Signals from the Field

One of the most impactful sessions at the Financial Brand Conference (April 2025) was led by Sean Payant, Chief Strategy Officer at Haberfeld. His session, Overcoming Strategic Contradictions in the Banking C-Suite, zeroed in on a critical growth opportunity for credit unions: earning and growing the Primary Financial Institution (PFI) relationship.

Here’s why that matters more than ever and how your credit union can win that spot.

The Financial Brand Conference (April 2025) provided powerful insights into the evolving definition of "community" and its implications for credit unions today.

One session that really stood out was, "What Will Save Community Banking?" led by Jean-Pierre Lacroix, President of SLD (Shikatani Lacroix Design). He offered research-backed guidance that every credit union leader needs to hear.

Here's what we learned, and why credit unions are uniquely positioned to thrive.

After covering the most frequently asked questions in Part 1, this post dives into deeper use cases and often overlooked capabilities in HubSpot that credit unions can take advantage of.

Many credit unions are exploring HubSpot to modernize their marketing, enhance member experiences, and unify siloed data. So naturally, there will be lot of questions, especially around integration, tracking, and security. 

We’ve gathered the most frequently asked questions from real conversations with credit unions and our HubSpot implementation team.

Credit unions thrive on relationships. Whether you're trying to improve the onboarding experience, understand why members close accounts, or measure satisfaction after a loan closes, the only way to truly know how you're doing is to ask.

Email automation can be one of the most powerful tools in a Credit Union marketer’s toolkit. When used strategically, it not only improves engagement, but also enhances the member experience, drives conversions, and strengthens relationships over time.

To help you visualize what’s possible, we’ve broken down automation ideas into three key stages of the member journey: Lead Generation, Member Experience, and Promoter Engagement. These examples are based on real workflows we’ve implemented using HubSpot for Credit Unions.

Each section below includes a quick explanation and a table of workflow ideas you can adapt for your credit union.

Member retention is a big challenge for credit unions. The key to success is making personalized and proactive experiences for members. HubSpot offers strong tools so Credit unions can use data, automation, and member engagement to boost retention. Here’s how.

Why Tracking Members vs. Non-Members Matters

Many credit unions wonder, "Are most of our website visitors already members?" The answer depends on your particular credit union. Knowing this is powerful for setting and measuring performance goals for your marketing campaigns.

So, how can you tell how many site visitors are members or not? Many credit unions rely on the "new and returning visitors" distinction to assess this. However, this method has major flaws.

A better method is to track logins and non-logins as a baseline. Then, add behavioral insights to improve the analysis.

If you’re a marketing manager or a credit union using HubSpot Forms, you know how crucial it is to track and measure form submissions.

Whether you’re capturing leads for loan applications, B2B contact forms, or any other inquiry forms, having a seamless tracking setup can save you a lot of time and provide clear insights.

In this post, we’ll walk you through a quick and efficient way to track all your HubSpot Forms using Google Tag Manager (GTM).