Top Marketing Automation Features in HubSpot (With Examples)

If you’re still manually handling your customer engagement tasks, it’s time to rethink the way you market. Marketing automation can significantly improve the way you manage your campaigns by saving time, reducing errors, and scaling personalised communication. And one of the best platforms to help you achieve this is HubSpot (of course, we love HubSpot)!

HubSpot’s marketing automation features are not just about saving time—they’re about getting smarter with your marketing. Here are some of our favourite marketing automation features and workflows that you too can use to streamline your efforts and engage your audience more effectively.

Why Marketing Automation Matters

Before we get into the specifics, think about the challenge most marketers face every day—a lack of time. Whether it’s responding to new leads, nurturing existing ones, or ensuring campaigns run smoothly, there’s always far too much to do. And too that mix, add the need to manage every channel where your audience may reside and ace every engagement! But what if you could automate some of these tasks so that you could focus on improving engagement and creating a strategy that actually shares value to your audience.

Marketing automation removes the mundane tasks, allowing you to focus on strategy, creativity, and driving results.

With HubSpot, you can automate repetitive actions like sending emails, updating customer statuses, or following up on leads. Here’s how you can use it to scale personalised engagement without feeling like you’re carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders.

Top HubSpot Marketing Automation Features and Use Cases

1. Lead Nurturing

When a lead fills out a form or subscribes to your updates, the process shouldn’t stop there. Lead nurturing allows you to automatically send targeted content based on a lead’s behaviour. For example, if someone downloads an eBook, you could follow up with an email sharing further resources or encouraging them to book a demo. This keeps your leads engaged and gently nudges them along their buyer’s journey.

2. Lead Scoring

With all the new updates to lead scoring and the sales workspace you probably wouldn't need to create a workflow to flag your sales team once a contact reaches a certain lead score (called HubSpot score before).

HubSpot's lead scoring tool automates the process by evaluating contacts and companies based on predefined criteria, such as engagement actions (e.g., website visits, email opens) and demographic information (e.g., job title, company size). The tool allows for setting score limits and decay, ensuring scores reflect current engagement levels. 

Especially with leads having a dedicate space in the new sales workspace, where you can also view the lead scores of leads!

Learn more about the new updates to Lead Scoring here:

3. Lead Rotation

If you’ve got a team of sales representatives, evenly distributing leads is vital. HubSpot’s lead rotation workflow ensures new leads get assigned to the right team member based on criteria like geography, industry, or workload. No manual assignment needed—just smooth, fast follow-ups.

4. Lifecycle Stage Updates

HubSpot automates lifecycle stage management by allowing you to set and sync stages across contacts, companies, and deals. When a new contact or company is created, their lifecycle stage can be automatically set. Additionally, when a deal is created or won, the associated contacts' and companies' lifecycle stages can be updated accordingly. 

This is vital for marketing automation as it improves targeting by delivering relevant messages, streamlines workflows with automated triggers, boosts efficiency by reducing manual updates, and enhances personalisation to drive engagement and conversions—all while saving time for marketers to focus on strategy.

5. Webinar Promotion

Running webinars shouldn’t involve endless amounts of manual emails. With marketing automation, you can create workflows to handle everything from invitations and reminders to post-webinar follow-ups. For instance, after someone registers, you can thank them with a confirmation email and schedule reminders leading up to the event.

Or even once the webinar is done with, the engagement shouldn't stop you can continue to engage them by sending on-demand webinars for them to look at whenever they'd like or related resources.

6. Welcome Emails

First impressions count. When someone subscribes to your mailing list, you can set up workflows to send an automatic welcome email—or even better, a series of them. Share your story, showcase your products, and invite them to take the next step with you.

7. Form Submission

Every time someone fills out a form on your website, a workflow can trigger a series of actions. For example, HubSpot can automatically send a thank-you email, update their lifecycle stage, and notify your team. This saves time and ensures you never miss an opportunity to engage with potential customers.

8. Job Function Segmentation

Personalisation is key, and sometimes the data in your CRM can be too messy to do that. We like to group contacts by their job titles and assign them a job function through a workflow. So the next time we're targeting a campaign to sales leaders, for example we can just look up the sales job function based on their seniority and hit send!

HubSpot marketing automation make this segmentation seamless.

9. Setting Non-Marketing Contacts

Not all contacts are there to be marketed to. For compliance or targeting purposes, you can use workflows to mark specific leads as non-marketing contacts.

10. Cart Abandonment

E-commerce businesses, this one’s for you. When someone adds items to their shopping cart but doesn’t complete the purchase, HubSpot workflows can automatically send a follow-up email. Include a gentle reminder—or perhaps a time-sensitive discount—to close the sale.

Why HubSpot Is A Game-Changer

The beauty of HubSpot lies in its flexibility. Whether you’re a small business looking for simple workflows or an enterprise scaling complex campaigns, it’s a platform built to grow with your needs. And unlike some tools, it’s remarkably intuitive—so you don’t need to be a tech wizard to set up automation routines.

But here’s the kicker—marketing automation isn’t just about saving time. It’s about creating better experiences for your audience. Personalisation becomes effortless, follow-ups are timely, and leads feel like they’re getting a tailored approach.

Final Thoughts

With HubSpot, marketing automation doesn’t have to be overwhelming. From lead nurturing to cart abandonment emails, there are so many ways to simplify your processes and engage your audience more effectively. The examples above are just a starting point—once you get the hang of things, the possibilities are endless.

If you’ve been struggling to keep up with all the moving parts of your marketing campaigns, it’s time to call in the help of automation. Give yourself more time to focus on strategy, creativity, and what truly matters—building relationships with your audience.