Is HubSpot Good for B2C Businesses?

HubSpot is a fantastic tool - a CRM, fully integrated marketing suite, sales tools, and customer service tools- all in one package (depending on the hubs you choose).

One question that often comes up is whether or not it's suitable for B2C businesses. After all, you may not need the sales enablement and sales automation tools, and those make it look quite B2B-focused. So, let's delve into what a B2C business can gain from HubSpot.

HubSpot for B2C - Does it Work?

As is always the case with this type of question, the answer depends on a couple of things:


- The value and volume of your sales
- Whether or not what you offer is a considered purchase


These elements will influence whether or not HubSpot is a great investment for you because they affect whether or not inbound marketing is the best strategy.

HubSpot might not be the ideal option if inbound marketing isn't a suitable fit for your company (we'll discuss this in more detail soon). In any case, the free CRM is still a fantastic piece of software, and every company needs one. HubSpot offers a wide range of solutions that address sales funnels, marketing processes, and targeted outreach. The marketing hub can greatly improve your sales funnel and market strategy when used in conjunction with HubSpot's marketing automation.

Best B2C CRM

A CRM system is essential for any organisation as it stores data about clients and potential clients. It's easier to convert a previous customer into a new sale if they were satisfied with their purchase than it is to make a new one.

Because it combines all of the information you have on a client or prospects with their online behaviour, For B2C businesses, HubSpot is a fantastic CRM platform and B2C CRM software. As a result, you are aware of their purchases, website visits, blog post readings, and opened emails.

With the ability to segment your database based on who has viewed those interest pages and send targeted marketing emails catered to certain areas of interest, all of this makes it incredibly simple to get in touch with them once more.

The point here is that HubSpot isn't just a database of customer contact details, nor is it just a tool for sending emails or creating segments - it does all of those things and more as a complete CRM system. So, if you're looking for a powerful CRM for B2C, HubSpot is an excellent choice.

There are a few factors that determine whether you can benefit from every HubSpot feature, which we'll go over below. There's nothing to lose by giving the CRM a try, as the beginning level is completely free (not a free trial). What factors, then, influence whether the remainder of HubSpot is best for your organisation, B2C?

The Value and Volume of Sales

Where does your product or service fit on the above grid?

If you have a high-cost and high-volume item, then HubSpot might be just right - you have access to the marketing automation tools that will help you get in front of even more people, engage with them, and nurture them into becoming your customers.

When you have a smaller market or lower volume of sales, but the value of those sales is high, HubSpot is also a fantastic choice - you might use an approach like Account Based Marketing (ABM), using the ABM tools in the HubSpot marketing platform, or focus on the engage and delight elements of the inbound journey.

If the answer is "bottom left", then HubSpot might not be the right investment for you, especially at the Professional and Enterprise level. If you sell a small number of low-cost items, achieving ROI might require a different b2b and b2c market strategy. You may evaluate the Starter suite and find that it does enough for what you need. You'd likely run this in-house, as the investment in a marketing retainer might need to be more viable.

If you're bottom right, low cost and high volume, what you need to look at is your margin and work out if HubSpot makes sense for you. Bear in mind that you now pay for marketing contacts, rather than all contacts, in HubSpot. If you have a very high volume but low-cost product, you may have lots of people in your marketing database - you'll need to evaluate which CRM platform is most cost-effective for you.

Considered purchases

A considered purchase is one where people spend time considering before purchasing - simple enough.

The reason it affects whether or not HubSpot is the best approach for you is that whether or not something is a considered purchase will influence whether it makes sense to run an inbound marketing strategy.

With a considered purchase, people will do things like:

- Research their options
- Research different products
- Look for reviews and case studies
- Learn about the pros and cons of different solutions or ask a question
- Read about specifications
- Research pricing


All this means that they're spending time online, researching and learning, at the first stage of the buyer's journey (the Awareness stage). Therefore an inbound approach, which includes creating content to appeal to buyers at different stages in their journey, will be valuable.

Beyond the awareness stage, buyers do more research, again making inbound a good option.

Types of considered purchase include:

- Home improvements - new kitchens, renovations, etc
- Technology products
- Expensive items - high-end furniture, bespoke fashion
- Vehicles


And can also cover things as varied as plants, holidays, properties, and investments.

For purchases that aren't considered - things that people decide upon without turning to internet research - inbound is much less effective.

If no one is looking for content about your product, because it's an easy decision either way, then there's not a lot of point in spending all your time building it out. You might be better off focusing your budget on PPC. And while you can manage Ads through HubSpot's marketing hub, the investment in the platform is mostly worth it when you're using a variety of features rather than just one.

What specific features are good for B2C?

