Yearly Archives: 2023

There’s a reason why Google’s advertising revenue stood at a staggering $224.47 billion in 2022 or why Meta generated over $113 billion in ads.

Millions of businesses worldwide invest billions in paid ads each year to put themselves in front of as many people as possible. And they’re doing it because online advertising, when done right, delivers outstanding results.

On the other hand, if you’re not careful, it can feel like flushing your $$ down the digital drain. And it’s even more important today, considering the ever-evolving online advertising landscape, all thanks to new platforms, ad types, and targeting capabilities popping up all the time.

To help you out, we’ve put together this comprehensive online advertising guide for business. Throughout this post, we’ve covered everything you need to know about online advertising.

If you’re only interested in learning about a certain type of online advertising, you can use the table of contents below to navigate to each section.

How to Advertise Online

Of all online interactions, 93% start with a search engine.

Whether you’re on the lookout for the best Indian restaurant in your neighborhood or looking for a specific SaaS tool, you’re likely going to turn to a search engine to find what you need.

And the same goes for your audience.

With search engines like Google, Bing, and many others being a core part of almost everyone’s daily routine, it’s important to ensure you’re running paid ads to catch their attention on these platforms.

And let’s not overlook how much time people spend on social media platforms.

According to Data Reportal’s Digital 2023 report, the average time people spend on social media stands at 2 hours 31 minutes daily. This means you should also incorporate social media into your online advertising strategy.

There are plenty of ways to advertise your business strategically. Think about who you’re trying to reach when you start.

Ask yourself questions like:

• What target demographic am I advertising to?
• How can I place my product or service offering in front of my target?

The answer is to see where your target demographic spends the most time online. Research their most frequented social media channels and the keywords they look up the most.

If you want to run pay-per-click (PPC) ads on social media, it’s important to note that most social media platforms offer business pages the ability to pay a fee to promote posts/ads within the interface.

Or, if you are looking to advertise on a search engine for targeted keywords, Google Ads or Sixads can guide you through the process of payment and execution.

Benefits of Online Advertising

There are three key ways that digital advertising can help you improve the performance of your organic marketing efforts.

With digital ads, organic performance can benefit from:

1. An increase in brand awareness by displaying your content to individuals within and outside of your networks.
2. A better understanding of your audiences by leveraging the targeting and analytics of the ads platforms.
3. The creation of higher-performing content by understanding what ad content helps you achieve your business goals and what doesn’t.

The goal of any advertising strategy should be to get a positive return on your investment, which comes down to whether you’re getting more revenue out of the ad campaign than the cost you’re putting in.

How Paid Advertising Works

How can you determine what your ad spend should be to get the most return on your investment? To start answering that question, we’ll need to understand the bidding system used by the ad networks.

What’s a bid?

A bid is the maximum amount of money you’re willing to pay for the desired action on your ad. If it sounds like an auction, that’s because it is an auction.

Ad networks have a limited amount of ad space, and to determine whether or not your ads are shown to your target audience, they run an auction to see how much each advertiser is willing to pay for ad space.

Just like in an auction, the highest bidder wins. Let’s say you bid $10 for a click on your ad, and the next highest bidder only pays $5 for a click.

Each ad network will only make you pay the lowest amount possible to win the bid. In this example, you might be willing to pay $10. However, in reality, you’ll only have to pay $5.01 to win the bid.

Winning this “auction,” in addition to the overall quality of your ads, will determine how your ads are displayed on the different ad networks.

Here’s another example of how the ad auction works from WordStream.

How much should I spend?

At this point, you might be thinking, “Okay, I get how the auction system works. But how do I figure out how much I should actually spend to see a return on my investment?”

My advice is to work backward from your revenue to determine what your maximum bid should be.

Use this equation:

Lifetime Value (LTV) x Average Lead-to-Customer Rate x Average Conversion Rate

Your LTV is how much a customer is worth to you throughout their relationship with your business. The average lead-to-customer rate is the rate at which your leads become paying customers.

Your conversion rate is the rate at which new contacts convert on your content offers by filling out a form.

When combined, these metrics show you how much you should spend on your paid ads to break even.

Let’s say you want to use digital ads to promote your new content offer. You will need to know what your maximum ad spend should be to see a positive return on your investment.

Assume that you know the following about your business:

• Lifetime value: $500.
• Average lead-to-customer rate: 10%.
• Average conversion rate: 20%.

Plug these numbers into the equation above to determine your maximum ad spend: $500 x 0.10 x 0.20 = $10. This means you can spend a maximum of $10 per click on your ad to break even.

Your goal should be to spend less than $10 to see a positive return on your investment.

Types of Online Advertising

Now that we know more about how to advertise online, let’s dive into the different types of online advertising.

Social Media Advertising

Every month, there are nearly 2.96 billion active users on Facebook, 2 billion on Instagram, and 556 million on X worldwide.

Whether it’s to chat with friends, stay connected to people across the globe, or for business and/or networking purposes, consumers are on social media for a multitude of reasons — and marketers know it.

Because of the sheer number of active users on these platforms, advertising spending invested in social media channels is at an all-time high. The global digital advertising spend is projected to exceed $243.7 billion by 2027.

Advertising on social media comes with many advantages. You can:

• Reach very specific target audiences with the help of targeting features and different audiences across all of the social media platforms.
• Leverage a variety of ad formats to advertise in a way that aligns with your business goals.
• Invest in the specific advertising efforts that drive leads and sales for your business.

Let’s look at eight popular social media networks, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok. We’ll cover the audiences and ad types available on each one.

1. Facebook

Facebook is, hands down, the most widely used social media network, leveraged by 64% of marketers. HubSpot Blog’s 2023 Marketing Strategy & Trends Report indicates that Facebook offers the highest ROI.

I’d also like to shed light on the fact that almost 2.96 billion people worldwide use Facebook. Just think about it — that’s more than 35% of the world’s population.

With so many people using Facebook and the platform taking the throne as the highest-ROI social media platform, you’re almost guaranteed to reach an audience that’s relevant to any type of business.

That’s where one of the most powerful features of advertising on Facebook comes in: audience targeting. The targeting capabilities on Facebook are unmatched by any other social media network.

There are three types of audiences that you can target on Facebook:

1. Core audiences — an audience based on criteria like age, interests, and geography.
2. Custom audiences — get back in touch with people who have previously engaged with your business.
3. Lookalike audiences — reach new people whose interests are similar to those of your best customers.

Facebook’s advanced targeting can target your ads to the most relevant audience — and even tap into new audiences you’d otherwise never reach with organic content alone.

Advertising on Facebook includes a range of ad types, including:

• Photo ads.
• Video ads.
• Story ads.
• Lead ads.
• Poll ads.
• Carousel ads.
• Instant experience ads.

Photo ads are great for sharing collections of image content. Monday.com’s Facebook photo ad is a great example:

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Video ads are great for product explainer videos and branding, and you can use a simple video ad maker to create eye-catching and engaging videos.

Kay Jewelers’ Facebook video ad is one of my favorites — as it tells a quick yet moving story of a woman smiling and being super-happy after receiving a gift in the ad.

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Story ads allow you to combine photo and short-form video content. Similarly, there are different ad types, which you can dive deep into through the Facebook advertising course on HubSpot Academy.

Personally, my favorite way to advertise on Facebook is with lead ads because they give you the best of both worlds: sharing visual content and generating leads simultaneously. Facebook Lead Ads allow you to capture lead information without directing people out of the Facebook platform.

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No matter your business’s size or industry, you can use lead ads to find potential customers who are likely interested in your products or services.

With lead ads, you provide a helpful piece of content that encourages viewers to sign up for a newsletter, receive a price estimate, or request additional business information. In return, when the viewer fills out the form, the business receives a new lead.

Another way to advertise on Facebook is through Facebook Messenger.

Facebook Messenger is a separate messaging app that comes with its own advertising opportunities. Facebook Messenger is the go-to messaging app in countries including the US, Canada, and Australia.

Other messaging apps like WhatsApp and WeChat are the more popular choice in countries throughout South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

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Billions of messages are exchanged between people and businesses monthly on Facebook Messenger. Ads play a big part in initiating conversations on Facebook Messenger.

You can use Facebook Messenger as part of your advertising strategy in a few different ways.

• Facebook Messenger call-to-action in ads: Start conversations with ads on Facebook that include a call-to-action (CTA) to send a message.
• Facebook Messenger Story Ads: Run story ads on Messenger Stories.
• Facebook Messenger Ads: Use messenger ads to deliver content directly into users’ Facebook Messenger chats.

All of these ad types come together to encourage your audience to kick off conversations with your business. They can be used to contact a sales team, request more information on a product, or even share other content like blog posts or ebooks.

My favorite way to advertise on Facebook Messenger is retargeting. Retargeting ads in Facebook Messenger are a great way to start targeted conversations and send personalized offers and content.

Sponsored messages allow you to advertise to people who have already interacted with your business in Messenger. This is a great way to re-engage your audience in a personalized way.

Here’s an interesting example:

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As you can see, this ad is visible in the user’s feed. When they click on the CTA (“Learn More”), rather than being redirected to any website or dedicated landing page, they are redirected to Facebook Messenger.

2. Instagram

You can also advertise on Instagram through the Facebook Ads Manager. Instagram has over 2 billion monthly users globally. The majority of users are between the ages of 18 and 34.

There are three ways that you can advertise on Instagram:

• Promote posts and stories directly from your Instagram professional account.
• Create ads from your Facebook Page and promote them on both Facebook and Instagram.
• Create ad campaigns in the Facebook Ads Manager to access full targeting capabilities.

I recommend taking the third option and creating custom campaigns for your audience on Instagram.

Instagram has similar ad types to Facebook, including:

• Photo ads
• Video ads
• Story ads
• Carousel ads
• Reel ads

By far, the most interesting ad types right now are in-feed and explore.

Ads that appear while scrolling your feed are called in-feed ads. The ads that you see in the “Explore” section while exploring your interests and discovering new content creators are Explore ads.

Ads in Instagram Explore are a great opportunity to put your brand in front of people looking for new creators or content.

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Here’s an example of explore ad by Harvard:

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3. LinkedIn

The LinkedIn platform has over 900 million monthly active users worldwide.

Users on the platform are largely working professionals, which makes LinkedIn a great place for B2B (business-to-business) advertising.

LinkedIn is the go-to platform for working professionals, which provides B2B advertisers with a large audience pool to reach.

Plus, the advantage of advertising on LinkedIn is its unique targeting capabilities. On LinkedIn, you’ll have access to unique targeting criteria that are unavailable on other platforms.

You can target users on LinkedIn by unique demographics, including job title, job function, and industry.

Maybe you only want to advertise to potential customers at the director level who work in customer service within the recruiting industry. LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities make that possible.

Plus, with the option to include lead gen forms in your LinkedIn ads, LinkedIn can be a lead generation machine. This will allow you to reach a very specific audience and drive leads without directing them outside of the LinkedIn platform.

The most interesting ad type of LinkedIn is Message Ads. Message Ads allow you to send direct messages to your prospects to spark immediate action.

How to use LinkedIn Message Ads:

• Deliver a targeted message with a single CTA.
• Drive stronger engagement and response than traditional emails.
• Measure the impact of your messages.

But a word of warning: Don’t send too many Message Ads to the same people, or it will come off like spam. And make sure the messages sound authentic — if you were writing a LinkedIn message to a friend, what would you write in it?

If your Message Ads are too stiff, they’ll come off as spammy, too. Remember: This channel is a one-to-one conversation.

Direct messages are sacred spaces — if you’re going to advertise there, you need to be extra careful about taking the time to make your Message Ads feel personal and relevant to your end users.

Make sure you’re delivering value to them in a way that feels authentic.

4. X (Formerly Twitter)

Digital advertising is less common on X (formerly Twitter) because organic reach is still a significant driver of a brand’s performance on X.

This is very unique to X — but even so, ads can still deliver strong results depending on what your goals are. X has over 556 million monthly users globally.

The majority of users are between 35–65 years old.

Advertisers have discovered a few niches that have high engagement on X: B2B and ecommerce. Many B2B companies are using X as a digital marketing tool, and X users are known to spend a lot of money online.

This makes advertising specifically to these audiences a great strategy.

Climate Group, an international climate non-profit, ran an X advertising campaign to educate business owners on climate-friendly innovations.

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As visible in the screenshot, this ad garnered impressive engagement — with 7,446 likes, 355 reposts, eight bookmarks, and 29 quotes (as of 2023).

X breaks down its ads into five goals:

• Awareness. Promote your messages and maximize your reach.
• X engagement. Promote your messages and get more reposts, likes, and replies.
• Follows. Promote your account and grow your X following.
• Website clicks. Promote your website and get more traffic.
• App downloads. Promote your app and get more downloads.

All of these can work together to help you grow your audience on the platform and convert users into customers.

