Automating Event Registration: A Case Study on HubSpot's INBOUND Conference

HubSpot, founded in 2006, is on a mission to make the world more inbound. It has over 56,500 total customers in more than 100 countries who use HubSpot’s award-winning software, services, and support to transform the way they attract, engage, and delight customers. HubSpot comprises of Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, and a powerful free CRM, providing companies with the tools they need to grow better. One of their major events is the INBOUND conference, a week-long marketing, sales, and customer service event that attracts thousands of attendees each year.

HubSpot's INBOUND conference, a week-long marketing, sales, and customer service event, has seen a significant increase in attendance over the years. However, the registration process was not always seamless. The event technology used was outdated and relied on archaic infrastructures, making the transfer of information from the event management app into HubSpot's CRM tool and marketing automation a manual and laborious process. This led to a clunky sign-up process, which could potentially affect customer confidence and attendance numbers. The process was also costly and resource-intensive, involving an outsourced team to manage the integration and keep it running throughout the year. This was neither sustainable nor cost-effective.

Elijah Clark-Ginsberg, the senior event manager in charge of technology and attendee experience, sought out a new event software and landed on Bizzabo. Bizzabo's focus on attendee-friendly registration process significantly improved the user experience. However, the challenge of transferring registration and attendee information from Bizzabo into HubSpot remained. Bizzabo's team recommended the automation tool, Zapier, which could be used to automatically send data from one app to another. Once Elijah set up a Zap—an automated process—connecting Bizzabo and HubSpot, the cost to his budget became essentially zero. The integration also provided deeper insights into when and why things go awry during registration, adding a layer of transparency that was previously missing.

• The use of Zapier not only automated the registration process but also provided valuable insights into the registration process. It alerted the team when it encountered an error, providing a deeper understanding of when and why things go wrong during registration. This added a layer of transparency that was previously missing, providing insight into why a registered attendee doesn't show up to the event or when items don't transfer as expected. It also allowed for an easy-to-follow paper trail. The automation freed up resources, allowing the team to focus on improving the attendee experience and building out new features. The do-it-yourself ethos of Zapier enabled non-developers to get up and running, fix bugs and issues with very little effort.

• The cost to the budget for managing the integration became essentially zero after implementing Zapier.

• The time taken to build and manage an integration was reduced from months to instant with the use of Zapier.

• The use of Zapier allowed for immediate syncing of data from the day tickets start selling.