be exported into an Excel spreadsheet and moved to storage. Use the transition to a new system as an opportunity to clean house and save yourself some money in the process.
Average Monthly Email Sends
Emails sends typically won't have a huge impact on your end price, but it's a good thing to keep in mind! If you typically send 45,000 emails a month but the marketing automation license you're looking at has a limit of 50,000 email sends/month, you're going to be in trouble if your contact database grows by even a little bit. Oh, and if you are sending out 30,000 emails/month and your database is less than 4,000 contacts, we need to have a discussion.
What About Your Website or CRM?
Some marketing automation systems include a website hosting platform or CMS (Content Management System) among their list of services. Having everything consolidated onto one platform or suite of tools can provide a lot of benefits, the least of which is having to remember that many fewer passwords. When looking into marketing automation software, it might also be a good idea to look at the current tech stack and see if it would be beneficial to you to consolidate to a single system.
Once you've found the marketing automation software that is a good fit for the size and needs of your organization, the next step is to look at pricing.
The Cost of HubSpot
HubSpot Marketing & Sales Automation software is definitely a solid choice for those small to medium-sized organizations with smaller marketing teams. Just like Oracle Marketing Cloud isn't the best choice for smaller organizations, HubSpot would not be the best choice for Abercrombie & Fitch (for example).
However, if it is a good fit for your organization, the next step is cost comparison. HubSpot, like most other marketing automation platforms, offers a lot of combinations to make tailoring your pricing a little bit easier.
All of those options can get confusing sometimes though, so we've created a handy guide to help you walk through the steps to help estimate your organization's cost of HubSpot and breakdown HubSpot pricing.
The Growth Stack
HubSpot's Growth Stack includes three vital pieces to any organization: Sales, CRM, and Marketing tools. Each piece of the stack has a free option, and then the Sales & Marketing tools also have paid options that are much more robust.
Free Tools
If you have never done any sort of marketing automation before and are strapped for cash where marketing is concerned (hey, we've all been there), the free marketing tool might be a good option for you. This will give you the basic functionality of marketing automation at a relatively low commitment (time or money) from you.
If you're marketing team is accustomed to having some sort of marketing automation to supplement their efforts however, you're going to want to pass on the free marketing tool.
HubSpot's CRM tool is actually free for all, which is a pretty unique situation for a fully-fleshed CRM. If you don't have a CRM currently or have looked into switching, the HubSpot CRM is a great option for smaller sales teams. Read more about it here.
Paid Tools
The main variables that will go into determining the cost of HubSpot for your license are going to be your number of contacts and monthly traffic. HubSpot Basic provides the basic marketing automation tools for up to 3,000 monthly website visitors and 100 contacts.
HubSpot Pro is their most popular license and does pretty much everything that a typical marketing strategy would need for unlimited monthly users and 1,000 contacts.
HubSpot Enterprise offers extra special additions like being able to create events in the system that will help attribute specific marketing actions to traffic, contacts, and customers. Enterprise is available to unlimited site traffic and comes with 10,000 contacts at the base rate.
For all three license options, you can choose to add more contacts a-la-carte.
In order to really be able to prepare for the purchase of a system, you need numbers. We totally get that. Click here, or the banner below, and fill out a quick 7 question survey and we'll send you a customized estimate.
