Category: Marketing Automation

Imagine watching the Super Bowl without any commercials — or driving through a bustling city with blank billboards.
Now imagine watching YouTube without ads.
For some people, this is a reality. With YouTube Adblock, viewers can block ads from appearing in videos and on the webpage.
This begs the question: should video marketers worry about ad blocking?

Let’s learn more about YouTube Adblock, if consumers actually use it, and tips from real video marketers on how to get around them.
Ad blockers may feel like a marketer’s worst nightmare. But there is power in understanding why people use them.
Here are some quick stats: 48% of ad blocker users felt there were too many ads online. And 47% of users found these ads annoying or irrelevant.
Think of your own experience — have you ever been bombarded with pop-up ads while reading an article? Or watched a video ad that wasn’t relevant to your interests… at all?
This study signals a clear trend: Users want a less intrusive experience with digital ads. And they’re willing to guard their time and attention with ad blockers.
Do Consumers Use YouTube AdBlock?
We know the motivations behind using YouTube Adblock, but how many people actually use it? Take a look at HubSpot’s survey about ad blocker use on YouTube:

More than half (63%) of respondents do not use any type of ad blocking software on YouTube, whereas a slim 11% of respondents do.
Does this mean marketers can breathe a big sigh of relief? Not so fast.
While the adoption of ad blockers is low, it is slowly increasing year-over-year. It may not be an immediate threat to your digital marketing strategy, but this could change in the coming years.
And, if your target audience consists of millennials, you may feel the effects of ad blocking more. People in the 18-to-24 range are the highest users of ad block software, while people younger than 12, and 65 and older, are among the lowest.
Marketers must get creative to leverage YouTube without ad blockers getting in the way. Here are four tips from video marketers on how to get started.
4 Tips for Navigating YouTube AdBlock, According to Video Marketers
1. Keep it in perspective.
Don’t let the fear of ad blockers drive you away from YouTube entirely.
For Nicole Ondracek, marketing manager, paid advertising at HubSpot, advertising on YouTube still proves effective — even with pesky ad blockers.
“You’re still able to reach so many people on YouTube that [AdBlock] doesn’t really play a factor in our strategy.”
Ondracek adds, “For example, one of our audiences is a Custom affinity audience, which is a type of audience that targets people with interests in B2B CRM software. This segment alone can still reach 500 million to 1 billion impressions a week.”
While ad blockers “mute” a portion of your audience, YouTube still provides access to billions of users (2.1 billion to be exact), along with plenty of opportunities to reach them.
2. Diversify your ad channels.
It’s never a good idea to put all your eggs in one (marketing) basket.
For instance, if your digital marketing solely revolves around YouTube advertising, you may want to diversify your marketing strategy to include “ad blocker-proof” channels, such as social media or content marketing.
Jennifer Brault, channel promotions manager at HubSpot, tells me, “When running any sort of digital marketing campaign, it’s important to meet your audience where they are.”
Brault continues, “By diversifying your advertising spend across multiple channels, you’re not only reaching a variety of audiences, but you’re also learning more about what platforms your audience spends their time on, which can help inform future ad spend and organic efforts.”
3. Create a meaningful ad experience.
“Rather than trying to find ways around ad blockers, focus on finding ways to make advertising more meaningful and appealing to end users,” says Bernard May of National Positions.
As ad blocker usage slowly rises, video marketers must put their audience at the center of their video strategy. This means getting to the heart of customers’ interests, questions, and pain points — and then finding ways to address them.
Remember, consumers don’t hate advertising — they hate bad advertising.
4. Focus on targeting.
While we can’t necessarily get around ad blockers, we can focus on putting ads in front of the right people.
With Google AdWords (YouTube’s ad platform), video marketers can target people who already demonstrate an interest in specific topics or keywords relating to your business.
Affinity Audiences is an especially helpful targeting mechanism in Google Adwords. With Affinity Audiences, you can reach people based on their browsing history and place them in certain segments such as “bargain hunters” or “DIY.”
For example, a marketer selling outdoor sports equipment could target users who recently searched for “ice fishing” or “best hiking trails near me.”
Final Thoughts
Ad blocking technology isn’t going away soon. Fortunately, all isn’t lost for digital marketers who can still benefit from YouTube by auditing their current practices, diversifying their marketing channels, and identifying areas for innovation.

