The Email Marketing Strategies Beyoncé, Royal Caribbean, and Sprinkles Cupcakes Use to Boost Conversions and Loyalty Welcome to Creator Columns, where we bring expert HubSpot Creator voices to the Blogs that inspire and help you grow better. Email marketing isn't dead—it’s evolving. With an average ROI of $36 for every dollar spent, it remains a marketing powerhouse. But here's the twist: making your emails more inclusive isn't just good ethics — it's good business. As an inclusive marketing strategist who's analyzed countless marketing campaigns, I’ve noticed that brands that embrace inclusion in their email marketing ultimately attract, convert, and maintain even more subscribers. When people feel seen, they're more likely to click “buy now” instead of “unsubscribe.” Let's explore five clever strategies that brands like Beyoncé’s Cécred and Royal Caribbean use to make their subscribers feel like VIPs. 5 Inclusive Email Marketing Strategies 1. Sprinkles Cupcakes celebrates cultural heritage. Sprinkles Cupcakes does a fantastic job making people whose heritage is traditionally underrepresented feel seen. The brand does this by communicating about various special edition cupcakes that highlight different cultures and celebrations. Whether it's emailing about cupcakes for Lunar New Year, Hanukkah, or other special flavors the brand has incorporated that are specific to certain communities like Cuba, Puerto Rico, or Vietnam, the variety in their offerings is a smart way to get more people to buy. The brand speaks to cultural heritage in both their email subject lines and in the body of the email. When I received their email...

Be a Knock Out in Small and Local Business Marketing In addition to running a marketing agency with customers around the globe and a seven-figure local business, today’s master is also a kickboxing champion and MMA fighter — making Jennifer Waters easily the marketer I’d least like to fight. Though Flo from Progressive seems like she’d be a scrapper, right? It’s not just me? But rather than spend our time arguing about which mascot would win in the octagon, today she’s here to teach you how to kill it… in small and local business marketing that is. But don’t worry; you SMB and enterprise marketers will get your kicks in, too. Meet the Master Jennifer WatersCo-founder, 7 Figure Dojo; Executive sensei, Seigler’s Karate Center Claim to fame: Grew her small business to seven figures (Thus the name of her agency!) Fun fact: She’s a sixth-degree Kempo karate black belt and purple belt in Tetsu Shin Ryu Jiu-Jitsu   Lesson 1: Forget omnichannel. Think omnipresence. “To survive as a local business, you need to think and market like a Fortune 500 company,” Waters says. If that reflexively made your wallet pucker, you can relax. She means that you need to think bigger than just a few scattered Facebook ads. “You need to do what I call omnipresence marketing. Digital marketing is just one arm of it,” Waters explains. So while omnichannel refers to coordinating your marketing across all of your digital channels,...

How We’re Building Breeze to Power the Future of GTM Two years after Generative AI took off, one thing is clear: AI will transform the way businesses operate. But for most small and medium businesses, the AI landscape feels overwhelming. They don’t need the hype; they need practical help. The reality is that 50% of small businesses fail within five years. Not because starting a business is hard, but because scaling one is brutal. When you’re caught between limited resources and ambitious growth goals, you need tools that deliver actual results, not more complexity. That’s what we’re building with Breeze — AI designed specifically for scaling companies, built directly into HubSpot’s customer platform. In this post, we’ll take you behind the scenes of how we’re building Breeze, the most common use cases, and how it’s already helping real businesses drive results. The Breeze Tech Stack: Building for the AI-First Era Software is evolving. What started as desktop programs in the 1990s and moved to cloud-based SaaS in the 2000s is now entering a new era: software that doesn’t just serve, but works toward outcomes. This is the shift from “software as a service” to “results as a service.” We’re not building AI because it’s the latest tech trend — we’re using AI to deliver what customers are actually after: more leads, faster sales cycles, and better customer satisfaction. With Breeze, scaling companies can quickly and easily get value from AI connected to their customer data. We’re distinguishing Breeze in...