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...

Beyond the Golden Arches: How Two McDonald’s Marketers Win Gen Z 90% of the U.S. population has eaten at a McDonald's over the past year. Whether a Big Mac is your drunk go-to, or you like to bribe your kids with Happy Meals on long car rides, the point holds: McDonald‘s is one of the most popular and long-lasting brands we’ve got. We all take it for granted. Except maybe we shouldn't. There‘s a reason McDonald’s ranks among the top 10 most magnetic brands for Gen Z — surpassing Sephora, NFL, and Starbucks. And it's not the nostalgia factor… At least, not entirely. To get to the bottom of this, I sat down with two experts — Anna Engel, Director of brand, content, and culture at McDonald‘s, and Nathaniel Gaynor, Brand marketing manager at McDonald’s — whose full-time job is to make McDonald’s cool to Gen Zers. Lesson 1: Marketing should be symbiotic. Engel thinks of campaign elements — whether it's a new food item, a digital campaign element, or a social media post — as “ingredients.” Of course she does. And what she loves about Gen Z is how they‘ve created a symbiotic relationship with McDonald’s campaign “ingredients”. Engel‘s team doesn’t just create content for Gen Z. Gen Z creates content for them, too. As Engel told me, Gen Zers often take brand ingredients and “create something new with them — that's what excites us and motivates us,” she says. “For instance, they might create a narrative...

Chubbies Co-founder Warns: Don’t Get Hooked on the Performance Marketing Drug Any time an interviewee makes me ask my boss, “Can we say that in a newsletter?” you know it’s gonna be a good day. Today, we’ve got spicy takes and spicy language from a master of marketing who made his fortune selling spicy shorts. Lesson 1: Don’t get hooked on the performance marketing drug. Preston Rutherford openly admits that he made every mistake in the book when co-founding the shorts company Chubbies. So I kick off our chat by copping a line from Sheryl Crow: “What’s your favorite mistake?” “Favorite mista-a-ake.” He sings, then laughs. “Favorite. Obviously a euphemism for gut-wrenching and sleep-depriving mistake. But, just to honor Sheryl…” He thinks a moment: “Getting hooked on the drug that is short-term performance marketing — and in particular return on ad spend (or ROAS), where effectively all of our marketing investments were evaluated on that basis.” My eyebrow goes up. Most marketing leaders want to see a measurable, proven return, right? How else do you know what’s working? Rutherford says that exact sentiment is why he (and so many marketers) over-rotated toward performance marketing. That drive to make all of your marketing efforts systematic, measurable, and scalable. “ We're so used to a certain feedback loop on the data side, right? If I'm spending dollars, I'm only measuring success by who clicked on my ad and purchased in a 24-hour period.” But that feedback loop incentivizes marketing efforts that produce...

Gen Z is turning this CEO's business model upside down "This whole entire generation is about to turn all of our business models on its head." I'm a consumer who falls somewhere between baby millennial and geriatric Gen Zer, and after hearing Hootsuite CEO Irina Novoselsky talk about my generation — she gets it. I’m sure her being a millennial, thus closer to Gen Z than the average CEO, helps her keep in step with younger consumers, but I also think how intentional she is as a marketer sets her apart. She's even gone as far as to speak with 500 Gen Zers to understand their consumer and social media habits.   "What pushed me to do that is I came across the stat that over 65% of all business decision-makers are going to be Gen Zers or millennials starting next year," Novoselsky says. "The fun fact is that 2024 was already the first year that there are more Gen Zers in the workplace than boomers." Here's what Novoselsky discovered: 1. Gen Z is a generation of contradictions. "They grew up with a phone in their pocket but don't want it to talk, they don't want it to be sold to, and they don't want our push model today," she explains. And she's right. My inbox is full, and I don't like companies playing on my phone, so I'd rather find my next favorite lip liner-gloss-combo on my own terms before giving any brand my money. Novoselsky says...

The 12 Sharpest Lessons from Marketing Leaders at Fortune Media, Liquid Death, Oatly & More Each week, Laura, Caroline, and I get to sit and chat with some of today’s most innovative marketing masters. We’ve run down the rabbit hole with folks from Spotify, Liquid Death, Oatly, New Balance, Zapier, Hootsuite, the Brooklyn Nets, and even the makers of Chicago’s most beloved tirefire-flavored liquor. If you could smoosh all of their combined wisdom into your head, it would be like getting your… well… master’s in marketing. (Oh, hey. I just got the name.) Well, you can’t. Not until brain chips are a thing. Until then, you can do the next best thing: Check out 12 of the most insightful, provocative, or just downright useful lessons our experts had to share. Lesson 1: People aren't brainless consumers. Here‘s a fun fact: At Liquid Death, they don’t use the word consumer. Ever. Instead, they have a team called “human insights.” Greg Fass, Liquid Death’s VP of marketing, is proud to work against the mindset that people are just “brainless consumers” whose sole purpose on Earth is to consume products. (Yep – that's a direct quote.) Instead, he says, “At Liquid Death, I‘m proud that we think of our audiences as people. And when you think of them as humans, you understand they’ll get a piece of copy that isn‘t straightforward, or jokes other brands are afraid to make. They’re intelligent, and have a sense of humor.” It's a philosophy that has...