Review the best online referral programs to make money, including GetResponse, Fiverr, Walmart, Tesla, Robinhood, Spanx, and more.

For a small to medium-size business, affiliate marketing is an easy way to earn some extra revenue while keeping inventory and labor costs to a minimum. It is a marketing strategy that allows you to offer more to your customer base while capitalizing on the efforts of a brand partnership. Interested in learning more? Here…
The post Affiliate Marketing 101: A Guide to Everything You Need to Know appeared first on Benchmark Email.

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Did you know that it takes 5 to 7 impressions for people to remember a brand? With branding, the goal is to continue making those positive impressions on an ongoing basis. One way to do that is through brand activations.

In this post, we’ll dive into what brand activations are, how to strategically plan a brand activation, and give you some ideas to inspire your own branding events.
While a brand activation is a singular event or campaign that is meant to elevate your brand it shouldn’t be confused with ongoing brand strategy. So, what does brand activation strategy look like? Let’s dive in now.
Brand Activation Strategy
Before you get started with planning different brand activation events, it’s important to understand the goal of each separate campaign.
The best way to plan a strategy is to identify your goals. It could be customer acquisition, user sign-ups, social media engagement, etc. Ultimately you’ll want to increase brand awareness, however, narrowing down your goal, even more, will make it measurable and attainable (hello SMART goals).
Once you know your goals, you can begin brainstorming various brand activation events or campaigns that you can do to achieve your goals.
For instance, let’s say your goal is user sign-ups. One brand activation for that goal could be going to a trade show. There you can talk to potential customers and then hopefully sign up users on the spot (depending on your offerings).
Once you have a list of ideas, goals, and metrics, it’s time to begin your brand activation plan. You should decide on one campaign or event to move forward, plan the logistics of that event, and use your brand playbook (with a clear vision, value propositions for key targets, brand personality, character, voice, and experiences). Keep in mind that brand activations don’t necessarily need to be events, but can be sampling campaigns, social media contests, or other digital marketing campaigns.
Now, let’s go over some ideas to help you come up with your own brand activation plan. Below, we’ll have the ideas separated by the goal to give you an idea of how to strategically brainstorm brand activations.
Brand Activation Ideas
Goal: User sign ups

Experiential marketing event
Trade show
Digital marketing campaigns

Goal: Increased impressions/brand awareness

Sampling campaign (giveaways)
In-store/virtual events
Digital marketing campaigns
Influencer marketing

Goal: Customer acquisition

Digital marketing campaigns like PPC, display advertising, etc.
Interactive events
Live demonstrations

Goal: Social media engagement

Social media contest
Social media movement
Behind-the-Scenes series
Influencer marketing

Now that we have some ideas, let’s look at some examples of brands that have run excellent brand activation events.
Brand Activation Examples
1. Vitamin Water | Brandon

Image Source
A colleague, Clifford Chi, uses this as a great example of brand activations. He usually doesn’t pay much attention to subway ads, but Vitamin Water’s “Brandon” was so funny, it made him laugh out loud. Then, a few weeks later, when Chi was walking around Boston, he strolled past Forbes’ Under 30 Summit and saw someone holding a sign that said, “Need Handshaking Tips?”.
That person was a part of Vitamin Water’s “Brandon” marketing campaign. There were also other members of the campaign, handing out Brandon’s business cards, some swag, and even bottles of Vitamin Water.
The funniest (and most impressive) part of the “Brandon” marketing campaign, though, was that the members acted like they actually worked for Brandon.
Vitamin Water’s “Brandon” campaign resonated with so many people because instead of just giving subway riders a quick laugh on their way to work, they made the extra effort to interact with their target audience and bring the ad to life. To make things even more personal, Brandon accepts all of his LinkedIn requests.
2. Revolve | Revolve Festival