5. Pinterest

Pinterest is a unique social media platform with 445 million users who are highly engaged and predominantly female.

Some people say that Pinterest is the only platform where users actually want to see ads from brands they love because Pinterest is all about visuals.

Here’s how to advertise on Pinterest in four steps:

• Pick a pin. Promote your best pins so they appear in the most relevant places.
• Decide who sees it. Set up targeting so the right people see your ads.
• Pay for results. Choose to pay for engagement or visits to your site.
• Track what’s working. Once your campaign starts, see how it’s doing and make adjustments as necessary.

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Pinterest is great for businesses relying on photography to sell their products and who have a female target buyer persona.

6. YouTube

YouTube is the second largest search engine, second only to Google, with over 2.5 billion monthly active users.

Ads on YouTube appear before and during other YouTube videos or as a stand-alone promoted video that’s displayed after performing a search.

Since you can target demographic information and interests, you can serve your videos to specific, relevant audiences already watching videos from similar brands or on related topics.

Despite that, not many brands can keep their target audience engaged and stop them from hitting the “skip ad” button.

But that’s not the case with Nissan. Nissan, a Japanese multinational automobile manufacturer, changed the game by keeping their viewers engaged for over four hours without reaching for the “skip ad” button.

They launched a YouTube ad that was very different from the traditional ones. This four-hour-long ad featured a custom Lofi playlist that serves as the soundtrack to an animated character’s road trip.

One of the reasons this ad worked so well is that people love lo-fi music. It’s a genre people love listening to while studying, working, or trying to relax.

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Learn more about Nissan’s secret here.

7. Snapchat

Snapchat’s 635 million users are predominantly made up of people between the ages of 18–24.

Snapchat offers a few ad types, including story ads, sponsored tiles in Snapchat Discover, and augmented reality (AR) lenses.

Snapchat’s ad types feel pretty similar to the advertising options on Instagram.

What makes Snapchat unique is the augmented reality lenses. AR lenses are sponsored by a business to create interactive moments that users can use and share with their friends.

It might be hard to believe, but in this example from Domino’s — even though you see the pizza, it’s not really there — that’s the AR lens at work.

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8. TikTok

One of the newer — and most popular — players in the social media advertising world is TikTok. TikTok is all about creating short, creative, and funny videos.

TikTok has exploded in the past few years and has reached 1.05 million monthly users.

Advertising options are mainly geared toward driving awareness.

Promoting TikTok videos allows brands to build awareness with a young target audience. Most posts you’ll see on TikTok aim to get laughs.

From a brand perspective, you’ll want to create funny videos that align with other content on the platform. Think of things like dance challenges and memes. This type of content is the most effective.

That said, let’s move on to paid search advertising.

Paid Search Advertising

People searching online are looking for something specific and will click on the first result they believe will be the most helpful to them.

You might be thinking: “I already appear in organic results on search engines. Why should I pay to advertise too?”

Well, there are three key reasons:

• On average, digitally prepared businesses anticipate four times better revenue than less prepared ones.
• Advertising on search engines protects you from the competition who may be advertising on your branded terms.
• Search ads appear first in the search engine results pages (SERPs) above the organic results.

Paid search advertising allows advertisers to capture the attention of their audience in a more targeted way than with organic search alone.

Search ads allow you to anticipate the wants, needs, and desires of your potential customers and serve ads to them that are highly contextual.

Over time, the analytics of your search ads can help you analyze and improve those ads to reach even more people.

But how does Google know how to deliver the right ad to the right person? That’s where keywords come into play.

Keywords

A keyword is one word or phrase that someone uses to describe what they need in search.

Advertising on search platforms takes the targeting capabilities available on social media platforms, like demographics and location, and layers it with the addition of keywords.

When a Google user types a query into the search field, Google returns a range of results that match the searcher’s intent.

Keywords align with what a searcher wants and will satisfy their query. You select keywords based on which queries you want to display your ad alongside.

Keyword research is just as important for paid ads as it is for organic search.

That’s because Google matches your ad with search queries based on the keywords you selected.

Each ad group you create within your campaign will target a small set of keywords, and Google will display your ad based on those selections.

Let’s say Mary is moving to a different house and is looking for a home mover. So she goes into Google and types “who are the best movers.”

By searching “best movers,” she’s going to see results for advertisers that targeted keywords like “moving companies” and “top-rated movers.”

Search engines also consider your intent when choosing the types of ads to display.

In the example above, search ads were the most helpful resource. But what if you’re looking for a location-based business, like a coffee shop?

In Google Maps, you might see “Promoted Pins” like these, shown in purple on the map and in the search results on the left. Promoted Pins are a great way for businesses to attract customers to their business based on

What if you’re looking to make a purchase? Well, Google might show you a different kind of post to match your intent, such as Shopping Post Ads.

In this example below, Google shows you shopping post ads for the keyword “buy snowboard.”

Since my query includes the word “buy,” Google knows that I’m interested in making a purchase, so I am shown ads for products I might be interested in.

So, how do you select your keywords?

Keywords typically fall under two categories: brand and non-brand.

A brand keyword is a word or phrase that includes a brand’s name or variations of a brand’s name. For example, some of HubSpot’s brand keywords include HubSpot, HubSpot Free CRM, and HubSpot Marketing Hub.

These are all variations of the HubSpot brand and the tools that we offer.

Non-brand keywords are all other relevant keywords that don’t include a brand’s name or variations of a brand’s name.

Some of HubSpot’s non-brand keywords include “inbound marketing,” “sales software,” and “customer relationship management.”

While these keywords are not part of HubSpot’s brand name, they are relevant terms that allow HubSpot to reach audiences interested in eventually making a purchase.

Brand and non-brand keywords play a role in your digital advertising strategy. Brand keywords help you protect your brand from your competitor’s ads.

If you don’t run ad campaigns for brand keywords, you’ll leave your business vulnerable to losing website traffic to the competition who is bidding on your brand keywords.

Non-brand keywords still have a role to play, too. Non-brand keywords allow you to reach new audiences unfamiliar with your brand.

Match Type

When it comes to when your ad is displayed, you don’t just want to pick a certain group of keywords and have the ad shown only when those keywords are entered into the search engine.

This is where match type comes in. Since there’s an infinite number of ways that people can actually search for one term, Google gives you three match types to choose from: exact match, phrase match, and broad match.

You can even use a broad match modifier and exclude negative keywords to optimize where your ads are delivered.

Let’s take a look at each match type:

• Exact match: A keyword set to exact match will only display your ad if the search term includes that exact keyword or a very close variation. Exact match keywords are surrounded in [brackets].
• Phrase match: A keyword set to phrase match will display your ad if the search term contains the same order of the words, but it can also contain additional words. Phrase match keywords are surrounded by “quotes.”
• Broad match: A keyword set to broad match displays your ad when the search term contains any or some combination or variations of the words in your keyword, in any order. Broad match keywords don’t include any symbols.
• Broad match modifier: The broad match modifier allows you to select keywords that must be included in the search query for your ad to be displayed. Keywords with a broad match modifier use a +plus sign.
• Negative keywords: Excludes your ads from being shown on searches with that term. Negative keywords include a -minus sign.

Google vs. Bing vs. Yahoo

There are a few advertising platforms out there for search, including Google, Bing, and Yahoo. But Google is by far the most used search engine out there.

Google processes more than 90,000 search queries each second. With Google leading the search engine market and accounting for 85.53% of the search engine market share, it makes sense for businesses to run Google Ads campaigns.

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But this doesn’t mean you should entirely rule out advertising on these other platforms.

In some cases, you can achieve impressive results with a smaller ad spend on Bing and Yahoo than you could on Google since there is less competition from advertisers.

My recommendation is to dig into your organic traffic to identify if Bing or Yahoo make up a significant amount of traffic for any given keywords or topics.

This might indicate that advertising for those keywords on Bing or Yahoo could be profitable.

Regardless of where you advertise, the good news is that advertising on all of these platforms more or less work and look the same. So knowing how to advertise on one will make advertising on the others easier.

Native Advertising

Publishers like BuzzFeed and The Dodo produce content that snowballs in popularity on social media almost daily.

And they make money by helping other brands do it, too. Brands will pay these publishers to craft posts and videos that follow the publishers’ formula for virality.

They also pay publishers to distribute this sponsored content to their massive audience through social media and their website.

This is native advertising.

Check out this example from Walmart. The retail giant partnered with BuzzFeed to create this advertisement about Walmart Essentials.

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When you pay for a publisher’s native advertising services, you’ll be able to leverage their editorial expertise and audience reach to help your brand tell captivating stories to a bigger and better viewership.

And each publisher is going to support different ad formats and creative types.

During the creative process, you’ll collaborate with publishers to craft sponsored content that covers one of their main topics and looks like a regular piece of content on the publisher’s website.

This way, even though your post is technically promotional, it won’t disrupt their audience’s browsing experience. They’ll enjoy reading your post and won’t feel like you or the publisher are advertising to them.

This exposes your work to a huge, engaged viewership and attracts new followers to your brand.

Native advertising creates a symbiotic relationship between publishers and brands. Publishers who do sponsored content right reap the benefits of another revenue stream and gain more audience trust if they promote a native ad from a trustworthy brand.

For brands, collaborating with prominent publishers can unleash unprecedented amounts of creativity to help them win over the publishers’ audience and boost engagement — as the click-through rate on native ads far exceeds traditional.

For example, T Brand Studio, the New York Times native ad business, crafted sponsored posts that captured as much engagement as some of nytimes.com’s highest-performing articles.

To find the optimal native advertising opportunities for your brand, try using StackAdapt or Nativo.

Display Advertising

Display ads are a controversial topic in the digital marketing community.

For almost 25 years, advertisers have abused them by tricking internet users into clicking misleading ads — some malicious display ads have even infected people’s computers with viruses.

It’s easy to see why people have developed banner blindness and can’t stop downloading ad blockers: display ads have the reputation of being intrusive, distracting, and irrelevant.

On the other side of the spectrum, though, display advertising technology has advanced to the point where ad networks can leverage data and machine learning to offer advertisers more effective targeting strategies and consumers more relevant ads.

Ad networks like Google Display Network and Facebook’s Audience Network are the leaders in the banner ad renaissance.

They can display your ads to the right target audience at the right place and time.

And if you want more control of your advertising, they’ll let you decide where to place your ads. Below, we’ll cover each ad network’s features and targeting capabilities.

1. Google Display Network

When you use Google’s Display Network, you can design visually appealing ads and place them on over two million websites and apps, YouTube, and Gmail.

You can also build new audiences by targeting people who are most likely to be interested in your product or service and remarket website visitors just by importing a list of their contact information.

If you don’t want to build out your ideal audience or deal with bidding, you can let Google Ads do it for you. Its automated targeting and bidding features can identify your highest-converting audience for the best return on investment.

Display ads can be most effective when retargeting an audience that’s already familiar with your brand.

Here’s an example of a display ad on Yahoo News:

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2. Facebook’s Audience Network

With Facebook’s Audience Network, brands can expand their Facebook ad campaigns and use the same targeting data they use on the platform to advertise on a huge collection of websites and apps.

Brands can place native ads, banner ads, full-screen ads, in-stream video ads, and rewarded video ads (for example, “Watch this video ad to get more tokens!”) on the network’s websites and apps that their Facebook audience frequently visits.

This type of advertising can be particularly effective for mobile games, like in the example below from 5agame, who was able to attribute 80% of their revenue through their rewarded video.

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If you want to continue leveling up your ads training, check out HubSpot Academy’s free course on the Digital Advertising Training Course.

Getting Started

In today’s digital work, having the right online advertising strategy is essential for every business.

Now that you know about all of the digital ad types that are available, the next step is to learn how to leverage the right ads for your business to achieve your goals.

Start building a strategy today, so you can increase your revenue tomorrow.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in April 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Can AI write a better subject line than an actual person? Probably. Brands like JOANN have had a 10% increase in email open rates, all thanks to AI.

Unless you’re an expert email marketer, coming up with brilliant subject lines every time can be tough. This is especially true if you’re sending personalized emails multiple times per week.

Plus, you may need to write several subject lines and run split tests to find the best. This is time-consuming!

This post will explore how AI works with email subject lines and why you should get inspiration from AI when writing email subject lines. You’ll also learn about some of the best AI email subject line generators.

How AI Works With Email Subject Lines

Many AI technologies are still in their infancy. They look good on paper but haven’t reached their potential. That said, there are other AI content generators that have advanced rapidly to become game-changers.

It’s this second group that is driving the AI explosion we’re seeing today. Two technologies, in particular, have driven AI progress:

1. Natural language processing (NLP)
2. Natural language generation (NLG)

NLP is when a machine “reads” text. It turns that text into code a machine system can then interpret. NLG is when a machine uses that code to generate its own words.