Lingering Questions: What Marketing Masters Want to Ask Each Other Over at Masters in Marketing, Caroline, Laura, and I have interviewed some very bright minds from some very bold brands. We’re talking Liquid Death, New Balance, Oatly. But we got to wondering: What happens when noted marketing masters get to ask each other the questions? What do the innovators want to know from each other? This year, we decided to find out with a feature we call Lingering Questions. The rules are simple: Each interviewee answers a question from the previous master of marketing. Then they drop a question for the next. They may or may not know who it will be (and sometimes neither do we). But they know it’s someone who knows. 👏 their. 👏 shtick. 👏 Below you’ll find all of the answers to 2024’s lingering questions. (Plus, a bonus rip in the spacetime continuum.) 2024’s Lingering Questions To kick things off, my colleague, friend, and former AV Club executive editor, Laura M. Browning cooked up this one: Malört is one of Chicago’s mascots. What would Malört’s mascot be, and why? Anna Sokratov, Brand manager for Jeppson’s Malört: A 31-gallon galvanized steel trash can with a lid. Both are perceived as being unappealing or gross, and the cans last a long time — similar to the long-lasting flavor of Malört. Read “This is disgusting, try some”: Marketing Chicago’s vile-tasting liqueur Sokratov asks: What unconventional marketing approach would you like to take, and how would you...

It’s Like Marketing, But Made for Humans: Lessons from Oatly’s EVP If you're sipping an oat milk latte as you read this, you're in luck. Keep reading to learn the secret sauce (er–milk?) to Oatly's killer guerilla marketing strategy. Find out why global chief creative officer fired the entire marketing department, why Oatly is a big fan of posting their lawsuits online, and Brendan Lewis' belief that growth marketing needs to be "neutered, if not totally destroyed."  Lesson 1: Put creatives at the forefront. Brendan Lewis, Oatly’s EVP of global communications and public affairs, says it all started when global chief creative officer John Schoolcraft was tasked with turning a small Swedish milk company into a global sensation. His first step towards world domination? Firing the entire marketing department. Then he took the creative department and put them at the center of the business. The creative team is involved in everything, from sales meetings to supply chain meetings. Lewis says this allows his team at Oatly to ignore traditional marketing tactics in favor of feeding off the moment, and allows them to be more transparent with people. A prime (and hilarious) example: When the Spanish dairy lobby sued Oatly over its ad proclaiming, ‘It’s like milk, but made for humans‘ ad, Oatly didn’t get defensive. It just posted the entire lawsuit online. Or, my personal favorite: FckOatly.com — Oatly’s website dedicated to gathering all their bad press and negative comments in one place. It’s like if Yelp one-star...

How California Pizza Kitchen Embraces Change, Goes Viral on TikTok, and Gives Consumers FOMO This week's master has worked for Lou Malnati's (pizza), Krispy Kreme (doughnuts), and now heads the marketing team at California Pizza Kitchen (back to pizza) — making her career sound like my dream delivery order after a rough Monday. Keep reading to hear from Dawn Keller, CMO at California Pizza Kitchen, on why she likes giving consumers emotional FOMO and how to lead the charge on brand evolution. Lesson 1: Drive emotional FOMO.  "Craveable items that are unique and compel consumers to be irrational are the best defense against competition, consumer apathy, or inertia," says Keller.  For Keller, this pertains to both her menu and her marketing. Her goal is to "drive emotional FOMO" for her consumers.  Look, I'll hand it to you — discussing "craveable products" with the marketing leader for a pizza company probably doesn't sound too relatable to B2B marketers.  But when I tell Keller that cheesy, gooey crust is more seductive than revenue attribution reporting, she pushes back: "I actually see this in B2B marketing all the time. Emotional FOMO is totally create-able in that world, too — you just need to show what's possible, and the success stories of other people." She adds, "It's all the same humans, you know? They're just making different decisions… Like, what to eat, and what software to use for their businesses." While you might not be selling garlic knots, there are plenty of...