Hubspot is an easy-to-use marketing and sales CRM. It is a lightweight alternative to Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics that has a ton of marketing and sales functionality.

This week I dug in to it and found some lesser-known features:

Autopopulating form fields from link query strings

What if your workflow involves emailing contacts to get them to fill out a form, like an Application form? It is annoying for the user to fill out information you clearly already have, such as Name and Email Address. Smart Forms are a partial solution to this problem, but don’t work if people fill out one form on their computer and another on their phone three days later.

After some digging, I found out that Hubspot allows you to assign information about your contact to variables and append them as query strings on URLs.

This means you can set up email templates to make it unnecessary for your customers to type information over and over. Awesome.

Any time you drive someone to a form via email, you should use query strings to automatically fill things for them.

COS URL redirects

Hubspot’s Content Optimization System (COS) is essentially a landing page and content platform hosted on Hubspot. You usually set it up on its own domain or subdomain and it is useful for tracking user interactions. Let’s say you are no longer using a COS page, but it is linked somewhere and people keep hitting it. What do you do?

I found the solution buried a few levels deep into the Marketing platform. There is a URL redirect tool built in.

Leverage connections to other apps via Zapier

Hubspot connects with Zapier, so it connects automatically with 750+ apps. New contacts, contact updates, calendar tasks, social media messages, and form submissions can kick off workflows.

For example, you can:

• Text someone a download link after they fill out a form
• Pipe notifications of new sign ups or form fill-outs to Slack so you know about them
• Copy contacts over to Google so you can make a personal email contact
• Sync Hubspot lists with Mailchimp
• Copy Sumo leads over to Hubspot
• Add sales customers from Shopify or Stripe to your Hubspot contact list
• Create Hubspot contacts from Facebook Ads Leads
• Create tickets in Zendesk from Hubspot forms