Business growth platform HubSpot will now support free email creation, sending and analytics as part of its free CRM offering. 

According to HubSpot’s research, 82% of respondents indicated that they lose up to an hour per day logging into and managing disparate business systems. That lost time, says Hubspot, can be particularly damaging to a growing business working with small teams and limiting budgets.

By bringing emails and advertising tools into the free CRM, HubSpot says it wants to give users the ability to manage those essential features in a single connected system – saving time and granting access to a holistic customer experience view.

“Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of email marketing tools that are targeted to the needs of small or growing businesses. Unfortunately, those free or low-cost solutions are often standalone and don’t provide a full view of the customer experience,” says Kipp Bodnar, CMO of HubSpot. 

“We believe that email and CRM belong together, and that every marketer, no matter the size of their budget, should be able to see how their efforts are impacting their customers and, ultimately, their bottom line. We’re offering email as part of our free CRM to enable growing businesses to finally see how their efforts impact their customers’ experience beyond just a single email or interaction.”

With the update, HubSpot’s free CRM users will now be able to create contact lists and send up to 2000 emails per month created within HubSpot’s email editor. 

The company also announced today that it has expanded the capabilities of its free tier ads tools – which previously only supported Facebook lead ads. As part of the update users will be able to manage and track up to $1000 of ad spend per month across Facebook, Google and LinkedIn ads. The tools will include conversion-level reporting and will allow up to two account connections.

Further Reading:

• The funnel is dead. Introducing the flywheel – why marketers should make the switch »
• Spotify makes all ads skippable for free users – a “win” for advertisers? »
• Apple finalises Shazam acquisition, goes ad free »

Image credit: HubSpot