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An excellent example of brand activation is the Revolve Festival that Revolve holds at Coachella each year (or at least has for several consecutive years). This is often known as the celebrity party of the year.
Revolve hand picks celebrities and influencers (macro or micro) to party while the music festival is occuring.
Revolve Fest trends on social media almost each year it happens because of the influencer marketing that the company focuses on. Influencer marketing helps the company bring in sales for its clothing line and more. In fact, influencers drive 70% of sales for the company.
Each of these festivals is a brand activation to bring in sales and drive awareness for the brand.
3. HBO | SXSWestworld

To promote the second season of their hit show Westworld, HBO built a miniature replica of the show’s Wild-West-themed amusement park in Austin, Texas for attendees of SXSW 2018 to explore.
With over 40 “hosts” who guided attendees on their own unique narrative within Sweetwater, the attendees felt like they were actually in an episode of Westworld, traversing a town full of trotting horses, troublemaking bandits, and money-hungry gamblers.
The park also contained clues of season two’s storyline and new characters, which helped generate a ton of suspense and anticipation for its upcoming premiere.
4. HubSpot | INBOUND

Each year HubSpot holds the INBOUND event. This brand activation is a way to drive brand awareness, customer sign ups, and ultimately help our customers in whatever way we can as a company.
INBOUND is an excellent example of brand activation because it’s a singular event each year that drives engagement and interactivity for HubSpot.
With INBOUND, we can provide an experience for our customers and any business that wants to learn from the best of the best.
5. Netflix | Altered Carbon at CES

At CES 2018, Netflix designed one of the most popular booths at the event. But it didn’t showcase the inner workings of their recommendations algorithm or their process for green-lighting shows. It actually spotlighted a concept their show Altered Carbon revolves around — immortality.
In their booth, fictional employees from Psychasec, the company that offers transfers of their clients’ consciousness to new bodies, or “sleeves”, in Altered Carbon, pitched the benefits of their service and even displayed some models of their sleeves.
Netflix deeply immersed CES’ attendees in the narrative of their hit sci-fi show, and it made them feel like they could actually live forever — if only Psychasec’s service was real.
6. CALM | Project 84

In the U.K., suicide is the number one cause of death of men aged 18 – 45. CALM, a suicide prevention charity, decided to spread awareness for the issue by creating 84 life-size sculptures of hooded men, which is the number of men who take their own lives every week in the U.K. and placing them on top of one of U.K.’s top TV network’s building.
Every sculpture is unique and tells the story of a real person who committed suicide. And to produce as much publicity for male suicide prevention as possible, ITV, the TV network CALM partnered with, agreed to air the campaign on their morning show and dedicate three days of programming to male suicide. The campaign also promoted a petition that urges the government to take suicide more seriously and take greater action to help solve the urgent issue.
Brand Activation Takeaways
Putting on a brand activation event or campaign can help you increase brand awareness, impressions, and ultimately bring in new customers. With tactics like experiential marketing, digital campaigns, influencer marketing, and in-person or virtual events, you can engage and interact with your audience in a personal way.
To succeed with brand activation, it’s important to focus on your audience, make your experiences shareable, and be creative.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in April 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Interested in helping out and learning about email and marketing automation, but usually people bring up tools such as marketo, salesforce or hubspot. Anyone tried Mailchimp’s certifications and courses before and are they useful?
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I have integrated Facebook lead ads and Salesforce through zapier to pull leads automatically into Salesforce CRM.It was working properly but right now it’s showing an error.any help will be great.I spent hours to fix this issue “Could not create record of the “Lead” object: This source is meant to track Marketing campaigns. Please use different value.” Above error is showing when I test the zap.
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Think about the last commercial you remember.
What about it made it memorable? That’s the answer every advertiser wants to know. I tend to remember ads that are funny and/or relatable, but is it the same for most consumers?

