Beyond the Basics: 7 Little-Known HubSpot Features That Small Businesses Can Leverage

For many small businesses, HubSpot is known for its easy-to-use CRM, email marketing, and sales automation tools. But HubSpot has a lot more to offer beyond the basics. There are a host of lesser-known features that, when used correctly, can give small businesses a real competitive edge by improving efficiency, customer engagement, and overall business growth.

In this blog, we’ll explore some of HubSpot’s hidden gems—features that small businesses might not be using but should definitely consider. These powerful tools can help you get more out of HubSpot without needing to expand your team or budget.

1. HubSpot Snippets: Speed Up Your Communication

If your team frequently sends out similar emails or responds to common questions, HubSpot’s Snippets feature is a must-have tool. Snippets are short, reusable text blocks that you can insert into emails, live chats, or even notes, saving you time and ensuring consistent communication.

How to use Snippets:

• Create responses for FAQs: Set up Snippets for common customer questions, such as product availability, pricing, or delivery times. This way, your team can quickly insert these responses into emails or live chats, improving response time and accuracy.
• Personalised outreach: You can use Snippets to insert personalised details such as greetings or introductory sentences into sales emails, making it easier to tailor your outreach while maintaining a personal touch.

Why it’s useful for small businesses: Snippets save time by eliminating repetitive typing, ensuring your team can respond to customers faster without compromising on consistency.

2. Conversations Inbox: Centralise All Customer Interactions

Managing customer communications across multiple channels—emails, live chats, social media messages—can get overwhelming for small businesses. HubSpot’s Conversations Inbox centralises all customer interactions in one place, making it easier for your team to stay on top of every conversation.

How to use Conversations Inbox:

• One inbox for all channels: You can connect your email, live chat, and social media accounts to HubSpot’s Conversations Inbox, allowing your team to view and respond to all customer messages from one centralised location.
• Assign conversations: HubSpot allows you to assign specific conversations to team members, ensuring that the right person handles each enquiry and nothing gets missed.
• Track history: The Conversations Inbox also keeps a record of all customer interactions, giving you a full view of past conversations, which can be invaluable for resolving issues or personalising responses.

Why it’s useful for small businesses: The Conversations Inbox helps you deliver a seamless customer experience by ensuring that all communications are organised and accessible, reducing the risk of missed messages or delayed responses.

3. Smart Content: Personalise Your Website and Emails

Personalisation is key to customer engagement, but most small businesses struggle to find the time or resources to deliver personalised experiences at scale. HubSpot’s Smart Content feature solves this problem by allowing you to show different website content or email elements to different audiences based on their behaviour, location, or lead status.

How to use Smart Content:

• Website personalisation: Show personalised content to visitors based on their location, device, or previous interactions with your site. For example, returning visitors can see a welcome message, while new visitors may see an introduction to your services.
• Tailored emails: HubSpot’s Smart Content lets you dynamically change elements in your email campaigns based on the recipient’s profile. You can show different product recommendations based on past purchases or personalise offers based on their location or interests.

Why it’s useful for small businesses: Smart Content enables you to deliver tailored experiences at scale, increasing engagement and conversion rates without needing to manually create different versions of emails or web pages.

4. HubSpot Playbooks: Standardise Sales and Service Processes

Consistency is crucial in delivering a smooth sales and customer service experience, but many small businesses struggle with keeping everyone on the same page. HubSpot’s Playbooks feature allows you to create guides, scripts, and processes for your sales and customer service teams, ensuring they always know the right steps to take when interacting with customers.

How to use Playbooks:

• Create sales scripts: Use Playbooks to build out scripts for your sales team to use during phone calls or meetings. These scripts can include key talking points, questions to ask, or steps to take, helping your team stay consistent in their approach.
• Service workflows: Playbooks are also useful for customer service teams. You can create step-by-step workflows for resolving common issues, ensuring that all team members follow the same process when assisting customers.

Why it’s useful for small businesses: Playbooks help standardise processes across your team, reducing the chance of errors and ensuring your customers get a consistent experience, no matter who they speak to.

5. HubSpot Sequences: Automate Personalised Follow-Ups

Following up with leads and customers is crucial, but it’s time-consuming and easy to forget when you’re juggling multiple tasks. HubSpot’s Sequences feature allows you to automate personalised follow-up emails and tasks, helping you stay on top of your outreach without needing to manually manage each follow-up.

How to use Sequences:

• Automate follow-up emails: Set up Sequences to automatically send a series of follow-up emails after a prospect takes a specific action, such as downloading a guide or filling out a form. These emails can be personalised and spaced out over several days or weeks.
• Task automation: HubSpot can automatically create tasks for you or your team to follow up with leads or customers at key points in their journey, such as after a demo or consultation.

Why it’s useful for small businesses: Sequences help you stay engaged with leads and customers without needing to remember to follow up manually, ensuring that no opportunities slip through the cracks.

6. Lead Scoring: Prioritise Your Most Engaged Prospects

For small businesses, time and resources are often limited, so it’s important to focus on leads that are most likely to convert. HubSpot’s Lead Scoring feature helps you assign point values to leads based on their actions, such as website visits, email opens, or form submissions, allowing you to prioritise your most engaged prospects.

How to use Lead Scoring:

• Assign points for key actions: Set up a lead scoring system that assigns points for specific actions, such as downloading a whitepaper, visiting key pages on your website, or engaging with your emails.
• Set score thresholds: Once a lead reaches a certain score threshold, HubSpot can trigger alerts or automatically assign the lead to a salesperson for follow-up, ensuring your team is focused on the highest-priority leads.

Why it’s useful for small businesses: Lead Scoring helps you focus your time and resources on the prospects that are most likely to convert, ensuring that your sales team is working efficiently and effectively.

7. Knowledge Base: Empower Your Customers with Self-Service Support

Small businesses often struggle to provide fast, consistent customer support with limited resources. HubSpot’s Knowledge Base feature allows you to build a library of helpful articles, guides, and FAQs that your customers can access any time they need support, reducing the load on your customer service team.

How to use Knowledge Base:

• Create help articles: Write and organise articles that cover common customer questions, troubleshooting tips, and step-by-step guides. These can be easily searchable by your customers, giving them quick access to answers.
• Track performance: HubSpot’s Knowledge Base includes analytics, so you can see which articles are most popular or helpful and identify any gaps in your content.

Why it’s useful for small businesses: A Knowledge Base allows you to provide self-service support to your customers, freeing up your team to handle more complex issues while improving customer satisfaction.

Unlock the Full Potential of HubSpot for Your Small Business

HubSpot is packed with features that go beyond the basics of CRM and email marketing, offering small businesses a wide range of tools to improve efficiency, enhance customer engagement, and streamline processes. By leveraging lesser-known features like Snippets, Smart Content, Playbooks, and Sequences, your small business can maximise the value of HubSpot without needing additional resources.

Ready to unlock the full potential of HubSpot for your small business? Start exploring these advanced features today and see how they can transform the way you manage your marketing, sales, and customer service efforts.