HubSpot Inbound Conference 2021 Recap: Key Takeaways

HubSpot’s annual Inbound conference wrapped up last week and – as usual – it was full of great insights, product updates, nuggets of wisdom, and general excitement. There is always a lot to process after these events so I’ll do my best to boil down my key takeaways into a concise, well-formatted blog post without throwing too many jotted-down notes and bulleted items at you.

For the second year in a row, the HubSpot Inbound conference was held virtually, so all sessions were conducted through a live video feed. Luckily, technical problems were few and far between so most sessions went smoothly. If you weren’t able to attend, here are some of my biggest takeaways for fellow marketers and HubSpot users.

The Apple IOS 15 Update Is a Big Deal

If you hadn’t already heard, Apple recently rolled out a new privacy update that has email marketers everywhere throwing temper tantrums and swearing that email “will never be the same.” This was the gist of almost every conversation about email marketing that I heard at the HubSpot Inbound conference.

The way it works, essentially, is that when a user enacts the “hide my mail” feature, all incoming emails will be filtered through a randomized email address. This randomized email address will open the email, activating the tracking pixel, and then forward it along to the user’s inbox – masking their personal email and IP address. So all emails sent to IOS users will be marked as “read” even if they weren’t.

“Ultimately, this will affect about 40% of your database. You will not be able to track open rate on 40% of your database moving forward.”

Jay Schwedelson
Subjectline.com

As a result, metrics such as deliverability, open rate, device type, etc., will become less reliable. So how should marketers brace for this? Here are a few ways:

Start adapting your strategy around CTA clicks instead of opens
Look at how much site traffic your emails are generating overall
If you have workflows or list criteria that are built around email opens, those may be affected too.

HubSpot Payments Could Be a Game Changer

The new HubSpot Payments feature is HubSpot’s attempt at modernizing the B2B space by providing a frictionless buying experience that matches that of B2C eCommerce companies. Payments is built natively into HubSpot, meaning it integrates seamlessly with our websites, workflows, reporting, etc. Perhaps the most exciting part is that Payments is built on the infrastructure provided by Stripe, so we can assume it will be reliable.

“By putting commerce and payments in the CRM, companies can provide a modern, seamless payment experience to their customers. They can augment traditional rep-based sales motions by starting to sell online and they can remove friction from the quote-to-cash process.”

Brad Green
HubSpot VP, Commerce and Payments

Payments supports all major credit cards and ACH payments. Other key features include:

Payment links that can be embedded on a website, or within an email or chat.
Recurring payments that allow businesses to sell memberships, set up retainers, etc.
Native integration with SalesHub for frictionless payments through Quotes

We Should Text More

Too many marketers are not taking advantage of the different communication channels we have available. This has been a huge topic of discussion at WEBITMD so it was great to hear our thoughts echoed by Amit Kulkarni at Heymarket.

Way too many marketing and sales strategies lean on email as the one and only communication channel. There are good reasons for this, but Amit quickly squashed those arguments with some pretty impressive statistics. If your marketing and sales teams are not using text messaging in their day-to-day communications, you are missing out big time.

“We have a fortune 500 customer that has actually found that, for their leads that opt in to text messaging reminders, the appointment attendance rate for them has increased from 53% to 93%.”

Amit Kulkarni
Heymarket Co-Founder & CEO

Simply put, EVERYBODY texts regardless of age, demographics, industry, etc. And data shows that people are more likely to engage with a text message than an email.

Marketing teams that aren’t utilizing text messaging will fall behind quickly. And with Heymarket, you can capture those conversations in HubSpot right within the contact record just like a 1:1 email.

RevOps is All the Rage

There has been a lot of buzz surrounding RevOps recently and this year at the Hubspot Inbound conference, there were A LOT of sessions surrounding the topic. In fact, there was probably more talk about RevOps than there was about inbound marketing.

Essentially, RevOps is a new methodology that goes beyond marketing to improve the way organizations generate revenue. It is especially relevant to SaaS companies and other business models that rely heavily on recurring revenue.

“Without this real-time, accurate, and connected data, organizations face so many difficulties in acquiring the right insights to understand how the business is actually performing.”

Rosalyn Santa Elena
VP, Global RevOps

If you want to learn more about RevOps, what it is, and why everyone is talking about it, here are some of my favorite on-demand sessions to check out:

Looking Forward to Inbound 2022

Inbound 2021 was great and the virtual sessions were a lot more engaging than I expected them to be. But after two years of virtual events, I am really looking forward to attending next year’s conference in person and doing some face-to-face networking with my colleagues from around the world.