How to Maximise HubSpot on a Small Business Budget: The Must-Have Features

For small businesses, choosing the right tools to manage marketing, sales, and customer relationships can feel overwhelming, especially when working with a limited budget. HubSpot is often seen as a premium platform, but many small business owners don’t realise that HubSpot offers a variety of free and cost-effective features that can make a big impact without draining your resources.

In this blog, we’ll explore how small businesses can maximise HubSpot’s features on a tight budget, helping you streamline operations, improve marketing efforts, and grow your business efficiently.

1. Start with the Free CRM: The Foundation for Growth

HubSpot’s free CRM is a game-changer for small businesses, offering an all-in-one platform to manage your customer relationships without any upfront costs. The CRM centralises your contact information, tracks interactions, and manages deals—all in one place. It gives you a complete view of your customers’ journey, helping you nurture leads and stay organised.

Key features of the free CRM:

• Contact management: Store unlimited contacts, view their interactions with your business, and manage all communications in one place.
• Deal tracking: Keep track of ongoing deals, set deal stages, and monitor progress as leads move through the sales funnel.
• Task and activity tracking: Assign tasks to team members, set follow-up reminders, and track every activity related to your contacts.

Why it’s essential: By centralising your customer data and keeping track of all communications, you ensure no lead is forgotten and every opportunity is followed up on. The free CRM alone can save small businesses countless hours by streamlining processes.

2. Automate Your Workflows to Save Time and Increase Efficiency

As a small business owner, you’re often juggling multiple tasks—marketing, sales, customer service, and more. HubSpot’s workflow automation tools can help you manage these tasks more efficiently by automating repetitive processes, like sending follow-up emails, assigning leads, and updating contact information.

How to use automation on a budget:

• Email automation: Automatically send welcome emails to new subscribers, follow-up emails after form submissions, or nurture emails for leads who have shown interest in your products or services.
• Lead assignment: Set up rules to automatically assign leads to specific team members based on the lead’s behaviour or profile, ensuring timely follow-up.
• Task automation: Automatically create tasks for your team based on certain triggers, such as when a lead downloads a resource or requests a demo.

Why it’s essential: Automating routine tasks saves you time and ensures that no lead or customer is forgotten. Even small businesses can use HubSpot’s free automation features to improve efficiency and stay on top of their growing workload.

3. Leverage HubSpot’s Free Email Marketing Tools

Email marketing remains one of the most cost-effective ways to engage with your customers, and HubSpot’s free email marketing tools make it easy to create, send, and track emails at no additional cost. Whether you’re sending newsletters, product updates, or special offers, HubSpot provides an intuitive drag-and-drop editor that helps you design professional emails in minutes.

Key features:

• Drag-and-drop editor: Easily design beautiful, professional emails without needing design skills or technical knowledge.
• Customisable templates: Use pre-built email templates or customise your own to match your brand.
• Email tracking and reporting: Track open rates, click-through rates, and overall engagement with detailed reports, helping you refine your strategy over time.

Why it’s essential: With HubSpot’s free email tools, small businesses can run professional email campaigns without paying for additional software. This keeps your audience engaged and drives leads back to your website or sales team.

4. Optimise Your Marketing with Free Analytics and Reporting

To grow your small business, you need to understand which marketing efforts are working and which aren’t. HubSpot offers free analytics and reporting tools that give you insights into the performance of your website, emails, and marketing campaigns, all in one place.

Key features:

• Website analytics: Track how many visitors are coming to your website, where they’re coming from, and how they’re interacting with your content.
• Campaign performance: Monitor the success of specific campaigns, such as social media ads or email marketing efforts, and see which channels are driving the most traffic or leads.
• Lead tracking: View detailed reports on your leads, including how they found your business, what actions they’ve taken, and how close they are to making a purchase.

Why it’s essential: For small businesses, every pound counts. HubSpot’s free reporting tools help you optimise your marketing budget by focusing on the strategies that are driving the best results.

5. Use Live Chat and Chatbots to Engage Website Visitors

HubSpot’s live chat and chatbot features offer a great way for small businesses to engage with website visitors in real-time, answering questions, capturing leads, and even directing users to the right resources. This is especially useful for businesses that may not have a dedicated customer service team but still want to provide a personalised experience for website visitors.

How to use it effectively:

• Live chat: Add a live chat feature to your website to answer questions in real-time, increasing the chances of converting visitors into leads or customers.
• Chatbots: Set up chatbots to handle common queries, collect contact information, or guide visitors to the appropriate resources based on their needs.

Why it’s essential: By adding live chat or chatbots to your website, you can engage visitors at crucial moments, improve customer service, and capture valuable leads without having to invest in a large customer support team.

6. Take Advantage of HubSpot Academy for Free Training

If you’re a small business with limited resources, one of the best ways to maximise HubSpot’s features is by learning how to use the platform effectively. HubSpot offers a comprehensive HubSpot Academy, full of free courses and certifications that cover everything from inbound marketing and sales to advanced features of the HubSpot platform.

What you can learn:

• Inbound marketing: Learn how to attract and engage customers using inbound marketing strategies.
• Email marketing: Discover how to craft compelling emails that drive engagement and conversions.
• Sales enablement: Find out how to optimise your sales process with HubSpot’s sales tools and CRM.

Why it’s essential: HubSpot Academy empowers small business owners to get the most out of the platform, even if they don’t have the budget for outside training or consultants. These free resources help you sharpen your skills and apply proven strategies to your business.

HubSpot on a Small Business Budget

For small businesses, HubSpot offers a wide range of free and affordable features that can significantly improve marketing, sales, and customer relationship management. From the powerful free CRM to automation, email marketing, and reporting tools, HubSpot provides the tools you need to grow your business without breaking the bank.

By leveraging these features and learning from HubSpot Academy, small businesses can streamline their operations, engage more effectively with customers, and drive meaningful growth—all while staying within budget.

Ready to get started? Explore HubSpot’s free tools today and see how they can help your small business thrive!