When you've identified that HubSpot is good for your specific business, it's worth taking time to look at the specific tools that will be helpful. HubSpot contains a lot of features, but some of them are especially helpful in B2C settings.

Personalisation

You probably know about things like personalising emails with the recipient's name, but did you know that you can pull in any information you store in your CRM systems into the email? And that you can easily segment and personalise content for specific types of buyers. HubSpot is a great platform for personalisation.

Smart Content

Speaking of personalisation, if your website is hosted by HubSpot CMS, you can take advantage of Smart information, which allows you to modify the information on your pages according to a variety of criteria, such as the stage of the prospect's lifecycle or the device they are using. You can even customise a list you've created based on their past purchases if they're already in your database.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is one of those things that simply makes life easier. When someone does a particular thing, trigger an automation to send them emails, set tasks for your sales processes team, or update their contact record in HubSpot CRM. If you're using an external system and want that to trigger actions in HubSpot, you'll need to set up an integration to get the two systems to talk to one another (you can learn more about HubSpot integrations on our recent post).

If you have a full e-commerce B2C business, you might want to look at the Transactional Email add-on for HubSpot's marketing hub, too.

Integrated Data

As a B2C company, chances are you're using lots of different channels to generate leads - Google ads, social media ads, social media posts, email marketing, website, landing pages, and so on. HubSpot's CRM platform brings all of this together into one place, so you can track the impact of each channel on your marketing, sales and ROI.

You can dive in and see exactly what a customer has seen and done, and identify where your marketing is most successful - all of which is compelling data.

B2C HubSpot Integrations

We've posted before about all the things HubSpot integrates with, but let's take a look at some B2C-specific integrations.

Now, there are so many integrations that we can't go into all of them here - we've just picked the top few we know are especially popular with B2C. But you can also find plenty of apps like call reporting, data sync, SMS sends, advertising and remarketing, and social media.

Shopify

For eCommerce businesses on Shopify, this integration is a must.

• - Connect your Shopify store to HubSpot

• - Analyse your Shopify data in HubSpot (default reports include average order value, lifetime order value, abandoned cart recovery, and more)

• - Automatically sync products, contacts, and orders (seen as “deals” in HubSpot) from Shopify to HubSpot

• - Segment contacts based on products (Marketing Hub Starter, Professional, or Enterprise only)

• - Automate e-commerce campaigns (Marketing Hub or HubSpot Sales Hub Professional or Enterprise only)

WooCommerce

Similarly, if you use WooCommerce for your online marketplace, this is the integration for you.

• - Automatically sync real-time WooCommerce users, orders and products to HubSpot.

• - One-click sync of historic customer data to HubSpot.

• - The extension automatically creates best-practiced groups, properties, active lists, and workflows.

• - Incorporates workflows for HubSpot with automated workflow conversion tactics.

Facebook Messenger

Many, many B2C businesses communicate with clients and prospects through Facebook Messenger - this integration means you can manage those messages through the Conversations inbox in HubSpot Service Hub. As a result, you can include Messenger in your HubSpot reporting and dashboards, create new contacts, and assign messages to different people in your HubSpot portal.

Mailchimp

If you're already using Mailchimp and you don't want to move to HubSpot's email tool, this integration allows you to sync your HubSpot contacts into Mailchimp and see Mailchimp activity within HubSpot.

B2C HubSpot Considerations

If you're an e-commerce business, you may need to invest in the Transactional Email add-on for HubSpot - this doesn't come included in any of the main tiers (Starter, Pro, Enterprise). It's an extra cost, which you need to be prepared for.

You need this add-on for sending emails related to individuals' transactions - receipts, shipping info, etc.

If you have a bespoke commerce platform, you'll also need to integrate that with HubSpot using the APIs (Shopify and WooCommerce, as we see above, have ready-made integrations, but bespoke software won't so you'll need to have development time allocated to setting up those APIs).

If you don't integrate your system, you'll lose a huge amount of the value in HubSpot, your CRM and data won't be up to date, and you'll end up looking in two places every time you need information - not a great use of your time or investment.

Any system like HubSpot needs to be set up correctly so that it does what you need it to. Plus, you need to embed it in your organisation so that everyone is using the system properly and consistently. That's not specific to HubSpot, the same would be true if you had any other platform (even ones that aren't as powerfully integrated as HubSpot Sales Hub).

So, is HubSpot good for B2C?

In short, if everything is set up properly and your company is a good fit for inbound marketing, then the answer is definitely yes. And as always, if you utilise it and incorporate it into your company appropriately. 

If you still have questions about HubSpot get in contact with SpiderDigital, our team of HubSpot experts is here to help! We're a Diamond HubSpot Partner agency that can grow your B2C business, using the absolute best tools and strategies to achieve your targets.