These technologies are found in AI-powered marketing tools like Acrolinx, which uses NLP to assess your content and recommend improvements. One other major use case enabled by NLP and NLG is, you guessed it, writing email subject lines.

Besides saving time, another benefit of AI tools is that developers train them on email engagement using a large amount of data.

These data are based on email best practices, enabling the AI tools to create bias-free subject lines that could cause high open rates.

As Parry Malm puts it, “When humans make choices, they inject their own experience, thoughts and beliefs.” This can cause bias and make us opt for subject lines that may not be the best.

But AI is free of bias, and it’s trained using clean data. “AI output is based on pattern matching, which is invisible to the human eye and devoid of cognitive biases that lead to poor decisions,” Parry adds.

Now, let’s explore some of the best AI tools for generating email subject lines.

4 AI Tools for Generating Email Subject Lines

I tried most of the AI email subject line generators and barely found those that made the cut. Some of the output didn’t follow best practices, as the subject lines were long.

Below are four of what I consider the best AI email subject line generators in 2023.

1. HubSpot AI Email Writer

Get started with HubSpot AI Email Writer

HubSpot’s AI Email Writer enables you to automate email copywriting for sales outreach, email marketing, and more. It is versatile, allowing you to generate email copy for diverse audience segments by prompting it to write in different tones.

You can select from email marketing templates and use the slash and highlight commands to come up with emails that suit your needs. 

Furthermore, HubSpot’s AI Email Writer conveniently integrates with the HubSpot CRM to to automatically log conversations and contacts.

Pricing: Free.

2. Persado

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Best for: Enterprise companies

Persado is an AI platform that allows users to personalize communications at scale and inspire an audience to engage and act.

The brand has $66 million in funding and offers AI email subject line writing, in addition to automatic social media and language generation for enterprise marketing.

One reviewer, who is a senior email marketing and analytics specialist, says:

“We’ve seen a strong increase in open rates with Persado, and we’ve been able to learn about our audience. Persado categorizes subject lines by emotion, provides insights on the language that motivates your audience, and removes the pain of writing high-volume subject lines.”

Pricing: Pricing is available upon request.

3. Phrasee

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Best for: Mid-size and enterprise companies

Phrasee uses AI to create email subject lines, write email copy, and generate email CTAs. You feed it email data, and it analyzes the data to learn what works.

It generates optimized subject lines that can perform better than human-generated ones. And it uses what it learns from your emails to stay consistent with your brand.

In one case study, Phrasee helped Virgin Holidays increase their open rates by 2%. That may not sound like much, but it was worth millions of new revenue. The tool also streamlined a process that used to take weeks — today, it takes seconds.

Pricing: Phrasee’s pricing starts at $500 per month, billed annually. To access enterprise features, you’d have to contact Phrasee’s sales team for a quote.

4. ChatGPT

Best For: Individuals and companies seeking a free AI tool

There’s a good chance you’ve heard about ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a free AI tool that provides the best responses based on the quality of your prompts.

When using ChatGPT, it’s a good idea to not just tell it to create a subject line. Include the email you want to send and ask it to create subject lines for that email.

Here are two examples of prompts you can use to get subject lines:

• “Create 10 subject lines based on the email below. Each subject line should include a potential percentage of its chance of getting opened. Here’s the email…”
• “Write 10 email subject lines for the email below. Each subject line should end in a question and have one emoji that shows curiosity.”
• “Write 10 email subject lines for the email below. Each subject line should contain seven words or fewer and end with a question mark.”

Pro Tip: To get the most from ChatGPT, you have to be ultra-specific with your prompts.

Leveraging AI Email Subject Line Generators

One of the beautiful elements of AI is that it operates with little human involvement. At HubSpot, we see value in this.

That’s why we’re developing HubSpot AI — a content assistant and ChatSpot for generating email subject lines and even creating emails from scratch.

Get Started with HubSpot’s Content Assistant

It’s hoped that tools like this will ensure we don’t stay married to our creative ideas.

See, humans aren’t that great at writing and split-testing emails, creating social media content, writing headlines, and picking the best subject lines based on the data.

Heck, we sometimes do these wrong. Here, AI is better equipped than us for this task. It excels at analyzing vast volumes of data and extracts insights from that data.

For instance, Phrasee routinely uses 100,000+ emails as a dataset. That’s a lot!

So, often, AI can write email subject lines better (and faster) than humans. That’s good news because it improves your marketing.

Instead of drowning in data and having little time or budget to maximize performance, marketers can use AI to automate and augment their processes. They both improve performance and free you up to do higher-value tasks.

In a lot of cases, this is a win-win scenario. Marketers get better results and do more of what benefits their brand most (which also is the most interesting stuff anyway).

This is why marketers need to experiment with AI. Understand the tools out there and know what they can do for you.

AI in marketing right now has a “first-mover advantage.” Let’s say I start using a tool like Phrasee to write my email subject lines.

I improve my performance almost immediately. I reinvest hours each week into building better campaigns in every area of our marketing.

And, I collect more and more data on what subject lines work best, improving performance even more. It’s a virtuous cycle. A flywheel that spins faster and faster the longer you stick with it.

In other words, the advantages of using AI correctly compound over time. It’s hard to catch competitors with a sizable head start. Someday, that may change.

But right now, marketing AI is skyrocketing. Brands using it possess an outsized advantage over those that don’t.

The Possibilities of AI

No matter what type of marketing you do, one thing is clear: You need to explore AI’s possibilities. These tools can help you write the best email headline and improve the copy within.

As a marketer, I make crucial daily decisions that can impact the company I work for. Using my best judgment, I track important metrics like traffic, leads, and customers — and I provide a marketing report to back up my decisions.

While the above metrics are crucial to my marketing funnel and flywheel, a marketing report helps me further explore my findings and properly analyze the data to make the best decisions I can for my team and company.

Marketing reports aren‘t just vital for my work, they’re key to any marketer looking to do what‘s right for their organization. In this article, we’ll explore what a marketing report is and how to build one, and we’ll spotlight some examples.

Marketing Reporting

Marketing Reporting Examples

How to Create a Marketing Report

Create Your Marketing Report Today

Marketing reports vary depending on what data you’re reviewing and the purpose of each report. They can assess where your traffic and leads are coming from, what content they interacted with, if and when they converted, and how long it took to become a customer.

Take our free, 20-minute HubSpot Academy course on marketing reporting to measure success and optimize your efforts.

To reiterate: Marketing reports inform decisions.

You wouldn’t run a marketing report to review data performance or check on an ongoing goal — for these purposes, you’d glance at your marketing dashboards.

Look at it this way. Compiling a marketing report for knowledge’s sake is synonymous with scheduling a meeting to review a project. Who wants to attend a 30-minute session to review what could’ve been shared via email? Not me.

The same goes for marketing reporting. Reports should help you decide or come to an important conclusion — similar to how a meeting would help your team deliberate about a project or choose between project resources.

In short, marketing reporting is a precious process if used and crafted correctly.

Marketing Reporting Examples

There are hundreds of reports that you can run to dig into your marketing efforts. At this point, however, you’re likely asking, “Where should I start?“ and ”What are those basic marketing reports I can run to get more comfortable with all the data I’ve been tracking?”.

We’ve pulled together these five marketing reporting examples to get started.

You will need some marketing software (like HubSpot Marketing Hub) to do this. You should also ensure your software allows you to export the data from your software and manipulate it in Excel using pivot tables and other functions.

This free guide and video will teach you how to create an Excel graph, make pivot tables, and use VLOOKUPS and IF functions.

Since we use HubSpot for our reporting needs, I’ll show you how to compile these reports using the Marketing Hub tool. (The data below is sample data only and does not represent actual HubSpot marketing data.)

1. Multi-Touch Revenue Marketing Report

As a marketer, you’re a big part of your company’s growth. But unless you can directly tie your impact to revenue, you’ll be forever underappreciated and under-resourced. Multi-touch revenue attribution connects closed gain to every marketing interaction — from the first page view to the final nurturing email.

That way, marketers get the credit they deserve, and marketing execs make more innovative investments rooted in business value instead of vanity metrics. As a bonus, multi-touch revenue attribution can help you stay aligned with your sales team.

HubSpot customers can create multi-touch attribution reports quickly; HubSpot’s attribution tool is built for real people, not data scientists. (It also connects every customer interaction to revenue automatically.)

Navigate to your dashboard and click Add Report > Attribution Report. Select from the set of pre-baked best-practice templates, or create your own custom report.

How to Analyze Revenue Reporting

To analyze revenue reporting, determine what’s working and double down on it. Look at the revenue results from different channels and see where you most succeeded. Use this information to decide what marketing efforts to invest in moving forward.

For example, if you notice that your Facebook campaigns drove a ton of revenue, run more Facebook campaigns!

Multi-touch attribution reports should be run monthly to understand the broader business impact of your marketing channels. While revenue is necessary, you should dig into some of your other metrics for a more complete picture.

2. Channel-Specific Traffic Marketing Report

Understanding where your traffic comes from will help you make strategic decisions as you invest in different marketing channels. You should invest more resources if you see strong performance from one source.

On the other hand, you can invest in some of the weaker channels to get them on pace with some of your other channels. Whatever you decide, source data will help you figure that out.

HubSpot customers can use the Traffic Analytics report (under Reports > Analytics tools in your navigation) to break down traffic by source.

Want to get an even deeper understanding of your traffic patterns? Break down your traffic by geography. (Example: Which sources bring in the most traffic in Brazil?) You can also examine subsets of your website (like your blog vs. your product pages).

How to Analyze Channel-Specific Traffic

Take a look at what channels are performing well. Based on your goals, that could mean looking at the visitor data or focusing on the visit-to-lead and lead-to-customer conversion rates. Here are a couple of different ways to think about your data:

• Suppose you get a lot of traffic from a particular channel, but the channel is not necessarily helping your visitors move down the funnel. In that case, it may mean investing more in other channels or optimizing that underperforming channel for conversion.
• Think about how you can invest resources in your most robust channels. Did you run a campaign that helped the channel perform well? Was there a piece of content you created that set it off? Consider how you can replicate your past success.
• If you have yet to work on a particular channel, it could be an excellent time to test it. Think about how you can incorporate multiple channels into the same campaign.

Pulling this data weekly will allow you to stay up-to-date on how the channels perform. If a channel takes a turn for the worse, you’ll have enough time to remedy the situation before it gets out of control or you waste resources.

Pulling the report daily may be a bit overboard since some channels take multiple days to be effective, and pulling it monthly would prevent you from responding with agility — so weekly data is ideal.

3. Blog Posts by Conversion Marketing Report

Blogs have become a marketer’s best friend. There’s a direct correlation between how often a company blogs and how many leads it generates (not just the amount of traffic it drives). So, you must monitor how well your blog is helping you grow that critical metric.

Reporting on your blog leads is a quick way to see how many leads you generate daily, weekly, or monthly — and by what channel.

This report is a great way to understand the channels most vital for your blog, where you should spend more promotion time, and how well your content performs over time.

If you’re using HubSpot, creating a blog leads report is accessible. Navigate to Add Report from any of your dashboards, and choose Top blog posts by contact conversion. This report shows the posts most often seen by contacts immediately before filling out a form on your website.

How to Analyze Blog Posts by Conversion

Look at how many leads you’re generating from your blog over time. If you see spikes in leads, you know to dig into your content to see if specific topics are more successful at generating leads than others.

The more you can run these reports to determine what works and what doesn’t, the better off your marketing and blogging will be.

This data type should be pulled monthly to ensure you write the most relevant content over time.

4. New Contacts by Persona Marketing Report

Every marketer needs to be well-versed in their buyer personas — but you need to do more than just understand them. It‘s essential to track how many new contacts you’re adding to your database based on each persona.

This will help you determine how accurate your buyer personas are and how successful your marketing is in targeting and reaching them.

To report on this in HubSpot, plot your contacts by Create date, showing the date you added a new contact to your database. Then, break down your report by persona.

How to Analyze New Contacts by Persona

Did you run a marketing campaign around a particular topic? Did you focus on promoting your content through specific channels? What did you do that led to an increase or decrease in persona acquisition?

Digging into this report can help you allocate resources more wisely to grow different business segments.

Pulling this report monthly can give you insight into how your campaigns affect new contacts by persona — and might even shed light on an imbalance in resources dedicated to specific personas.

5. Lifecycle Stage Funnel Marketing Report

Another way to segment your contact database is to look at their appearance by lifecycle stage. This will give you a sense of how many leads, subscribers, customers, and opportunities you have in your database in a certain period.

This data will help you understand if you need to generate more leads or focus more on closing your current leads. It will also give you a general understanding of the quality of your contact database.

As a HubSpot customer, create a funnel report by clicking Add Report from any dashboard then choosing the Funnels category. Pick which stages to include, select your visualization, and you’re off and running.

