Andrew Levenson, Director of Growth for MHP/Team SI, sits down to discuss the marketing automation platforms “Nurture” and “HubSpot”, going over the similarities and differences between the two platforms.
Nurture is a marketing automation program built on a software called SharpSpring. With Nurture, you can bring all of these different marketing automation and marketing touchpoints into one software and automate these different marketing communications to customers. This means you can bring in email marketing, bring in text messaging, bring in automation, bring in your contact databases, bring in your marketing attribution, and put it all into one place. Then, you’re really able to automate these different marketing touchpoints.
So, let’s say someone fills out a form on your website. Through Nurture, they immediately receive an email alert thanking them for submitting a form, and then one of your salespeople receives an email alert saying they have a new lead. And from there, a dynamic email comes from their email automatically. And then five days later they’re entered into an automatic email drip campaign, and a new opportunity is created.
We’re able to automate all of these sales touchpoints, but also able to automate different marketing touchpoints within the system. That’s the main use of Nurture, which is incredibly robust in its features and its functionality: it has social listening tools, it has list-building capabilities, email design tools, media tracking, and more. But at its core, Nurture is a digital lead tracking and marketing communication automation tool that has seen a lot of success with many clients. That’s a high-level overview of what Nurture does and provides.
When it comes to comparing some of the benefits and key values between Nurture versus HubSpot, it’s important to first consider their pricing. Nurture is incredibly competitive in its pricing when compared to many other CRM and marketing automation programs that are comparable to it in features and functionality, including HubSpot.
A common complaint about HubSpot is their abundance of paywalls and how they build out their pricing plans. HubSpot has their marketing hub, and they have their service hub, and their operations hub, and their sales hub, and each of those has different pricing involved in it. Most of them are based on the number of contacts you have, and the number of users. Then, within each of those hubs, there are specific features that have additional costs associated with them.
A lot of times, we at MHP/Team Si will have clients that use HubSpot and will come to us with some frustrations about all of those different paywalls and hidden fees associated with the platform. So, if you start using HubSpot, you may realize that there’s a lot of functionality you would like, but can’t have without paying additional fees within HubSpot.
In comparison, Nurture has no hidden fees. They are very transparent about the costs associated with the platform. The only extra fee is if you exceed certain overage limits. For instance, there are some limits to what you can do in the platform in terms of email sends, or in terms of contacts that you can add each month. And on Nurture, those limits are very high, so “contact add” has a limit of 100,000 contacts. In comparison, HubSpot starts its pricing plan at 500 contacts. Nurture’s overage limit is so high, that we don’t typically see people reach those.
With Nurture, you get all of the features and functionality that come with the platform for no additional cost up to those overage limits. So, the full Nurture cost is $1,250 a month, and in comparison, most of HubSpot’s entry-level cost structures are around the $1,500 mark. If you compare features, like 100,000 contacts and the email send functionality, you would be looking at between $5,000 to $6,000 in HubSpot each month compared to about $1,250 in Nurture each month. So pricing is very competitive for Nurture while offering the same features as HubSpot.
From an email marketing perspective, everything you can do in HubSpot can be done in Nurture at a lower price point. You can design your emails, you can build email lists, you can do dynamic content insertion; you can do all of these different things in Nurture from an email design and deliverability perspective, which you can also do in HubSpot. From a CRM perspective, both platforms are very similar.
One of the only differences between Nurture and HubSpot is the ability to automatically bring in all emails to leads in Nurture, as opposed to HubSpot where you have to CC a specific email, making it a little clunky to actually get email communications into the platform and to associate with a specific contact. But even still, that feature in Nurture is very comparable to what HubSpot offers from an automation standpoint, being mostly the same.
You can set up visual workflows, triggers based on different data or actions and behaviors that leads are taking place, and a built-in chatbot in Nurture as well, just like HubSpot.
Another one of the key differences between HubSpot and Nurture is that HubSpot has some built-in integrations that Nurture does not. HubSpot has an app integration library where you can add features, such as SMS functionality. You can go to their app library and find an application that offers SMS, and then that will actually build additional functionality into your HubSpot. So if you add on that SMS integration, then you would be able to send SMS through HubSpot, and you would have new functionality, whereas, with Nurture, we would have to use an external service. So we’d have to have an external SMS provider that would then push data into Nurture, meaning you wouldn’t be able to do all that functionality in the platform, you’d have to use a third party.
If you’re looking to add a lot of functionality that’s not necessarily out of the box with HubSpot or with Nurture, you’re looking for all of these different third-party integrations. Those are typically a little bit easier or smoother with HubSpot because you’re able to bring those all into the platform, but overall from a higher level, HubSpot and Nurture are very comparable with features and functionality.
Virtually anything you can do in HubSpot, you could also do in Nurture. The biggest value of Nurture over a similar product, like HubSpot, would be the pricing. From what we’ve seen, and from what we’ve kind of vetted and researched from these other marketing automation platforms, Nurture’s pricing tends to be substantially cheaper than these other platforms, and also offers the same, if not similar, functionality as these platforms.
So that is a high-level overview of what the Nurture platform is, how it compares to HubSpot with its pricing, and then how it also compares with features and functionality. So if you’d like to learn more about Nurture, you can reach out to anyone at MHP/TeamSI, and we can set you up with a demo, show you more about the features, talk about your problems, and the issues you’re facing currently.
