Migrating from HubSpot to Shopify for inbound marketing

HubSpot is well known for its inbound marketing, to then process an interested client and apply the internal sales process to turn them into a customer. But what if you just need the leads, just to reach out to them and set an appointment without all the marketing automation that the HubSpot Marketing platform offers - you might save thousands a year with Shopify! Did you know that Shopify doesn't need to be an online store? It can just host an inbound marketing website at a fraction of the cost - and a fraction is a small fraction, how's $9/month? This article discusses how you can take an inbound marketing strategy from an eCommerce platform such as Shopify and get the job done while saving you a significant monthly charge.

HubSpot Pricing and Features

HubSpot prices are based on your leads, and as your leads grow, they have a scaling pricing scheme. They offer a bunch of free tools to receive your audience and make it easy for them to drop you their contact details. Of course, it is to HubSpot's advantage that these tools are effortless for the audience as they want your subscribers to grow. The issue is regardless of the quality of the subscriber, they count them as they register, and it takes the business to go through them and remove the ones that don't apply - scrubbing subscriber data is time-consuming when it comes to auditing your contact list, making your leads more relevant to your services.

Pricing starts at $0 to set up an account, you get to explore and play with the tools. Once you decide to set up a website and apply the tools to collect the contacts to then reach out with your services - things start changing. Pricing is broken up into 5 parts: Marketing, Sales, Customer service, CMS, and Operations. Each has its own pricing structure. Marketing is priced by the contacts you acquire while Sales is based on the Salespeople you have managing the leads. Customer Service is based on users accessing the system while the CMS for your website is locked currently to the Professional Plan at $360/month. Operations Hub for business automation ranges from $45/month to $2000/month. No one can doubt that you can build a full business around HubSpot, but has there been no competition or alternative to its capabilities and pricing? Shopify is no slouch on getting customers and converting sales, maybe it can do key functions for a lot less.

https://app.hubspot.com/pricing/4609221/marketing

Shopify as a Viable Alternative

Looking at the Small Business environment, every cost-saving measure you apply makes a bottom-line impact. Shopify has been a leader in the industry in providing an easy way into setting up your store, but what if your store is a service brick and mortar business, and only requires leads to book an appointment? Sure, HubSpot would work and do the business of inbound marketing very well, however, Shopify can do it just as well as HubSpot can.

Did you know that a Shopify store does not have an active payment gateway? Yes, no need for a payment gateway, it can be just an inbound marketing site. Parking a store cost $9/month, which suspends the payment gateway and stops the monthly plans regarding the shopping cart, allowing you to use a website builder to set up your store. No need to be selling products (yet, maybe later), but if your marketing tasks are to gather suitable audiences from search engine results - you are now in the Shopify inbound marketing business. All this for a mere $9/month vs. the hundreds HubSpot charges for their marketing automation tools. You can save time by using Shopify's easy-to-use Theme setup, the various tools to build your website including Shopify Apps for plugging in your social networks, and have a smooth customer journey to review your offerings. Shopify's App store has thousands of marketing tools compared to the HubSpot app marketplace, and when considering social media integrations, Shopify is way ahead of the curve.

How Shopify works in Marketing automation mode

If you have taken the plunge to set up a website in Shopify for lead generation, you will find that Shopify has already Email marketing as part of their feature set - even at the "parked" price. Given the push for product sales within Shopify, it turns out that Shopify has become a marketing automation platform. Your marketing automation strategy can be tailored with a great starting point and you can add via the Shopify App store marketing automation software that will serve for brand awareness, integrations into social media platforms and have a great website that can capture your target audience with a good clean On-site SEO. Even personalized messaging, content marketing, and a build-up of contacts with no limits of price increases as you grow your audience to market to.

Conclusion

For the small businesses focused on Service, Shopify can bring a new dimension to acquiring your contacts and do it for a reasonable cost. No need for a HubSpot to Shopify integration, just straight up Shopify in parked mode and no need for HubSpot. With this platform strategy, you are getting the best of 2 worlds - your inbound marketing is well taken care of, all the while as you build products that might be sold online - then you upgrade your plan from $9/month to $29.99/month and have the products being sold online. However, you would have amassed an audience to Email market to, can then promote products and drive additional service engagements via product sales. If you would like to discuss this strategy, and what it takes to make it a concrete plan, feel free to reach out to us at wish@thegenielab.com