How to Analyze a Lifecycle Stage Funnel

This report will give you an overview of how your leads progress through the buying process. Use this report to see what areas of your funnel you must address for greater efficiency.

For example, update and optimize your nurturing program if your report shows that you’re generating leads but not converting any to MQLs. Pulling monthly funnel reports can help you stay on top of the efficiency of your marketing process.

6. Email Marketing Report

When I want to assess my email marketing campaign, I take a look at the following KPIs:

• Number of emails sent
• Click rate
• Unique open rate
• Overall campaign performance

These metrics allow me to analyze the effectiveness of my campaigns by showing me what kind of content performs best in email channels.

7. Social Media Marketing Report

To track the performance of your social media channels, your social marketing report needs to include target audience demographics, likes, followers, engagement, reach, impressions, and your top-performing posts.

Knowing your target audience demographics helps you to better understand the kind of content that would be helpful to them.

For example, if your target audience demographics consist of first-time business owners who are new to marketing, you’ll want to create social media content media content best suited to beginners.

Likes, comments, and overall engagement help you fine-tune your social media campaign by showing you which content your current audience prefers.

Furthermore, you‘ll need to track these metrics for each of your organization’s social media accounts, such as Facebook, Instagram, X, and more.

8. SEO Marketing Report

I always include the following in my SEO marketing reports:

• Keyword rankings
• Organic sessions
• Organic landing pages
• Organic conversions

These metrics show how well certain keywords are working to rank your content in SERPs, so you and your team will know which words to rank keep ranking for and if there are any changes in SERP algorithms you need to be aware of.

9. E-commerce Marketing Report

E-commerce marketing occurs over various marketing channels, including social media and Google Analytics. Key metrics you must track are:

• Bounce rate
• Conversion rate
• Transactions
• Pages per session
• Average order value
• Revenue

How to Create a Marketing Report

As I said, you can run many different marketing reports.

This section won’t focus on what specific data to put into your marketing report — that will depend on what type you decide to run. Remember, that process is a bit different if you’re building a marketing dashboard.

Let’s discuss how to build marketing reports that inform your decisions and benefit your audience, whether your team, CEO, or customers.

Featured Tool: Marketing Reporting Templates [Download for Free]

Most of your marketing reports will contain a few of the same elements:

• Title: What is your marketing report analyzing? Whether you’re running a report on campaign performance, quarterly blog performance, or monthly leads, be sure to title your report so the intent is clear. I found this to be especially important if I share my report with people outside of marketing.
• Reporting period: Your marketing report should reflect a certain time period. This period can be a few days, months, or even years. I notice analyzing my data within a time period allows me to compare performance to past periods.
• Summary: Your report summary should reflect the key points of your report, including your wins, losses, and goals for the next reporting period. It’s basically the TL;DR of your report.

Next, let’s dive into the report specifics. Valuable, insightful marketing reports recognize two distinct components: purpose and audience.

What’s the purpose of your marketing report?

A marketing report should help you make a decision. Choosing the content of your marketing report (i.e., the data you’re analyzing) is simple; however, it’s how you will use this data to make a decision or draw a more difficult conclusion.

This is true for two reasons:

1. Marketing reporting is often performed to review data, which is simply a waste of time.
2. Data points can be used to draw multiple conclusions or make numerous decisions, so you should know precisely how to use the data before removing it.

You should determine the goal of your marketing report before you pull any data. Once you make this impending decision, list all the data that might be relevant. From there, you’ll better understand what reports to run and how to use said data.

Who’s the audience for your marketing report?

Marketing reports are precious because they can inform so many different decisions — decisions made by a wide variety of people across your organization.

Whether you’re delivering a marketing report to your team lead, department manager, or CEO, your marketing report must be tailored to whoever may be reading and using it.

Here are a few ways to do this:

• Ask your audience what they need. If you know the decisions your audience needs to make, you’ll know what data to pull and analyze. I often find knowing this information helps me avoid running reports my audience doesn’t care about.
• Speak in their language. Marketing involves a lot of acronyms and jargon. When giving reports, I sometimes notice my team members understand what I’m saying, but my executive team and co-workers outside marketing may not be fluent. So, believe me when I say consider your audience when writing your marketing report and choose words and descriptions they’ll understand.

• Don’t mix audiences. Creating separate accounts for separate audiences is best if you create a marketing report for a mixed audience. For example, I wouldn’t make the same report to give my CEO and Marketing co-workers; I’d likely break this into two reports with different data and jargon. This will allow my audience to focus on the data and analysis that’s most relevant to them.

Marketing reporting can take up much of your time (and waste some, too). Here are some best practices to help you work smarter, not harder.

1. Schedule your marketing reports.

Whether you create a recurring reminder on your calendar or set your reports to run automatically, schedule your marketing reports beforehand. This will take the guesswork out of when to run your reports and when to send them to the relevant audiences.

Schedule daily, weekly, or monthly reports and send them directly to your team’s inboxes with the HubSpot Marketing Hub Reporting add-on.

2. Collect feedback from your audience.

As you send out your marketing reports, ask for feedback from your audience. Whether you ask an open-ended question like, “How did this report help you?” or provide a short Google Form, gathering feedback from those using your reports can help you improve them in the future.

3. Create marketing report templates.

If your marketing report will be designed the same way each time you send it out, consider turning it into a template. This will save you time and energy building each template and provide a reliable, predictable report design for your audience to read.

These free monthly marketing templates make your monthly reporting faster and easier.

4. Put your most valuable data first.

Long marketing reports are acceptable as long as all the data you include is valuable and helpful for whatever decision you or your team need to make. However, you should place the most impactful data first so your audience can stop reading once they decide.

Nobody wants to read an entire report only to utilize the final page.

5. Visualize your data as much as possible.

When possible, include visual data in your marketing reports. Not only does this help your reports pack a more significant punch with your coworkers and executives, but it trims down the time and effort needed to digest your data.

To do this, include charts from Excel or screenshots from your reporting tools (like HubSpot Marketing Hub). You can also use heat maps if you’re reporting on website performance.

Create Your Marketing Report Today

Marketing reporting is a vital part of your marketing efforts and the growth of your business. By understanding how efficient and effective your marketing is, you can better allocate time, resources, and money — and make well-informed decisions.

Start with these marketing reporting examples and expand your reporting as you utilize more data.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in April 2014 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

World events and economic conditions impact how each generation behaves as consumers and business owners.

A decade ago, millennial consumers were constantly making headlines for “killing” certain products. From a business standpoint, millennial entrepreneurs in the 2010s saw notable success marked by increased access to venture capital and early adoption of social media to acquire customers.

Now, as interest rates are higher, venture capital funds are harder to come by, and privacy laws have made paid customer acquisition on social media more challenging, Gen Z entrepreneurs are following a different playbook when it comes to building their businesses.

Per The Business of Fashion, Gen Z businesses are differentiating themselves from their millennial counterparts by creating super-niche products. This route requires less capital and calls for slower, more sustainable growth.

To better understand the ins and outs of Gen Z entrepreneurship, we’re doing a deep dive into a uniquely Gen Z business: Chamberlain Coffee.

Founded by popular YouTube creator Emma Chamberlain in 2020, Chamberlain Coffee has become a cult favorite among young coffee drinkers. The brand launched offering whole bean coffee and has expanded to sell cold brew packets, matcha, chai, ready-to-drink coffees, and branded merch including a milk frother and mugs.

What Makes Chamberlain Coffee Uniquely Gen Z

So what makes Chamberlain Coffee distinctly Gen Z compared to other beverage brands?

Natural Connection to Chamberlain’s Content

Not all brands founded by popular creators succeed, but Chamberlain Coffee is off to a strong start.

As a creator, Chamberlain got her start sharing videos of her daily life which frequently included her drinking cold brew coffee, so the launch of Chamberlain Coffee felt like a natural extension of her personal brand.

Her love of cold brew aligns with her generation’s coffee consumption habits — Gen Z is more likely to opt for iced coffee than older generations. Chamberlain Coffee’s at-home cold brew options make sense for the brand’s target audience.

A Clear Omnichannel Strategy

The 2010s saw many emerging brands opt for an exclusively direct-to-consumer model backed by high VC dollars. Chamberlain Coffee, like other Gen Z-led brands, has opted for a deliberate omnichannel in the company’s early stages.

While the brand was initially only available through the company website, it can now be found at retailers including Sprouts, Target, and Walmart which allows for greater accessibility and various points of customer acquisition.

Partnerships and Collaborations

Chamberlain Coffee has also leaned into partnerships and collaborations with other brands to drive name recognition. Last year, the brand teamed up with Swoon to launch a specialty line of matcha lemonade drinks.

This fall, Chamberlain Coffee partnered with ready-to-eat cookie dough brand Deux to create co-branded coffee donut holes and took over a Los Angeles coffee shop to generate excitement about the launch.

The brand has even tapped into the beauty space, collaborating with IGK to create matcha dry shampoo.

Chamberlain Coffee sits at the intersection of Gen Z business and the creator economy, and its continued business trajectory will be fascinating to watch.

Good news: Spotify is a go-to destination for podcasts, with 32.5 million listeners per month.

Even better news: Spotify for Podcasters makes it easy to start a podcast and reach those listeners — no fancy equipment or advanced skills required. And, once you’ve started your show, you can find different ways to promote and market your podcasts to maximize your reach.

Here, we’ll cover everything you need to know about podcasting on Spotify, and how to upload your next episode to the platform, and hear from seasoned podcasters about their thoughts on the platform.

Table of Contents

• What is Spotify Podcasts?
  • How RSS Feeds Work on Spotify
• How to Meet Spotify’s Podcast Requirements
• How to Start a Podcast on Spotify
• Switch to Spotify for Podcasters
• Spotify for Podcasters: Expert Insight

Using it gives you access to multiple features for growing your show, engaging with audiences, and monetizing your content. Some stand-out features include:

• In-depth show and episode analytics
• Monetization tools
• In-app or platform recording and editing
• Q&A or polls to share with audiences to build engagement
• “Video episodes” for a unique watching experience for fans

You can either use Spotify for Podcasts as your hosting platform or upload your episodes to Spotify with an RSS feed from your existing host.

How RSS Feeds Work on Spotify

An RSS feed is a unique ID card for your podcast. You can think of it as a house address, and, like a house address, there is only one RSS feed per podcast.

Every host gives you a code that you can copy and paste into different directories to share your episodes on other platforms, like from Apple Podcasts (host) to Spotify. RSS feeds update automatically, so you won’t have to share your link with other distributors more than once.

How to Meet Spotify’s Podcast Requirements

The first step to starting a podcast on Spotify is making sure you meet its podcast requirements. Here’s a quick rundown.

Your podcast should have:

• A title along with relevant details (i.e., category and primary language).
• Cover art in a 1:1 ratio and PNG, JPEG, or TIFF format. The higher the resolution, the better.
• A high bitrate MP3 format (128 kbps+) or MP4 with AAC-LC.
• Episodes that do not exceed 12 hours.

Once you meet the conditions in this checklist, you’re officially ready to upload your podcast to Spotify. Check out the steps below.

1. Create a Spotify for Podcasters account.

Unsurprisingly, you’ll need a Spotify for Podcasters account to upload your podcast to the platform. You can use this form to sign up and select either “I want to start a podcast” or “I have a podcast.”

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If you click the first option, log in with your existing Spotify account or create a new one. If you select the second option, select your current podcast host from the list and claim your show by adding your RSS feed and entering a verification code you get over email.

If you already have a podcast but want to switch to Spotify, follow the steps outlined here.

2. Add information about your podcast.

Once you set up your account, you’ll add information about your podcast, including:

• Podcast name
• Description
• Cover art
• Category
• Language
• Content type (clean or explicit)

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3. Upload your files.

If you already have a podcast, you can upload existing audio or video episodes or create and edit an episode within the Spotify for Podcasters platform.

To upload an episode ready to be published, click Quick Upload and upload an audio or video file. If creating from scratch, click Create an episode.

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When creating an episode within the platform, you’ll land on a dashboard that lets you record or upload audio, add files you’ve previously uploaded to your library, and edit and add effects.

The drag-and-drop builder is an easy way to build all of your episodes, and you can preview it as many times as you’d like during your editing process.

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4. Add episode information.

Once you’re ready to publish, add an episode title, description, and publishing timeline. You can also note if the episode is part of a series, the type of episode, and whether the content is clean or explicit.

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5. Share your podcast on other directories.

Once published, your podcast will be available to Spotify users globally. You’ll need to use your RSS feed link to share it on other platforms. On podcasters.spotify.com:

Click Settings, then Podcast Availability, then click RSS Distribution to get your unique link to paste in the designated distribution spot on other directories.