Let’s see what recent data suggests about memorable ads and discuss some tips for your next campaign.
Why Consumers Remember Ads
We surveyed 281 U.S. consumers and asked them to think back to a recent ad they saw and what made it memorable. Respondents could only select a single answer.
Here are the results.

Our research found that funny commercials were the number one reason why respondents recalled ads.
The second highest response was the value respondents ascribed to the information presented in the commercial.
The remaining options each made up less than 8% of the answers. Some remembered the ad because the product featured seemed valuable (7%), the ad told an interesting story (4%), or had a catchy element like a jingle or tagline (4%).
Additional reasons included:

It featured interesting characters (3%)
It was high action (3%)
It made them sad (2%)
It related to a topic I’m interested in (2%)
it featured a celebrity or expert they knew (2%)

This survey also revealed that the least popular reason for ad recall was ad quality –meaning if it looked high budget (1%) or low budget (1%).
Insurance provider The General is a great example of how ads that are viewed as low budget can negatively affect brand perception.
CEO Tiku Raval revealed to AdWeek recently that the nature of its ads led consumers to believe they weren’t a reputable and credible company. Because of this, the brand recently overhauled its ad strategy with a fresh, new look.
The brand didn’t do this silently, they tackled the elephant in the room and addressed that misconception in its newest ads.
Now back to the research.
Eight percent of respondents said they remembered the ad for other reasons. One could be that the ad used fear, as that is a common tactic used in commercials. Particularly those that aim to change user habits or invite them to take action, like voting or smoking.
Now that we’ve gone through the results of the survey, let’s cover two of the most popular (and effective) devices used in advertising today and how they work to engage consumers.
The Use of Humor In Advertising
In my round-up of the top YouTube ads of the last two years, five out of nine ads that ranked were funny.
Our research revealed that ad recall was the strongest in ads that used humor. This supports research from a 2018 advertising survey by Clutch which showed that consumers prefer (and remember) ads that make them laugh.
Similarly, six out of nine ads that received an “A” grade in Kellogg’s 2021 School Super Bowl Advertising Review were humorous.
So, the question is why? Well, humor – when done right – brings people together through shared experiences. In fact, that’s what meme marketing is based on.
It allows people to forget their stresses.
The thing with humor is that you have to do it right. Otherwise, you risk facing a PR crisis.
Thinking back to 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 crisis, many brands halted ads and avoided humorous ads altogether, as many consumers found it inappropriate.
While the pandemic was extremely difficult to navigate, there were some moments of levity that could lend themselves well to advertisements.
Executive Creative Director Dave Hannenken from the advertising agency Hoffman York, wrote an article in which he highlighted some shared experiences we had during the pandemic. Working from home, baking banana bread, spending more time with kids and pets.
To get humor right, it’s all about finding a common ground and expanding upon it. Once you start zeroing in on something too unique and personal, that’s when you can land in the hot seat.
The Use of Education in Advertising
At the beginning of the buyer’s journey, consumers aren’t aware of the solutions to their problems. They may be aware of the challenges they face, but that may also be further down in the journey.
What we do know is that education can be an effective tool in building trust with your target audience and helping them move down the funnel.
Data from a 2018 Clutch advertising survey revealed that consumers want ads to teach them something. Fifty-one percent of respondents said they disliked an ad because it was uninformative.
Viewers want to leave an ad knowing about the product, the brand, and even the industry.
Education-driven ads can work particularly well for sustainability-conscious brands who share facts about the environment in their ads and explain what their company is doing to address it.
They appeal to consumers who value social responsibility and make purchasing decisions based on that – which is about 46% of consumers, according to a 2019 report.
Education can also be effective in ads that aim to promote an action or change a behavior.
While humor is a great way to grab their attention, it’s not the only way to captivate an audience. Creating compelling and memorable ads requires knowing your audience, understanding their challenges, and finding common ground that will resonate with them.

