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Strategic Brief

UMe Credit Union — Strategic Brief

Prepared for Anita Hutchinson, CMO & Vice President of Marketing
Confidential · May 2026
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Executive Summary

UMe Credit Union has the foundational marketing infrastructure — HubSpot CRM, SendGrid, and Gravity Forms capturing inquiries across 8+ loan and account products — but the architecture shows clear signs of underutilization typical of a small, resource-constrained team. The likely result is that post-inquiry follow-up is either manual, batch-based, or product-agnostic, meaning a member who expressed interest in a home equity loan is being treated identically to one asking about a student loan.

For a 24-person institution competing in the Los Angeles market, closing this automation gap represents the single highest-leverage operational improvement available without adding headcount.

Current State Analysis

UMe's marketing posture is that of a team with genuine intent to automate but limited bandwidth to execute. HubSpot and SendGrid coexist in the stack — a pattern that almost always indicates CRM-side data is not driving email execution. Gravity Forms is capturing leads across multiple product pages, but without native HubSpot workflow triggers, those submissions are likely feeding a queue rather than a segmented nurture engine.

Layer Tools Detected Observation
CRM HubSpot Present in stack but likely underutilized for workflow automation given team size
Email Infrastructure SendGrid Suggests transactional sends operating outside HubSpot — split breaks nurture continuity
Lead Capture Gravity Forms Active across product pages; without HubSpot-native triggers, submissions need manual routing
Paid Social Meta Ads Only 1 active ad detected vs. 9+ competitor ads in auto loan category

Key Findings & Gaps

Finding 1 — Disconnected Email Infrastructure Running SendGrid alongside HubSpot is a strong signal that email execution and CRM data are operating in separate lanes. When this split exists, HubSpot contacts rarely receive behavior-triggered communication — instead, they receive scheduled blasts that are identical regardless of which product page the member visited or which form they submitted.
Finding 2 — Form Submissions Without Automated Routing Gravity Forms is embedded across UMe's product pages — a solid lead capture setup — but the value of that infrastructure depends entirely on what happens after submission. Without HubSpot workflow triggers mapped to specific form IDs, a submitted auto loan inquiry and a submitted CD inquiry land in the same place and receive the same automated response.
Finding 3 — Paid Social Thin Spot Creates CRM Dependency With only one active Meta ad running against a competitive field of 9+ ads from rival institutions, UMe is not winning the top-of-funnel volume battle on paid social. This means the CRM and nurture layer must work harder to convert the inquiries that do come in.

Recommendations

Quick Win — 2 to 3 weeks

Map existing Gravity Forms form IDs to HubSpot contact properties and build a single trigger-based workflow per top-volume product (start with auto loans, given the active ad). Each workflow should include a same-day confirmation email, a 48-hour follow-up with product-specific content, and a task creation for a team member if the contact goes cold after 5 days.

Strategic Move — 1 to 2 months

Consolidate SendGrid sends into HubSpot's native email tool, eliminating the split-lane data problem. Build out 5-7 product-specific nurture sequences tied to form submission events and member behavior signals.

Compounding Play — 3 to 6 months

Layer behavioral lead scoring on top of nurture sequences, identifying high-intent inquiries automatically and routing them to a dedicated member services queue with priority SLA.

Suggested Next Steps

A 15-minute call to validate these findings against what your team is actually seeing internally. We can walk through the Quick Win in detail and discuss what a phased buildout would look like, scoped to UMe's bandwidth and priorities.

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