Switch to Spotify for Podcasts Hosting

If you already have a podcast host but want to switch to Spotify for Podcasts, the process is relatively easy and you won’t lose your existing episodes or profiles on other platforms. It’s a three step process:

1. Go to Spotify for Podcasters switching page and use the search field to enter your unique RSS link or your podcast name.

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1. Sign up for a Spotify for Podcasters account or import your podcast into an existing account.
2. Redirect your RSS feed so it points to your new Spotify URL. The exact process for this final step varies by hosting provider, so it’s a best practice to follow their unique steps.

Once you’ve migrated successfully, you can use the platform for all it offers and upload audio or video or create a new episode with its built-in features.

Spotify for Podcasters: Expert Insight

I know that there are multiple podcast hosting platforms available, but I wanted to know what Spotify for Podcasts’ current users think, so I spoke to some experts.

Troy Sandidge, host of iDigress Podcast, says “Spotify for Podcasts provides a plethora of creative tools and features to share your podcast episodes.”

Sandidge says the platform is especially useful for minority-led podcasters: “They [Spotify for Podcasters] have programs like the “Making Space” initiative that literally helps podcasters find free places where they can record episodes. That is by far such a phenomenal way to make things more accessible for those who may not have the same financial ability to start, but this provides an equity pathway for more creatives to proceed.”

Al and Leanne Elliot, hosts of Truth, Lies, and Workplace Culture, also use the platform: “We’ve had Spotify as part of our Podcast Distribution mix since the beginning of Truth Lies & Work podcast, and although it’s no ‘silver bullet’ for podcast reach, we’ve seen huge advantages to using it.”

They say, “[Spotify for Podcasts] continues to unveil new features that help podcast creators and encourage listeners to swap to the platform from more established apps. This proactive approach suggests a bright future for podcast distribution.”

Some of the benefits they call out are the analytics (they say it offers sharper insight compared to platforms like Apple Podcasts), the development team’s openness to receiving feedback and ideas, and a simplified monetization process for integrating paid placements or ads.

Sandidge says, “From programs to community research and more, they [Spotify for Podcasters] are working to provide a fully streamlined turnkey solution coupled with training and opportunities to help creatives elevate and grow.”

However, as with all tools, there are always potential pitfalls. The Elliots call out a few:

• The podcast category is a relatively new addition, so gaining visibility in search results can take some time. But the advanced algorithm means there’s a good chance your listeners will find you in some way.
• Spotify isn’t always clear about how new features work. The Elliots say the Q&A panel is a unique feature, but they haven’t figured out where the responses appear.

Back to You

In five easy steps, you can share your podcast on one of the biggest podcasting platforms today. Once your podcast goes live, remember to share it far and wide. Make this a regular practice with each episode to boost your listenership.

Google Ads is one of the most effective advertising tools to get more traffic to your website, and generate more leads. In fact, it’s estimated that for every $1 a business spends on an ad, generate $8 in profits.

To create better, more powerful ads on Google, it can be helpful to receive a Google Ads certificate. Additionally, it’s a great resume booster.

If you want a Google Ads certificate, you’ve come to the right place. Here, we‘ve created a guide that’ll explain why a Google Ads certification is helpful, and how you can prepare and get certified. And if you’re in a pinch, jump right to the information you need.

• What is a Google Adwords certification?
• Google Ads Certification Benefits
• How to Get Google Ads Certification
• Tips for Taking the Google Adwords Exam

Acquiring it demonstrates a strong understanding of the Google Ads platform and can enhance career prospects in digital marketing.

Why get a Google Ads certification?

Years ago when I was applying for work, I interviewed a couple dozen people who worked in the digital marketing industry to learn about their jobs and the application process. Many emphasized the importance of getting a digital marketing certificate and in particular Google Ads certification.

The truth is that many employers search for people with this certification on LinkedIn to find employees for their marketing team. Plus, the demand for marketers skilled in Google Ads is high, while the supply of qualifying candidates is relatively low.

To find qualified employees, then, many hiring managers use LinkedIn‘s search engine to find anyone with a Google Ads certification because it’s one of the few defining qualifications that can show proven knowledge and skill. The certification shows the hiring manager that you’re somewhat savvy about the industry.

Additionally, having an understanding of neighboring areas of marketing helps with your communication among team members, and empathy. Ultimately, having that certification under your tool belt will only make you look better to employers.

How to Get Google Adwords Certification

1. Get started in Google Skillshop.

Accessible via Google Skillshop, the home for all e-learning courses offered by Google product experts, professionals can access the materials to earn this certification.

Log in to your preferred email address, preferably one tied to your LinkedIn or business account to keep them all in one place.

2. Select the Google Ads certification.

Explore the topics that Skillshop has to offer or search for the “Google Ads” topic.

Click the Google Ads certification and choose the exact exam you wish to take for your career goals. There are broad exams you can choose but Google also offers:

• Google Ads Search Professional Certification
• AI-Powered Performance Ads Certification
• Google Ads Creative Certification
• Google Ads Search Certification

3. Prepare for the exam.

To better prepare yourself, familiarize yourself with the topics, take notes, and set aside the time necessary to naivagate that information.

Google Ads Exam Topics

There are Google Ads certifications for different topics, including video, mobile, display, and shopping advertising. The most important version is the search advertising exam since that’s the area marketers use most often on the platform. The second most applicable Google Ads test for marketers is likely Google Ads display certification.

Google Ads Certification Exam Duration

Each exam has a different time limit, but it‘s usually between 60 minutes and two hours. I’ve got a good sense for how long it actually takes since I‘ve sat in a classroom with a dozen people taking the exam and have seen how quickly people finish. It usually takes 50–75% of the allotted time. A small percentage of people will use up to all the time if they’re new or focused on learning from each question.

4. Pass the assessment and display your badge.

Google Ads Certification Badge

Once you‘ve passed the exam, you get a certification badge that you can show off on your LinkedIn profile. Adding this badge to your profile adds credibility and makes your profile more search-engine friendly. As mentioned, recruiters look for this certification and care about it, so you’ll be showing up more often when they search.

Google Adwords Exam Tips

1. Take notes.

Have printed notes on hand that you can consult quickly whenever you forget minor details here and there (don’t expect to rely on these for the entire exam, though). These notes are useful in case Google decides to implement restrictive browsing limits for exam takers in the future.

2. Plan for plenty of battery.

Make sure your computer is plugged in so it doesn‘t run out of battery life while you’re taking the exam. This tip may seem obvious, but you don’t want to find yourself in that painful situation.

3. Pace yourself, while answering.

Take your time with each question. Most people end up with extra time. Remember — it‘s a marathon, not a sprint. You’ll be answering multiple-choice questions for at least an hour.

4. Practice self-care, pre-test.

Hydrate. Get enough sleep. Some people overlook simple things, like making sure you have enough water and food before the exam, which can affect brain performance. Foods high in omega-3 are great for brain power.

Ultimately, getting a Google Ads certification is a worthwhile investment for your career growth. Digital marketing employers look for any valid evidence that you’re above entry-level applicants.

5. Don’t rush through without understanding the topics.

While it‘s possible to pass the exam without understanding many of the principles, you’ll be doing yourself a disservice in the long run. Treat the exam as a learning process and an opportunity to shore up your knowledge and application of PPC terms and methodology because it’ll help you during the job interview, and in your career.

You don’t have to know everything about Google Ads since real-world experience can help you learn. But the knowledge you gain in preparing for this exam will give you a head start.

Build Your Knowledge with the Google Ads Certification

Treat the Google Ads exam as an opportunity to learn rather than a task to check-off a list. Your mindset shift will make all the difference because you’ll be learning from every question asked, while others rush through the exam just to finish it.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published January 2023 and has since been updated for comprehensiveness.

Part of my marketing job is to send emails and track their progress, so I know a lot about the most crucial elements of optimizing an email, common marketing email mistakes, and what inspirational email marketing looks like.

But at the end of the day, it doesn‘t matter how optimized my emails are if I can’t properly track my email analytics or if I’m unsure what metrics need my attention.

Fortunately, my experience sending email marketing materials, such as newsletters, has given me a wealth of knowledge I’m happy to pass on to other marketers and business owners.

Let’s explore eight crucial metrics and KPIs you should be tracking to assess the effectiveness of your email efforts.

1. Clickthrough Rate

Clickthrough rate (CTR) is likely the first answer you’ll get when you ask an email marketer what metrics they track.

In fact, I surveyed 190 marketers and found that the majority (33%) rank clickthrough rate among the top two metrics they track when sending and reporting marketing emails.

Your clickthrough rate is the percentage of email recipients who clicked on one or more links in a given email.

The formula I and other marketers use to calculate this metric is dividing total or unique clicks by the number of delivered emails. I then multiply that answer by 100.

Here’s how the formula looks:

(Total clicks OR unique clicks ÷ Number of delivered emails) * 100

For example, let’s say I sent out 10,000 delivered emails that amassed a total of 500 clicks. I would divide the 500 total clicks by the 10,000 delivered emails and multiply the answer by 100, yielding a 5% clickthrough rate.

The math would look like this:

500 total clicks ÷ 10,000 delivered emails * 100 = 5% clickthrough rate

Pro Tip: Using total or unique clicks in the calculation above works, as long as you consistently use the same approach.

I like to call CTR the “day-to-day” email marketing metric because it lets you quickly calculate performance for every email you send. From there, you can track how your CTR changes over time.

CTR is also frequently used for determining the results of A/B tests, as these tests are often designed to find new ways to get more clicks in your emails.

How valuable is a clickthrough rate?

In my experience, CTR is a crucial metric for all email marketers to track, as it gives direct insight into how many people on an email list are engaging with the content and interested in learning more about a brand or offer.

Read this blog post to know what a “good” clickthrough rate is, according to industry benchmarks. HubSpot customers can click here to learn how to set up click tracking in your emails using HubSpot quickly.

2. Open Rate

This is the percentage of email recipients who open a given email.

31% of marketers in our survey listed open rate among the top two metrics they track when sending and reporting marketing emails, placing it right behind clickthrough rate.

Most email marketers are still bent over backward, trying to optimize their subject lines for higher open rates.

While this can have a positive impact — and more opens are a great thing — experience has taught me that marketers should be focused on optimizing their clickthrough rates instead.

The fact is that the open rate is a very misleading metric for a few reasons. Most importantly, an email is only counted as “opened” if the recipient also receives the images embedded in that message.

And many of your email users likely have image-blocking enabled on their email clients.

This means that even if they open the email, they won’t be included in your open rate, making it an inaccurate and unreliable metric for marketers, as it underreports your actual numbers.

It’s also important to note that 22% of marketing professionals in our survey say Apple’s latest Email Privacy Protection feature impacts the reporting accuracy of open rates.

Fortunately, some marketers are finding workaround by creating opportunities for users to voluntarily give information via gates content such as webinar signups and virtual events.

How valuable is your email open rate?

You can get some value out of the open rate as a metric if you use it as a comparative metric.

For instance, comparing the open rates of this week‘s email sent to last week’s (both to the same lists) might give you some insight since the variables are somewhat controlled.

3. Conversion Rate

After an email recipient has clicked through on your email, the next goal is typically to get them to convert on your offer, in other words, to take the action your email has asked them to take.

So, if you‘re sending an email to offer your audience the chance to download a free ebook, you’d consider anyone who actually downloads that ebook to be a conversion.

Conversion rate is the percentage of email recipients who click on a link within an email and completes a desired action, such as filling out a lead generation form or purchasing a product.

To calculate the conversion rate, I divide the number of people who completed the desired action by the number of emails delivered and multiply the answer by 100. The formula looks like this:

(Number of people who completed the desired action ÷ Number of total emails delivered) * 100

Let‘s say I have 10,0000 total emails delivered, and 400 of the emails’ recipients completed the desired action. To get the conversion rate, I’d divide 400 by 10,000, which equals 0.04. Multiple that by 100, and the conversion rate is 4%.

I’ve found that conversion rate is one of the most important metrics for determining how my emails achieve my goals.

This is because the definition of a conversion is directly tied to the call-to-action in an email, and my call-to-action should be directly connected to the overall goal of my email marketing.

Pro Tip: To measure the conversion rate of your emails, you’ll need to integrate your email platform and web analytics.

You can do this by creating unique tracking URLs for your email links that identify the source of the click as coming from a specific email campaign.

How valuable is your conversion rate?

If your goal is to generate leads, conversion rates are significant as they show you how successful your newsletters are at actually generating prospects and leads.

4. Bounce Rate

There are two variations of this metric to track: “hard” and “soft.” Before we get into that, however, let’s discuss what a bounce rate is.

Bounce rate is the percentage of total emails sent that could not be successfully delivered to the recipient’s inbox. To calculate it, divide the number of bounced emails by the number of emails sent, and multiply by the answer by 100:

(Number of bounced emails ÷ Total number of emails sent) * 100

Example: 75 bounced emails ÷ 10,000 total emails sent * 100 = 0.75% bounce rate

There are two kinds of bounces to track: “hard” and “soft.”

