For eHouse, events aren't a side project. They're where the pipeline starts.
The team builds a significant portion of their top of funnel through in-person events — conferences, industry shows, and the hallway conversations that happen around them. It's the fastest way to get real time with the brands they want to work with.
Which is why the Shop Talk conference in Las Vegas is a fixture on their calendar.
Kara McKelvey, Marketing Manager at eHouse, put it plainly:
"Shop Talk is important to eHouse because it is a huge conference where there is an abundance of brands and retailers — both our current clients and prospects. So we want to get as much time as possible with those people, as well as our partners."
One show. Clients, prospects, and partners all in the same building. The opportunity is obvious. The hard part is making sure everything that happens there actually lands somewhere useful afterward.
The Challenge: Events Lived in HubSpot, But Not Really
Before hapily, eHouse was technically managing events in HubSpot. The reality was messier than that.
"We were still managing them in HubSpot, but not well. It was a lot of manual Google Sheets, which then we'd be updating things in HubSpot. It wasn't a super streamlined process at all."
That's a familiar setup for a lot of marketing teams. The CRM is the system of record, but the actual work of running an event happens somewhere else — a spreadsheet for the registration list, another tab for who confirmed, a manual pass to get any of it back into HubSpot.
It works right up until it doesn't. Every event added another round of copying, reconciling, and hoping nothing got missed between the sheet and the CRM.
And because the data was moving by hand, the questions that matter after an event were slower to answer than they should have been.
Who actually showed up? Which brands were worth another conversation? Which events were worth doing again?
The Solution: Registration, Attendance, and Follow-Up in One System
With hapily, event data stopped living in two places.
Registrations, attendance, and cancellations are all tracked on the event record inside HubSpot — no separate sheet, no manual sync.
"hapily's allowed us to better track our events in terms of who registered, who's attended, who's maybe canceled."
That distinction between registered and attended turned out to matter more than expected. It's the difference between a contact list and an actual signal about interest.
Kara also flagged something that comes up a lot when a marketing team brings a new tool into HubSpot — whether the rest of the team will be able to use it.
"I feel like whether you are well versed in HubSpot or had never used it before, it would be easy to utilize all the features that hapily has to offer."
Because everything sits inside HubSpot, follow-up runs on the automation the team already knows how to build.
Workflows trigger off event data directly, which removed most of the manual work that used to sit between the event ending and the follow-up going out.
"hapily has saved me so much time in the event planning process with automations through workflows."
The Impact: An Event Pipeline You Can Actually See
The bigger shift wasn't about any single event. It was about seeing the whole program at once.
eHouse uses hapily's board view to manage their event pipeline the way a sales team manages deals — events they're considering, events in planning, events that are complete.
"We really also love the board view of our events, where you can see the pipeline of events — ones we're considering, planning, ones that are complete — and just seeing, you know, what else do we need to add into our pipeline to generate the ROI."
That view changes the conversation from tactical to strategic. Instead of managing one event at a time, the team can look at the quarter ahead and ask better questions:
- Where are the gaps in the calendar?
- Which types of events do people actually follow through and attend?
- What needs to be added to hit the pipeline number?
And because every event is connected to CRM data, the answers come from the same place the revenue does.
"It's allowed us to see how we can better follow up with brands afterwards, and kind of what type of events people are interested in and will follow through in coming to."
The Real Takeaway?
eHouse didn't change their event strategy. Events were already driving top of funnel before hapily.
What changed is that the strategy now runs on one system instead of two. Registration and attendance data lives in HubSpot, follow-up runs on workflows, and the entire event program is visible as a pipeline rather than a list of one-off projects.
"I just think the planning aspect of it, as well as the time savings, has been huge."
For a marketing team building pipeline through in-person events, that's the whole point — less time moving data around, more time on the conversations that generate revenue.
Want to see these results work for you? Request a demo to see how hapily helps teams capture event leads, follow up faster, and track event ROI — all directly inside HubSpot.
About ehouse
eHouse is an ecommerce agency partnering with brands and retailers to design, build, and grow their online business. The team works closely with clients across strategy, design, and development — and builds much of their new business pipeline through in-person events and industry conferences.
