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Disclaimer: This blog post is not legal advice for your company to use in complying with data privacy laws like GDPR. Instead, it provides background information to help you better understand data privacy best practices. This legal information is not the same as legal advice, where an attorney applies the law to your specific circumstances, so we insist that you consult an attorney if you’d like advice on your interpretation of this information or its accuracy.

In a nutshell, you may not rely on this as legal advice, or as a recommendation of any particular legal understanding.

GDPR instilled a catalyst of real change in 2018 — resulting in a permanent change of the data privacy landscape.

It forced companies to really take stock of their data and privacy responsibilities — and double down on the requirements to map out and account for their data practices and put processes in place to manage data and store it compliantly.

COVID-19 has also unleashed a new set of risks in relation to data privacy that companies are currently confronting.

Both significant events force a strong message to be delivered to companies that privacy and data protection should be of paramount corporate responsibility. The changes have impacted conversations around the world with different territories adopting GDPR as their standard in order to outline an internal compliance program.

Data privacy or, in particular, the application of tenets of privacy to data, is often seen as a massive hurdle to cross for an organization. Companies should embed processes as part of their culture and be willing to pivot in order to adapt to regulatory changes and technological advances.

Systemized processes using tools that are designed to instill compliance can set you up for success as well as continuing to educate internally can help with internal adoption and ensure that privacy is everyone’s responsibility.

At HubSpot, we ensure that data privacy is top of mind and built into our practices and products. Upholding respect to the privacy of individuals who use our products is paramount to our corporate responsibility and internal business model. We are continuously identifying ways in which to improve processes to instill trust in our users and creating tools for our users to be compliant in their organizations.

Below are a few examples of how good privacy can be achieved in an organization.

Data Privacy Best Practices

Privacy Program Management

Setting yourself up for success in the privacy arena requires the establishment of a strong internal team, a united front that will continue to make data privacy and GDPR compliance a priority. Close collaboration on a strategic privacy program that outlines your privacy responsibilities is key to see your business scale compliantly.

Knowing how to conduct processes compliantly in relation to your online activities, identifying risks, managing cookie compliance for your web and app products; creating specific disclosures about the treatment of data; offering visitors information on the rights available to them in a privacy policy are all good practices that every organization needs.

Granularity and types of notices that are needed along with the scope of rights that you must provide to visitors under applicable laws depend on the territories where your visitors reside and it is up to you to demystify these and instill good practices in response.

The scope of domestic and foreign privacy legislation that one company may be obliged to comply with may look different than the scope applicable to another, as there is no “one size fits all” approach to data privacy.

Having a team in place to tackle what these mean to your organization and address compliance obligations can help you communicate your commitment to privacy in this area for your users.

Adopt the Use of Compliance Tools and Practices as Part of your Company Culture

Data privacy is not one person’s responsibility.

By embedding it into your company’s culture, it can make all employees feel invested in keeping company data safe and mitigate risk.

Creating ongoing training and communicating important regulatory changes to keep employees up to date is essential to see your privacy program a success. Charging your privacy team with ongoing monitoring of how changes can affect processes and implementing required changes ensures you are kept up to date with evolving legislation and ahead of any changes in responsibilities.

Did you know that ransomware attacks are often a result of a single compromised password? Doubling down on passwords is the most basic way to operate a good privacy program within your organization.

Identifying risks in this area is key and plugging the gaps that appear can be a constant battle.

For example, having inactive accounts present in your network from a former employee can be a fault that bad actors can take advantage of. It’s a good idea for your org to invest in pass-key software to help implement multi-factor authentication and add additional security to the systems you use to reduce risk in this area.

Using tools that are built with compliance in mind can automate much of these processes needed to affect your program management. These tools can monitor your data collection processes and allow you to implement changes in response.

Integration of third-party systems into this monitoring allows you to extend your privacy controls out into a vendor ecosystem. Automating your processes in relation to subject access requests allows you to be effective within the legal timeframe and generate responses to an individual and carry out your responsibilities when you have a 360 view of the data subject’s data points.