I’ve found soft bounces result from a temporary problem with a valid email address, such as a full inbox or a problem with the recipient’s server.

The recipient’s server may hold these emails for delivery once the problem clears up, or you may try re-sending your email message to soft bounces.

Hard bounces result from an invalid, closed, or non-existent email address, and these emails will never be successfully delivered.

You should immediately remove complex bounce addresses from your email list because internet service providers (ISPs) use bounce rates to determine an email sender’s reputation.

How valuable is a bounce rate?

While a bounce rate doesn‘t directly link to your goals, you should still look at it to make sure there are no deep issues with your emails. I’ve learned the hard way that having too many hard bounces can make your company look like a spammer in the eyes of an ISP.

Read this blog post to learn more about hard and soft bounces.

5. List Growth Rate

Aside from the call-to-action metrics (CTR, conversion rates), I also suggest keeping tabs on list growth and loss. Of course, you should aim to grow your list to extend your reach, expand your audience, and position yourself as an industry thought leader.

Your list growth rate is the rate at which your email list grows. Here’s the formula to calculate it:

([(Number of new subscribers) minus (Number of unsubscribes + email/spam complaints)] ÷ Total number of email addresses on your list]) * 100

Example: (500 new subscribers – 100 unsubscribes and email/spam complaints) ÷ 10,000 email addresses on the list * 100 = 4% list growth rate

How valuable is your list growth rate?

Believe it or not, there’s a natural decay of your email marketing list, and it expires by about 22.71% every year — which means that it’s more important than ever to pay attention to growing your subscriber list and keeping it at a healthy size.

6. Email Sharing/Forwarding Rate

I used to think the rate at which my email recipients forward or share my emails with others was insignificant, but I‘ve since learned it’s arguably one of the most important metrics marketers should track.

Why? Because this is how you generate new contacts. The folks on your email list are already in your database. So, while conversion is still a primary focus, this doesn’t help you attract new leads.

The percentage of email recipients who clicked on a “share this” button to post email content to a social network and/or clicked on a “forward to a friend” button.

This formula for your email sharing/forwarding rate is:

(Number of clicks on a share and/or forward button ÷ Number of total delivered emails) * 100

For example: 100 clicks on a share/forward button ÷ 10,000 total delivered emails * 100 = 1% email sharing/forwarding rate

Encourage your readers to pass along your email to a friend or colleague if they found the content helpful, and start tracking how many new people you can add to your database this way. Read this blog post for tips on getting people to forward your emails.

Why Email Sharing and Forwarding Rates Are Valuable

Keep a careful eye on your sharing rates to discover which types of articles and offers tend to get shared the most, and use that insight when you plan email campaigns in the future.

7. Overall ROI

This metric is the overall return on investment for your email campaigns. In other words, total revenue is divided by real spend.

Below is the most basic formula to calculate ROI — but there are several ways to calculate the ROI of your email campaigns:

[($ in additional sales made minus $ invested in the campaign) ÷ $ invested in the campaign] * 100

Example: ($1,000 in additional sales – $100 invested in the campaign / $100 supported in the campaign) * 100 = a 900% return on investment for the campaign

Depending on your type of business, you might prefer a different one.

Pro Tip: As with every marketing channel, you should be able to determine the overall ROI of your email marketing. If you still need to, set up an SLA system whereby you assign different values to various types of leads based on their likelihood to generate revenue for your company.

How valuable is ROI?

How many of these types of leads did you generate via email marketing? How does this translate to potential revenue? Actual revenue?

These metrics will help you show your boss and sales team how valuable email marketing is as a channel that drives accurate, tangible results.

8. Unsubscribe Rate

The unsubscribe rate is the percentage of email recipients unsubscribe from your send list after opening a given email.

As with the open rate, the unsubscribe rate isn’t a reliable picture of the health of your email list. Many subscribers tired of receiving your brand’s email messages won’t bother to go through the formal unsubscribe process.

They’ll stop opening, reading, and clicking on your email messages.

That‘s why I’ve found measuring subscriber engagement by clickthrough and conversion rates is much more effective. From there, you can keep an eye out for unengaged subscribers so you can consider removing them at some point, as we went over earlier.

How valuable is an unsubscribe rate?

Although your unsubscribe rate doesn’t directly relate to your goals, checking it monthly helps calculate your overall list growth rate. So, do keep an eye on it every once in a while.

How to Know Which Email Metrics to Track, Based on Your Goals

The goal of your email marketing may differ from the goals of another company like yours and may even vary within your own company over time.

But again, you must determine precisely what you’re looking to achieve with your email marketing before you begin (or continue) to send and measure your emails.

Here’s how you can align your specific goal with critical metrics.

Subscriber List Growth Rate

If you focus on growing the top of your funnel — attracting more visitors to your site, signing up more blog subscribers, and getting more people to use your free tools, your goal is to grow your subscriber list.

Your emails will likely contain calls to action such as “Subscribe to Our Blog” or “Join Our Weekly Email List.” Of course, the most important metric you should be tracking for this goal is the growth rate of your subscriber list.

Unengaged Subscribers

Just as you want to track and grow your subscribers, it’s also essential to keep an eye on your unengaged subscribers — and consider removing them from your list altogether. Why?

Because sending emails to people who aren’t engaged with your emails (called “graymail”) can hurt the deliverability of your email overall.

Email clients might get tipped off by low engagement rates and deliver emails from known graymail senders straight to recipients’ “junk” folders, meaning your emails will technically get sent and delivered but won’t necessarily be seen.

Here at HubSpot, we deliberately unsubscribed 250,000 people from HubSpot’s Marketing Blog, including those who had opted in to receive emails about new content we published on the blog.

This subscriber purge brought our total subscriber count from 550,000 down to 300,000. Read this blog post to learn why and how we purged our subscriber list and why you might consider doing the same.

Number of New (or Total) Leads Generated

Instead of focusing on subscribers, you’d like to work on growing lead generation.

If this is the case, you should be sending emails that offer lead generation content — in other words, content that requires the viewer to fill out a lead capture form to access it.

If the goal of your email marketing is lead gen, you should be tracking how many leads you capture every day and every month. Depending on your priorities, you can focus on all leads generated or only new ones added to your database.

Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rate

Finally, let’s say you want to focus more on the middle/bottom of your marketing funnel and convert your existing leads into customers.

If this is your goal, your emails will likely provide content more closely related to your business and your product or service.

Your calls-to-action may include “Get a demo,” “Watch a Video of Our Product in Action,” or “Start a Free Trial.” If this is your goal, you should track your lead-to-customer conversion rate changes.

As obvious as this all seems, you‘d be surprised how many email marketers determine their goals and then don’t bother to track their progress against them.

Ensure you can follow how closely you‘re trending toward your goal at any point during the month and that you’re looking carefully at any changes in these metrics month over month.

And if you need assistance tracking the performance of your marketing emails, HubSpot‘s Email Marketing Tools are available to help you create, personalize, and optimize your email campaigns.

Even better, the tools also include email analytics to observe your emails’ effectiveness.

To help you with your email marketing goals, you can also leverage HubSpot’s AI tools like our Email Writer that can help you generate copy that suits your needs.

Navigating Email Marketing Metrics

The bottom line? Be smart about which metrics you’re tracking, and ensure you can effectively measure your individual email performance, the health of your email list, and your progress toward your overarching goals.

As long as you can determine each of those, you’re on the right track for more effective email marketing.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in March 2014 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

If it’s your first time using ChatGPT, your answers may sound stilted. The program doesn’t know your voice and is trying to learn what you want. If you want to get the best results, you’ll need to invest time in training the algorithm.

Think of ChatGPT like an intern. If it’s their first day, they won’t know exactly how to get the job done. However, with practice and clear instructions, you’ll be amazed by what they can accomplish.

Our guide on how to train ChatGPT will give you a step-by-step breakdown to customize ChatGPT based on your specific needs. In this article, we’ll show you how to turn ChatGPT into your personal marketing assistant with:

• 5 Amazing Marketing Use Cases for ChatGPT
• ChatGPT For Marketing: Key Advantages and Limitations to Know
• 5 Actionable Tips for Training ChatGPT for Marketing
• 10 Marketing Prompts to Help Train ChatGPT
• How to Train Your ChatGPT With Custom Data

5 Amazing Marketing Use Cases for ChatGPT

When ChatGPT first came into the spotlight, people asked it to write songs and solve complex mathematical questions.

Now, with a premium plan and hundreds of plugins to expand the tool’s capabilities, marketers have realized ChatGPT’s potential to become a high-functioning assistant to make life easy.

We found the top five marketing use cases you can explore (and prompts to use):

1. In-Depth Market Research

You can use ChatGPT to explore any industry or vertical in detail.

It’ll give you a clearer understanding of your competitors, target audience, and location-specific nuances.

The tool can study publicly available information and find granular insights about the market — demographics to target, buyer preferences, competitor landscape, and other useful details.

This can be a good starting point for creating a marketing strategy from scratch.

Prompt: I want to start an ecommerce store selling hand-made jewelry and accessories created from sustainable materials in Austin, Texas. Act as a market researcher and give me information on the demographics of people most likely to order these products in Austin — including age groups, income, education, gender, and specific location.

2. Find Ideas to Create Customer Surveys

All successful marketing campaigns have one thing in common: listening to customers.

You have to stay on top of customer expectations and preferences when planning or reviewing your marketing efforts.

ChatGPT can simplify this process.

You can get a pulse on your customers with surveys created using ChatGPT. You can also be more specific to get clear, on-point questions to be added to surveys.

You can add specific instructions about the type of questions to include, like multiple-choice, rating-based, etc.

Prompt: I run an agency to help businesses create + edit video content in multiple formats. Create a customer survey to help me collect their feedback once I complete a project. Write 10-12 objective, close-ended questions asking about their satisfaction levels. Add one subjective question for their overall feedback.

3. Create Blog Outlines and Edit Drafts

Using ChatGPT to make outlines for blog content is another great way to fast-track your marketing workflows.

You can create a template prompt with all the instructions for creating detailed outlines and use it whenever you want to write an article.

Not only that, once you’re done writing the content, you can also feed your draft to ChatGPT for proofreading. You can ask the tool to pinpoint errors and share language suggestions based on your defined tone of voice.

Prompt: Create a detailed outline on the topic “Customer marketing for SaaS” following the BLUF approach. Add a compelling title and include bullet points within each section to explain what to include in these sections. Write the headings in sentence case and use H3s and H4s wherever needed. Properly format this outline.

4. Generate Copy for Emails and Social Media

Don’t have the time to create some juicy copy for your next social media post? Or are you spending way too much time coming up with a good subject line for your emails?

You can use ChatGPT as your creative sidekick to write short-form copy and content in seconds.

Instead of wrecking your head thinking about the best copy, create a detailed prompt to let ChatGPT do the heavy lifting quickly.

Prompt: Create an email for our existing customers to introduce our latest feature, AI voiceover. This feature will let them add AI-generated audio in different voices, styles, and languages. They can download and transcribe this audio as well. Highlight our motivations for creating this feature and end with a CTA gently nudging them to try it.

TOV: Keep it friendly, conversational, and exciting.

You can go a notch above this to plan an entire campaign with HubSpot’s Campaign Assistant. The tool can help you plan and execute marketing campaigns from start to finish without the busywork.

Get Started With HubSpot’s Campaign Assistant

5. Repurposing Content for Different Channels

Create once, repurpose forever — that’s the mantra for most marketers these days.

But let’s face it, many marketers drop the ball here because repurposing content can be a pain. It takes too much time, and workflows are usually complicated.

You can cut all this hassle with ChatGPT. You can convert:

• A blog post into a shorter copy for social media.
• A short video script into a longer blog.
• A podcast into a blog or email.

The possibilities are endless.

You can also use ChatSpot, HubSpot’s AI-powered companion, to outline, draft, rewrite and repurpose content, create social media posts, generate images based on prompts, and more.

Get Started With HubSpot’s ChatSpot

ChatGPT for Marketing: Key Advantages and Limitations to Know

When used well, ChatGPT can truly be a game-changer for marketers. But it’s not without its flaws. Let’s look at ChatGPT’s main benefits and shortcomings.

Advantages of ChatGPT in Marketing

Here are a few major benefits of integrating ChatGPT into your marketing workflow:

1. Speed Up Creativity

One of the biggest wins ChatGPT gives marketers is driving efficiency in creative work.

Whether you’re planning a new campaign or writing some copy, you don’t have to spend hours to come up with just a handful of good ideas.

ChatGPT can flex those creative muscles for you and get the job done quickly.

2. Cost-Effective Assistant

The free version of the tool works pretty great for the most part. But if you want to level up and produce even better output at scale, you can upgrade at just $20 a month.