When it comes to social media strategy, most brands know some of the top strategies: Post high-quality content, monitor your brand perception, engage with your audience.

But ever wonder if there are some strategies your social media team has been overlooking?
In this article, we’ll cover some strategies you may not have considered, with some data to support their effectiveness.
1. Leverage small, nano, and micro-influencers.
A 2021 State of User Generated Content report revealed that most marketers (93%) agree that consumers trust content created by people way more than brands.
People trust each other considerably more than they trust brands, and that’s why 75% of marketers are working with small to micro-influencers with followers ranging from 500 to 25,000, according to the study.
Why not mega influencers with millions of followers? Well, besides cost, some brands worry that as influencers become more celebrity-like and grow in popularity, they lose some of their influence – ironically enough.
As a result, brands are working more with small, blue-checkless content creators with great engagement and true influencers in their community. In 2018, an eMarketer study revealed that micro-influencers (between 10K-100K followers) were considered most effective.
User-generated content (UGC) will continue to be a great lead and revenue driver on social media. However, the shift toward smaller influencers may be the more effective (and affordable) way to increase brand awareness.
2. Stick to platform-specific content.
With so many different platforms to post on, it’s very easy to get overwhelmed.
Brands often try to batch-post their content by posting the same content on multiple platforms at once. For instance, the same video may go on Facebook, Instagram Reels, and TikTok.
While it may be a time-saver, it may hurt your brand in the long run. The competition between each social media platform is fiercer than ever before.
In Feb. 2021, Instagram announced it would deprioritize Reels with the TikTok trademark in it.
The trademark shows up when a TikTok user saves a video that was uploaded to the platform. Because TikTok is a direct competitor to Instagram Reels, the brand wants to promote the use of its own short-form software and keep users on its network.
This speaks to a larger effort from social media platforms to differentiate themselves from one another. In that same spirit, brands should follow a specific strategy for each platform, as consumer behavior differs from one site to the next.
3. Show the people behind your brand.
When I went on vacation a few weeks ago, my friends and I spent an hour discussing our favorite Black-owned brands, as Black women do.
One brand I highlighted was the luxury purse brand Anima Iris. I hadn’t even purchased from the brand but I was already loyal and I was eager to spread the word.
A few weeks later, I noticed that one of my friends kept sharing new content from Anima Iris with me. I mentioned that I loved how invested she became in the brand.
She responded, “It’s because I’m invested in her.” The “her” she was referring to is the company’s CEO, Wilglory Tanjong, who was incredibly visible on the brand’s social media.
In fact, the majority of the brand’s social media posts feature the CEO and her journey. Tanjong shares everything from new leathers she’s considering using to her struggle in raising capital.
What’s the point of the story? Well, brands often underestimate the power of transparency.
Back in 2018, a Sprout Social study revealed that 70% of consumers feel more connected to a brand when its CEO is active on social. They listed three reasons why:

It feels like there are real people behind the brand.
Consumers like learning about the leadership team.
Consumers feel the CEO offers valuable insight into the brand itself.

This transparency has helped Tanjong build a community of loyal followers who are invested in her brand and engage frequently with her content.
Marketers often think of data privacy and social responsibility. But it’s also company culture, employees, processes, and everything in between.
In a 2020 study by Havas, consumers shared that they (58%) want brands to be more transparent and honest and their company, including their processes and products.
Transparency builds trust and allows you to speak directly with your audience. What’s better than that?
4. Focus on community, not promotion.
Social media builds brand awareness, true. However, too often, brands focus on output without considering community building.
Annabelle Nyst, senior content strategist on the HubSpot social team, encourages companies to create a community-focused social strategy.
“So many brands see social media as a vessel for promoting themselves and their owned content, without really giving too much thought to engaging or growing their community,” said Nyst.
She adds that brands should be proactive about participating in conversations, finding their facts, monitoring their brand perception, and celebrating UGC.
Takeaway: Get your audience invested in your brand and you’ll have an easier time getting them excited about your products or services.
5. Go live.
Live streaming allows brands to connect with their audience in real-time. In some instances, consumers prefer it over other content channels.
Back in 2017, Livestream found that 80% of consumers prefer watching a brand’s live video than read a blog post or see a social post.
In 2021, 28% of marketers planned to use it in their video marketing strategy, according to Wyzowl.
Other reasons to go live include:

The ability to repurpose the live content into other posts.
The ideas you get generate from connecting directly with your audience.
The trust you can build by showing the faces behind your brand.

Social media is a beast that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Don’t be afraid to experiment, as that will help you better understand your audience and identify effective strategies.

As email marketers, one of the key metrics we use to determine if our audience is actually reading our content is the open rate.
Tracking email opens allows us to determine whether our subject lines are resonating with our audience. If we can’t get them to open an email, we can’t get them to click and move further along the buyer’s journey.
With the rollout of Apple iOS 15’s new privacy protection features, our open rates are in jeopardy. But is that a bad thing?
Let’s start with some information about how this new feature will work.

How Apple’s Email Privacy Protection Feature Works
After updating an iOS device to iOS 15, upon opening the Apple Mail app you will see a popup asking whether you’d like to “Protect Mail activity.”
If you select the “Protect Mail activity” option, Apple will first route your emails through a proxy server to pre-load message content, including tracking pixels, before it makes it to your inbox.
What does that mean for you?
According to Apple, “Mail Privacy Protection hides your IP address, so senders can’t link it to your other online activity or determine your location. And it prevents senders from seeing if and when you’ve opened their email.”
What does this mean for email marketers?
Mail privacy protection affects any email opened from the Apple Mail app on any device, no matter which email service is used such as Gmail or a work address. However, this will not affect other email apps used on Apple devices like the Gmail app on an iPhone for example.
If you’re an email marketer, you might still be wondering how this change will impact your strategy. To help, we decided to highlight the steps our email team is taking to adjust our strategy and process around these email privacy protection features.
Here are a few of the steps we’re taking and we encourage you to join us
How HubSpot Email Marketers Are Responding to iOS 15
1. Take stock of current processes.
Before Apple’s iOS 15 changes went live, we audited all of our existing email programs.
To begin, we wanted to understand the potential impact this change was going to have on the business. Using HubSpot’s email reporting tools we were able to assess the portion of our database that uses Apple Mail clients. Understanding this number is important to gauge how big of an impact these IOS changes will have on our ability to see accurate email performance data moving forward.
Next, we documented which subject lines resonate best with each of our personas.
While we follow email subject line best practices, as most email marketers know that only gets you so far. Things like character count and action-oriented language are only guardrails used to guide our subject line writing. From there we’ve experimented heavily with language, structure, and yes — even emojis — to find what resonates with each of our personas.
This documentation provides my team with a library of subject lines and guardrails that we can use moving forward in a world without accurate Open Data.
Finally, we documented email benchmarks for all of our programs. While the privacy update will only impact Opens, that means all other metrics utilizing open data will be impacted too — such as clickthrough rate which is measured by total clicks/total opens. These benchmarks will enable us to measure the impact that this IOS change will have across all of our email metrics.
2. Open up email reporting.
When reporting on email performance one of the first metrics considered is open rate. How successful were we at getting our recipients to open our email? Well, that’s about to change.
Email marketers are going to have to shift their focus to stable metrics like clicks, click rate (clicks / delivered emails), and conversion rate moving forward. This is our plan.
While this change may be painful, we believe it’s the right course of action. Looking at clicks and conversions is much more closely tied to how your database is engaging with your email programs.
Driving action via a CTA click and the following conversion is the ultimate goal of most emails sent today. Focussing on clicks and conversions will enable marketers to better optimize their programs to drive real engagement for their database.
However, open rates will not be going away. They will just be — different. It will still be important to track open rates over time for your email programs. We will need to establish new benchmarks after the IOS update is rolled out broadly. From there we will still be able to do subject line testing and see if we can improve Open rates over the new benchmark.
3. Stay the (automated) course.
While a few things are changing for us in how we think about reporting and subject line experimentation, our overarching strategy doesn’t follow suit.
At HubSpot, we’ve never relied on open data to segment or personalize our automated email programs. I know this goes against the tried and true drip campaign logic, which relies heavily on whether a contact opened an email. We instead focus our segmentation and personalization on the behaviors our contacts are taking on our website and within our app.
We’ve found this behavioral segmentation to be the most successful when trying to connect with our audience.
Take our email onboarding experience for example.
We have a welcome email that we send to every contact when they sign up for HubSpot that is filled with getting started resources.
The next email contacts receive is not based on how they interacted with our welcome email but rather how they have interacted with our product. Depending on the tools they have (or haven’t) used, we will send them a personalized email suggesting the next tool to explore.
We will stay the course here and focus on behavior over email interaction.
4. Understand the impact on your strategies.
According to Litmus, if Apple Mail audiences opt into Mail Privacy Protection, marketers could face the following issues:

Any audience cohort, segmentation, or targeting based on the last open date would be rendered useless — especially critical for purging unengaged contacts.
Automated flows and journeys that rely on someone opening an email would need to get re-engineered.
A/B testing subject lines (or anything else) using opens to determine the winner or to automatically send out the winner won’t work anymore.
Send time optimization would become inaccurate.
Countdown timers might show outdated times as the cached version was pulled at email send time — not opened time.
Other content powered by opens such as local weather or nearest store location also wouldn’t be accurate.
Some interactive emails that reference external CSS might not work.

5. Weigh alternatives.
Although some elements of email marketing will be more challenging with IOS 15 in play, marketers can still use some creative alternatives to continue to send subscribers interesting and engaging content.
For example, although you might not be able to optimize for send time as well without proper open-tracking, you can still manually analyze email performance based on send time, or send emails based on send times that receive the best global performance across industries.
Additionally, while you might not be able to automate location-specific banners or weather reports for Apple users, you can still use zip code information that they’ve submitted on previous forms to send them location-based content.
While these alternatives might not be perfect or easy to streamline with automation, they can still give your audiences a somewhat personalized email experience.
6. Explore additional tools.
While HubSpot’s product team is continuing to watch and respond to how iOS 15 impacts email marketing tools, there are also additional tools and integrations you can use with HubSpot’s email platform to create stunning emails.
For example, Litmus is a paid tool that allows HubSpot users to track their HubSpot emails. According to a recent post from the company, it allows users to view “reliable opens” as well as the total number of Apple-privacy-impacted opens, which can help email marketers determine how big the impact of Apple’s IOS changes are.
 Image Source
What’s Next?
First and foremost, don’t panic! While iOS 15 will force email marketers to pivot strategy and process, it most certainly does not mean that email marketing is going away.
Apple’s launch of iOS 15 and its Email Privacy Protection Feature is indicative of a larger shift that we’re seeing in the digital marketing space. More and more Individuals are taking a larger interest in how their personal information is being collected, stored, and used. We will continue to see this trend grow as more businesses put protections in place for their customers.
As email marketers, it’s our responsibility to honor the inbox of every contact in our database with a personalized experience. With iOS 15, personalization has become harder.
As data protection continues to grow and evolve, personalization will become even more difficult. The best thing we can do moving forward is to stay informed and adjust our strategies accordingly. Because at the end of the day, email marketing is really about providing value to the Human’s on the other end of that Inbox.
Want to get more background on Apple’s privacy move? Check out this post. To learn more about how this move could impact your processes within HubSpot’s email tool specifically, follow this community thread.