Not only that, but you will be ready to meet any request from a regulator should they need information from you consolidated in one source, allowing you to comply effectively within the timeframe.

Privacy Does Not Stand Still — Keep Pace with Evolving Legislation and Technology 

In the European Union, many consumers are actively making use of their data protection rights granted to them under the GDPR and the ePrivacy Regulation.

In the US and beyond, consumers now have higher expectations about online privacy and are starting to adopt GDPR standards. More and more consumers are now openly concerned about how their personal data is being handled by companies. The newly passed CPRA (amending the CCPA), Privacy Acts being launched in Washington and Virginia as well as similar legislation being rolled out globally in countries like Brazil, India, and China are testament to how territories are making moves to uphold data privacy at a local level.

Some of the latest significant legal developments that companies need to know about are:

• Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) — The European Commission adopted revised Standard Contractual Clauses for International Transfers on June 4, 2021. The revised version replaces those that pre-date the GDPR and are intended to be used for cross-border data transfers outside of Europe, including the US. Although these have an effective date in three months, businesses that are governed by existing SCCs have 18 months to enter into new SCCs or find another lawful means to transfer data.

• Colorado Privacy Act — This Act passed the state’s legislature on June 8, 2021. It will be the third US state – after California and Virginia – with a law that provides its residents with protections when it comes to their personal information.

• China’s Data Security Law (“DSL”) — This law takes effect on September 1, 2021. Many of the practical compliance steps are still to be published over the coming weeks and months but organizations can seek to rely on the draft measures until they do.

Keeping abreast of what these legal developments mean to you and what you need to do with regard to your data in response, is your responsibility. You may need to make adjustments internally to comply and work with your teams to ensure that any privacy issues are addressed.

A thorough examination of what is incumbent on you, with adjustments to processes internally or systematically, has to be done to meet changes at both local and global levels. Making sure your processes are flexible for both and having the capacity to scale with your business with such developments is equally important.

Final Thoughts

As our operations become perpetually digitized, building a privacy-by-design company should be a key priority. Implementing a comprehensive and coordinated approach to data privacy can be challenging and time-consuming but setting it out as a strategic priority across all business activities driven by leadership, is a must for future-thinking organizations.

Organizations should understand and prepare for the reputational risks that extend beyond non-compliance with the myriad of data privacy laws and regulations. Being on the pulse of regulatory change in global privacy laws, keeping up to date with enforcement decisions, and making continuous improvements to privacy programs can help create a privacy-first culture that will set you up for success in the future.

You should be asking yourself some of these thoughtful questions to see if your privacy methods are currently up to standard. Unfortunately, the consequences of failure to improve on matters are not kind, but effectiveness in this area will reward you in the long-term improving your brand image as a trusted, privacy-first organization.

Grabbing — and keeping — your audience’s attention has never been harder. Nowadays, people are bombarded with marketing 24/7, and yet in the last five years, the average attention span has actually dropped — to a mere eight seconds.

Fortunately, there are fun and unique strategies you can implement to engage your audience — and one of those strategies is an online quiz maker.

Similar to the addictive nature of Jeopardy, online quizzes are a fun way for people to engage with your brand. Additionally, consistent online quizzes can help you stay top-of-mind when your consumer is finally ready to buy.

Online quizzes also help you gain a better understanding of your users, and help create stronger relationships with them.

But, whether you’re looking for a professional survey tool or a more lighthearted quiz maker, there’s a range of options to choose from — which one will help drive the best long-term results?

We’ll explore our favorite 18 quiz makers shortly, but first, let’s take a look at the key features of great quiz makers.

Online Quiz Makers: Key Features

Quiz makers come in all forms. Some are incredibly professional, while others are pretty casual. Some are intended for fun, and others are meant to drive real business growth.

Whatever your goal, you should always look for the following key features in your quiz maker.

Easy Promotion Options

You’re trying to gather as many responses as possible, right?