That’s a bargain when you think of all the work you can do in minutes.

3. Round-the-Clock Availability

Another huge benefit is that ChatGPT works on your time and terms.

Whether you’re an early riser or a night owl, working on a Monday or the weekend, the tool is available round-the-clock to support your work with the same quality of output.

4. Ease of Integration With Other Tools

You can also integrate ChatGPT with any tool using its API.

Add it to your website chatbot or inside your app; you can use it for any task to maximize efficiency. For example, you can use it to collect and qualify leads from your website or create emails in minutes.

Limitations of ChatGPT in Marketing

ChatGPT might not be ideal for some use cases; here’s why.

1. Prone to Poor Quality and Inaccurate Output

Users share the concern that the tool sometimes throws up low-quality and incorrect responses.

An article by the SF Chronicle explained how LLMs can generate false information based on training data without knowing real-world facts.

Here’s an example of inaccurate outputs by different AI models:

Image Source

2. Limited Contextual Understanding and Bias

ChatGPT also lacks the ability to understand and retain information based on context. That means you have to feed it the same instructions every time you want to prompt an output.

Its LLMs also develop biases present in the training data. So, the context of your output is not fully objective.

3. No Knowledge of Brand Identity

Unlike humans in your team, ChatGPT can’t develop an in-depth knowledge of your brand.

You must continuously share relevant details of your brand identity and values whenever you want to generate any output.

This often results in subpar results and is not fully aligned with your brand.

4. Technical Glitches

A fairly common issue with ChatGPT is the frequent outages when the tool becomes completely inoperative. These unanticipated glitches can hamper your productivity and throw you off schedule.

5 Actionable Tips for Training ChatGPT for Marketing

Now that we’ve covered the basics of how you can use ChatGPT for marketing, it’s time to get down to business: how to train ChatGPT.

While there are tons of marketing examples to inspire your training efforts, we’ve curated our top five tips for training the tool for customized outputs.

1. Document your brand guidelines.

Help ChatGPT understand your brand inside out with detailed brand guidelines.

This document should ideally include your vision, mission, values, personality characteristics, tone of voice, and visual elements.

You can input these guidelines in the Custom Instructions feature to align all your responses with these instructions.

The tool also gives you a few questions to answer to make these instructions work more effectively.

2. Templatize your instruction prompts.

Another best practice is to create templated instructions for every use case — whether you want to create a weekly newsletter, find ideas for social media, or make blog outlines.

These templates can fast-track your work and save you the struggle of writing detailed prompts from scratch every time. Simply pick a template and customize it for a specific request.

This can bring more consistency in the quality of output and set you up for repeatable success with the tool.

3. Share insights about your target audience.

From what we’ve learned, ChatGPT can develop biases based on its training data. As a result, it’ll produce ideas and responses that might not necessarily resonate with your target audience.

You can fix this problem by feeding the tool more information about your target audience.

Doing so can help the AI platform understand who it’s writing for, their pain points, and preferences.

This can train ChatGPT to think and speak like your customers instead of producing generic ideas or content.

4. Simulate marketing scenarios and use real examples.

You can give ChatGPT a better contextual understanding of your business and overall marketing efforts by:

• Simulating different scenarios of how you plan your marketing campaigns.
• Sharing real-life examples of how your customers interact and buy from you.

This way, you can transfer some of your marketing knowledge to AI and enhance its capability to create high-quality results.

5. Refine your training based on testing and user feedback.

Don’t forget to regularly review the effectiveness of your training by answering a few questions like:

• Is ChatGPT producing relevant ideas and writing brand-aligned content?
• Does your ChatGPT-generated content/copy match your brand’s tone of voice?
• Are customers enjoying the campaigns created with AI’s assistance?
• Has there been any decline in the quality graph?

You can also collect feedback for some ChatGPT-generated ideas or copy to fill the gaps in your training. For example, if users say the social media posts feel too salesy, you can add more instructions to improve the tone of voice.

10 Marketing Prompts to Help Train ChatGPT

Want to get to work but don’t have the time to train ChatGPT completely? No worries — we have a set of 10 prompts to train ChatGPT quickly. Save these for the future!

1. Create Buyer Personas

In the [industry name] industry, identify the key buyer segments. For each segment, provide a detailed outline of the potential opportunities for marketing. This should include demographic details, consumer needs, and any trends that may affect the segment.

2. Identify Pain Points

Identify the common challenges faced by the specified buyer persona. These challenges can range from daily inconveniences to major obstacles that influence their buying decisions.

3. Generate Snappy Ideas

Suggest email copy and design ideas to run a campaign for [occasion]. Stick to our brand guidelines and come up with intriguing ideas based on some pop-culture themes.

4. Repurpose Content

Here’s some text from a blog post about books: [add text]. Modify it to fit the character limit of [social platform]. Make sure to keep the main message and tonality intact, but feel free to use abbreviations and X-specific language.

5. Create Short-Form Content

Generate five different descriptions for our YouTube video on [topic]. Each description should be engaging and accurately reflect the content of the video. Optimize it for [keyword]. Keep the tone conversational and exciting.

6. Write Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Write a title tag and meta description for the blog post about [subject]. The title tag should be attention-grabbing, and the meta description should provide a brief summary of the blog post.

7. Find Campaign Ideas

We want to conduct a webinar for our target audience: [specify personas]. Come up with 5-6 creative ideas for this webinar that would resonate with our audience. Align these with their pain points and our product/service. Add a basic overview with specific subtopics to cover.

8. Get Relevant Sources

Provide a list of reliable sources where I can learn more about [topic]. These can include books, articles, newsletters, thought leaders, or educational videos.

9. Edit and Proofread Content

Review this blog post (enter inserted text) and check for any spelling or grammar mistakes. Make the necessary edits to improve the text for readability, the flow of ideas, redundancies, logical arguments, and contextual relevance.

10. Create Memes

Create five memes around the idea of [explain your idea]. Make these memes relatable for [target audience] and suggest captions to make them more hilarious.

How to Train Your ChatGPT With Custom Data on Mac

Here’s your step-by-step guide to training your ChatGPT to produce tailored output for your needs:

Step 1. Install Python.

Check if you have Python 3.0+ installed. You need Python 3.0+ to train ChatGPT with custom data.

You can check which version of Python or whether Python is installed on your MacOS Terminal using the command:

python3 –version

If not, download the latest version of Python from the official website.

Step 2. Upgrade PIP.

PIP (standard package manager for Python) lets you install Python libraries. In our case, we need to install OpenAI, PyPDF2, and other libraries.

PIP comes pre-packaged with new Python versions. However, if you’re using an old installation, upgrade PIP to the latest version.

Here’s the command to upgrade PIP:

python3 -m pip install -U pip

Step 3. Install the essential libraries.

The next step is to install the following essential libraries (use the commands mentioned below their description to install them one-by-one):

• OpenAI library: to train and create your chatbot.

pip3 install openai

• PyPDF2: helps parse PDF files.

pip3 install PyPDF2

• GPT Index (LlamaIndex): to allow LLMs to connect with your knowledge base.

pip3 install gpt_index

• Gradio: create an interface for interacting with the chatbot.

pip3 install gradio

Now, we’re done installing the essential Python libraries.

Before we head over to the next step, make sure you have installed a code editor like Sublime Text or Notepad++.

Step 4. Generate your OpenAI key.

When you’re done with the setup, log into your OpenAI account (or create a new one).

This is the same account you’re using to access ChatGPT.

You’ll get three options for logging in. Choose the API option to get started.

Once you’re in, navigate to the top-right corner of your screen and click on Personal to open a drop-down menu with these options.

Here, you have to click on View API keys.

Click on Create a new secret key to generate a new API key and give it a name.

Then, you’ll get a key. Copy and paste it into a code editor.

Step 5. Prepare your custom data.

Now, you have to create a folder named ‘docs’ on your system.

Add all documents you want to use for training ChatGPT. These documents have to be in the TXT, PDF, CSV, or SQL formats.

Note: The more files you add for ChatGPT to feed, the more tokens will be used.

Step 6. Create the script.

Now we have everything in place.

In this step, we’ll create a Python script to train ChatGPT with your custom data.

This script will use the files inside the ‘docs’ folder we created in the previous step and generate a .json file.

Open your code editor and paste the following code into a file.

from gpt_index import SimpleDirectoryReader, GPTListIndex, GPTSimpleVectorIndex, LLMPredictor, PromptHelper from langchain import OpenAI import gradio as gr import sys import os os.environ[“OPENAI_API_KEY”] = ‘ ’ def construct_index(directory_path): max_input_size = 4096 num_outputs = 512 max_chunk_overlap = 20 chunk_size_limit = 600 prompt_helper = PromptHelper(max_input_size, num_outputs, max_chunk_overlap, chunk_size_limit=chunk_size_limit) llm_predictor = LLMPredictor(llm=OpenAI(temperature=0.7, model_name=“text-davinci-003”, max_tokens=num_outputs)) documents = SimpleDirectoryReader(directory_path).load_data() index = GPTSimpleVectorIndex(documents, llm_predictor=llm_predictor, prompt_helper=prompt_helper) index.save_to_disk(‘index.json’) return index def chatbot(input_text): index = GPTSimpleVectorIndex.load_from_disk(‘index.json’) response = index.query(input_text, response_mode=“compact”) return response.response iface = gr.Interface(fn=chatbot, inputs=gr.inputs.Textbox(lines=7, label=“Enter your text”), outputs=“text”, title=“My AI Chatbot”) index = construct_index(“docs”) iface.launch(share=True)

Make sure you replace the part that mentions OPENAI_API_KEY with the key you copied earlier (in Step IV).

Save this file in the same directory where the ‘docs’ directory is located. Name it ‘app.py’

Step 7. Run the script.

You’re all set to run the code in Terminal.

Head over to the directory where app.py and docs are located using the terminal.

Once you’re in the directory, run the following command:

python3 app.py

As soon as you do, it’ll start training your custom chatbot based on the data in the ‘docs’ folder. The time it’ll take will depend on the amount of data.

Once trained, it’ll generate a URL which you can head over to and access the chatbot. You can open this URL in your browser.

And we’re done. Your custom ChatGPT chatbot is ready for interaction!

Turn ChatGPT Into Your Marketing Sidekick

Now you know just how powerful ChatGPT can be for your marketing needs. You can train the AI tool to match your exact needs or create a customized version based on your data.

Remember that training ChatGPT isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it task. You have to constantly share more insights and guide the tool to create ideas and content aligned with your brand personality.

Get started today!

Here’s a little exercise for you: check the timestamps on the emails you’ve received in the past day. I noticed that most of my emails, especially my subscription emails, were sent between 9 AM – 12 PM or 12-3PM.

This isn’t a coincidence, either.

While the answer to “What’s the best time to send an email?” isn’t an exact science, there are some key findings we’ve discovered through heavy research, and the times listed above are right in line with what we found. Keep reading to find out the best time to send an email, according to marketing and advertising professionals.

Table of Contents

• When is the best time to send an email?
• Best Day To Send an Email
• Best Time To Send B2B Emails
• Best Time to Send B2C Emails
• Why Email Matters For Your Business
• How to Measure the Performance of Your Email Sends

The data reflects when most audiences begin their day and throughout the afternoon.

This data also aligns with my own experience. I usually check my email (personal and work) right as I start my day to catch up on anything I missed in the late afternoon and evening and see if there’s anything pressing I’ve received that will affect my upcoming work day or day in general.

If you’re sending emails that include a sale or promotion, I’d recommend sending them when you know your audience trends to take their lunch breaks because they may be more likely to check their emails at this time.

Best Days To Send an Email

If you want something more specific when it comes to what time and day you should send an email, here’s what you need to know:

Our survey asked marketers which day of the week their marketing emails get the most engagement. 27% of U.S. marketers said Tuesday, 19% said Monday, and 17% said Thursday. I’d caution against sending emails over the weekend, especially on Sundays.

If I cut that data by best days and best times, here’s what marketers say:

• The best time to send emails on Tuesday is 9 AM – 12 PM EST, then 12:01 PM – 3 PM EST. I’d stay away from sending your emails anytime after 6 PM EST.
• On Mondays, aim to send your emails between 6 AM and 9 AM EST, then 9 AM – 12 PM EST. You’ll get the least engagement between 6 PM and 9 PM EST

As marketers, we know the importance of using data to inform our decisions.

So, keeping your audience in mind when figuring out when to send your emails (instead of solely relying on the results above) is important. I’d recommend analyzing your historical engagement data to see when your emails generate the most interaction. Then, you can compare your unique insights with what other marketers say and decide the best days and times to appear in your subscribers’ inboxes.

Pro Tip: The last thing you want is to panic at 8:56 AM because you need to send your email at 9 AM, but it’s not ready. I’m not saying that scenario ever happened to me…but I do know that keeping track of when to send your emails is challenging, especially if you’re balancing other tasks.

HubSpot’s Marketing Automation Software was a helpful sidekick when I sent out Service Blog Email Newsletters. I created emails in advance and set up a workflow that would automatically send them at the exact right time, every single time.

Get Started with HubSpot’s Marketing Automation Software

To ensure you’re reaching your target audience, you’ll want to segment your B2B audience down even further — perhaps by job function or seniority — to accommodate different behaviors and modes of working with your email sends. You may even find that other times work better for your list.

Continue experimenting and seeing what works best with your audience. One way to do this is by using an automation tool like Seventh Sense which will fine-tune your email sends using artificial intelligence.

Why Email Matters For Your Business

Our survey found that 85.4% of marketers leverage automation as part of their email marketing strategy. If you aren’t leveraging automated email marketing, your competition probably is.

Automated email marketing allows you to improve sales conversions — maybe even by 14%. It’s a way to send customers unique offers — such as product sales or newsletter updates — with information your reader can’t get anywhere else.

Emails should contain content your customers want to see, allowing you to communicate with them instantly. Your emails should contain information your customers are interested in learning more about — such as discount offers, business updates, or product or service launches.

Pro tip: Having your emails pre-written and ready lets you take full advantage of automation. AI tools like HubSpot’sCampaign Assistantandemail writercan help you quickly write first drafts that you can further personalize with recipients’ unique information.

If you’re looking for a free email tool for creating your emails, HubSpot’s marketing email tool combines the key features you need, and it’s the best solution I can recommend. You can easily design your emails with its drag-and-drop editor, leverage the power of AI to create content, and set your scheduling preferences to send your emails at the right time.

How to Measure the Performance of Your Email Sends

There are a lot of metrics you can use to measure the success of your email marketing campaigns, but the one that matters most depends on the goal of your campaign.

For example, if I’m sending an email to advertise a new product, I’d be more interested in metrics that showed whether recipients were interested or not, like:

• Open rate, which could let me know if my subject line captured attention,
• And clickthrough rate, which would tell me if my email made people interested enough to click through to my website to learn more about the product.

A metric like replies wouldn’t tell me what I need to know about my audience’s feelings about my product.

Here is a breakdown of the most important email metrics:

Click-Through Rate

Click-through rate refers to the number of people who open a link or image in an email. This number will always be smaller than the total number of emails opened since some people will open your email but abandon it without engaging further.

It’s the most commonly tracked metric among the marketers we surveyed, and the three strategies they note are most effective in improving clickthrough rates are personalization (48.2%), crafting effective subject lines (36.5%), and providing value through marketing emails (38.2%).

Open Rate

Open rate is the percentage found from the number of subscribers who opened your email campaign. Emails that have great open rates have short, effective subject lines. Plus, they’re optimized for previews and preheader text.

Click-to-Open Rate

Click-to-open rate helps you identify the content in your email that resonates the most with your recipients by comparing the number of people who opened your email to those who clicked any links. To get it, divide your CTR by your open rate and multiply the result by 100. For example, if your email receives 200 clicks and 120 opens, your click-to-open rate is 60%.

Over to You

Email marketing can be a tricky process . There are so many industries taking advantage of it in their own way and making an impact.

Your subscribers are already interested in your content. They appreciate what you are offering as a company, and as long as you’re sending them emails that relate to that, you have a good chance of obtaining great metrics.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in November 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

As an Etsy shop owner, I like to think my products alone are enough for customers to click “buy.” Yet, it could be my two-day shipping guarantee. Or my product videos on TikTok. Or the sustainable packaging.

My point is this: offering a great product is essential, but it’s not enough to move inventory. You need to build a positive shopping experience around your product. A big part of this is embracing the latest ecommerce trends.

In 2024, there’s a whole lineup of new trends that could kickstart major growth for your ecommerce company — and we’ve chosen the top 14 trends we think will change how people buy and sell online.

Let’s dive in.

1. Short-Form Video

Short-form video has taken the social media world by storm, and platforms like TikTok have become legitimate vehicles to promote your businesses

I recently took a stab at using TikTok to promote my Etsy store, and was surprisingly happy with the results. While my business account has a modest 62 followers, I was able to generate over a hundred likes on my first video.

If you decide to veer into TikTok territory, here’s a word from the wise: don’t be overtly promotional. TikTok users are pretty good at sniffing out a promotional video from an organic one.

Instead, adapt your content for the platform. This means jumping on trending music, effects, and video concepts, like in the example below:

2. Direct Messages (DMs) for Customer Service

Most of my customers message me directly on Etsy. However, I’ve noticed an increasing number are reaching out via Instagram. This mirrors a larger trend in the ecommerce world.

19% of consumers have reached out to customer service via DMs in the past 3 months, up 45% from 2022.

What does this mean for ecommerce store owners? For one, you’ll need a more diverse customer service strategy, one that spans multiple platforms. Ignoring or delaying responses on channels like Instagram or Twitter could result in lost sales or declining customer satisfaction.

If you run a larger operation, consider investing in customer relationship management (CRM) software that can manage multi-channel interactions. On top of that, make sure your customer service teams are trained to handle messages professionally on social media.

3. Social Commerce

Would you ever buy a product on Instagram or TikTok? Nearly half (47%) of social media users would.

What’s more, 42% trust social media platforms with their credit card information.

Social media is no longer just a tool for promotion — it’s a marketplace where you can sell products directly to consumers. Take Instagram Shops, for example. You can open a storefront, add products, and run ads to boost awareness, directly from the Instagram app.

(Image Source)

Social media is ushering in a new era for digital commerce. Those that leverage social media as a direct sales channel can access an enormous— and still growing— customer base.

4. Sustainable Shopping

Now, more than ever, consumers want to back companies that align with their core values. Case in point: 46% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a company that actively donates to charity.

In my ecommerce store, all materials are ethically sourced, which is a point I  mention in each of my product listings. This is a great way to let potential customers know about the ethical considerations that are central to my business.

Corporate responsibility isn’t just lip service; it’s actually influencing consumers’ purchasing decisions — and I predict more ecommerce stores will start prioritizing sustainable sourcing, packaging, and manufacturing in 2024.

(Image Source)

5. Same-Day or Next-Day Delivery

Amazon has opened nearly 45 shipping sites in the last four years, and is expected to grow this to 150 in the next several years.

When you consider 40% of U.S. consumers expect their online delivery to take two to three days to arrive, this play makes sense.

But the need for (delivery) speed isn’t just for big retail giants.

Just last week, I received a notification from Etsy that sellers could update their processing time to include weekends. Meaning, if you fulfill orders on Sundays, your customers will see faster delivery times. I’ve personally discovered that the quicker my processing times on Etsy, the more customers want to buy.

Consumers don’t just want fast delivery times, they expect it. In some cases, they even fork over more money for same-day or next-day delivery. If you don’t give consumers these options, they may turn to competitors who do.

6. Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality

When I moved into my apartment last year, I was on the hunt for the perfect couch. Nothing too bulky, or ornate, or mismatched with my existing decor.

The problem? As I was perusing Ikea’s website, it was hard to envision what each couch would look like in my space from the product photos alone.

Fortunately, Ikea offers an AR app that lets you place 3D products in your home. The products are true-to-scale, so you can see whether it will fit and how it’ll look in your room.

Augmented reality and virtual reality will continue to keep the pace in 2024. Eventually, it will become standard for companies to offer AR and VR options.

Ultimately, these added benefits are worth the initial investment in new technology. As ecommerce grows, consumers are going to buy from companies that allow them the option of visually testing out products before purchase.

7. Livestream Shopping

Ever wanted to sell your wares on QCV or HSN? Now you can do something similar on social media.

In 2019, Amazon launched its livestream shopping platform, Amazon Live. Two years later, TikTok began testing a live shopping function in the United States. YouTube and Shopify closely followed suit, expanding their live shopping partnership.

All of these investments signal a more immersive and interactive future for e-commerce, one that goes beyond scrolling through static images and reading product descriptions.

(Image Source)

8. Automation and Chatbots for Online Ordering

With 1.3 billion people on Facebook Messenger, it makes sense to take advantage of chatbots for marketing, customer service, and sales.

With ecommerce, you can take it a step further.

Domino’s uses its Messenger bot, Dom, for full-menu ordering. The implications of this are huge: when fast and simple are priorities for consumers, Domino’s will beat out all the competition.

Plus, chatbot ordering is an opportunity for Domino’s to cater to its audience in a new way, proving itself to be a helpful and forward-thinking company.

If it makes sense for your business, I’d suggest creating a chatbot like Dom while it’s still an open field. In a few years, this could become a mainstream way of ordering, and lose some of its current novelty power.

9. Mobile First, Desktop Second

When shopping online, roughly 75% of consumers prefer using their mobile devices, compared to 15% that prefer desktop and 6% that prefer tablet.

As mobile purchasing continues to grow, it’s important to create an ecommerce site that’s optimized for mobile.

Fingerprint and facial recognition technology, as well as one-click payments, will simplify mobile payments and further encourage consumers to switch from desktop to mobile. Mobile will soon become the preferred payment method for ecommerce transactions.

Starbucks created a Mobile Order and Pay app in 2015. By 2021, 26% of all Starbucks orders were paid via mobile. Starbucks said their Mobile Order and Pay app is so popular, it creates congestion in stores and extra-long wait lines, which they’re attempting to solve by hiring more baristas.

If mobile ordering leads to a larger pool of in-store consumers, I’m thinking it’s a worthwhile investment.

10. Image Search

Picture this: you’re in a store and see a beautiful couch but don’t feel like paying full price, so you take a picture of it and use eBay’s image search to find similar products for a better deal.

As ecommerce transitions to mobile, companies will begin offering options to visually search for products by using personal photos, or photos found online.

Since image search offers opportunities to find similar products at a cheaper price online, it could eventually drive consumers to shop online even if they started in a physical store.

A few ecommerce businesses have already successfully implemented image search functions into their online platforms. Pinterest, for example, has its own image search function. On Pinterest, you can zoom in on an object in a Pin image and find similar objects.

11. Voice Search

As Amazon Echo, Google Home, and other voice-activated devices grow in popularity, voice search will become the preferred method of search. Around 40% of U.S. internet users use a voice assistant at least monthly.

It’s critical to optimize your business for voice search in 2024, or you could lose the vast majority of consumers who choose to shop through voice-activated devices.

Walmart made it possible for consumers to order any of their items by voice on the Google Express, and in the future, they’re going to allow consumers to place in-store pickup orders via Google Home. Target, Costco, Kohl’s, Staples, Walgreens and many other stores are in the process of creating similar options for consumers.

Since voice search is 3x more likely to be local, it’s also important to ensure your business listing is updated on Google to reach those local searchers (with accurate hours, an up-to-date address, photos and reviews, etc.).

12. Product Videos

Even when consumers are online, they’re still going to have the same questions about a product’s functionality and design that they’d have in-store. To compete in ecommerce, you’re going to have to answer all their questions digitally, and one of the easiest ways to do that is through video.

A high-quality video addressing your product’s design and function is one of the best ways to sell your product. Your video can appeal to your consumer’s emotions, persuading them more convincingly than text.

Redsbaby, an Australian baby stroller company, does a great job of this. Their videos of baby strollers display actors using Redsbaby strollers throughout a “typical day,” so consumers can feel confident that they understand what they’re purchasing, despite having never seen it in-store.

13. ROPO (“Research Online, Purchase Offline”)

It can be tricky to track how your digital efforts translate to offline sales.

Luckily, ROPO (“research online, purchase offline”) is a tool that will become more advanced and reliable in the upcoming year, and can help retailers accurately measure how well their digital ads are contributing to in-store sales.

ROPO combines information from social media, mobile tracking/geolocation, mobile payments, in-store inventory, analytics tools, CRM systems, and more, to figure out which ads and site pages led consumers to in-store purchases.

This is invaluable information. By knowing which digital ads are most efficiently contributing to sales, ecommerce businesses can create higher-conversion, more targeted campaigns, and feel confident that what they’re doing online is meaningful to their consumers.

14. Machine Learning and AI

You come across machine learning and AI every day. You just might not realize it.

Take Netflix: rather than dividing viewers by age, location, or gender, Netflix created 1,300 “taste communities.” Netflix makes recommendations on similar movie or TV show preferences based on what’s most popular for the viewers in that community. This is the future of machine learning.

Other ecommerce platforms will soon see personal benefits from using machine learning and algorithms to uncover which content they should deliver to which audience. In the future, content will be divided by machine learning and AI, so consumers are fed only the content (or products), they’re most interested in.

Back to You

Nowadays, stores can’t compete without offering excellent ecommerce options. It isn’t enough to post product images to your site and hope your ideal customers will find them. By embracing some of these trends, you can meet your customers where they are and offer them a positive shopping experience.