Choosing a service that has built-in sharing options should be a top priority, as it’ll help increase reach.

Data Collection / Analysis

How are you going to collect and use the data?

This is a huge issue. If the data that’s collected is difficult to sort through and doesn’t help you identify key trends, then it’s useless. Make sure the data you collect can be exported or analyzed in-app in a way that’s easy for you.

Lead Capture

In nine out of 10 instances, you’ll also want your quiz to capture lead data from the user.

Make sure there’s a built-in method to collect more than just respondent’s answers — and ensure it can integrate with your primary CRM or ESP.

Time Efficiency

Quiz makers speed up the process needed to put them together.

By using a quiz maker, you can choose from pre-existing layouts or templates, to make a clear and engaging quiz — without the fuss of starting from scratch. They also provide step-by-step guides on how to build them, so you don’t have to do any second guessing.

Now that we’ve covered that, let’s get into our favorite quiz making solutions.

The 18 Best Online Quiz Makers in 2021

1. HubSpot Forms

Price: Free

Even though it’s one of the more advanced form builder tools, you don’t need any technical expertise when you use HubSpot’s free form builder. You can quickly create forms with the drag-and-drop form builder and convert anonymous website visitors into leads with unlimited forms, fields, submissions, and custom forms that all connect to your contact database. This flexibility and customization means it’s easy to create quizzes using the tool as well.

Once someone fills out your form, they’re automatically routed to HubSpot’s free CRM. Once they’re in your CRM, you can set reminder tasks, call them, and send them one-to-one personalized emails, letting you better manage and nurture relationships with your contacts.

HubSpot Forms is also available for WordPress via HubSpot’s WordPress plugin.

2. Survey Anyplace

Pricing: Basic Plan, $39/month per user; Professional Plan, $59/month per user; Enterprise Plan, contact for pricing

Survey Anyplace is one of the more advanced tools in the market, with skip logic, outcomes, and custom scoring that allow you to create quizzes with a high focus on personalization. Combine that with full customization to your branding and the ability for respondents to download a personalized feedback report at the end of the quiz, and you’ll see why this tool is so popular among HR companies.

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3. Typeform

Pricing: Basic Plan, $25/year per user; Plus Plan, $50/year per user; Business Plan, $83/year per user

Typeform takes quizzes and makes them intuitive for both the creator and the user. By offering one question at a time and delivering the quiz in an attractive, responsive interface, Typeform has become a leader in the world of online quizzes and surveys.

The platform is easy to use with its drag-and-drop editing tools. It’s also versatile, offering customer surveys, quizzes, lead generation tools, and more. There are numerous templates to choose from which can be customized to your individual needs.

Using Zapier, Typeform can be seamlessly integrated into CRM services like HubSpot. This way, all the data you collect is automatically added to your existing contacts.

However, it’s important to note some people might feel frustrated when receiving questions one at a time, since it can be more time-consuming. Additionally, the free version limits you to collecting only 100 responses per month.

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4. SurveyMonkey

Pricing: Team Advantage Plan, $25/month per user; Team Premiere Plan, $75/month per user; Enterprise Plan, contact for pricing

With Survey Monkey, you can create basic polls and questionnaires in minutes, and the basic version is free to use. The software features hundreds of templates and questions written by ‘survey methodologists,’ and are specifically designed to draw the right information out of respondents.

Although you can customize the design and layout of your quizzes and surveys, a common criticism is that you can’t fully brand the surveys because the Survey Monkey logo remains.

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5. ProProfs Quiz Maker

Pricing: Free Basic Plan; Essentials Plan, $25/month per user; Premium Plan, $50/month per user; Enterprise Plan, contact for pricing

ProProfs Quiz Maker is a useful tool for creating scored quizzes, public quizzes, personality quizzes, opinion surveys, polls, online tests, and exams. The tool offers 100+ quiz templates, 100,000+ ready-to-use questions, as well as 100+ configurations and an easy-to-use quiz editor.

ProProfs Quiz Maker allows for 10 different question types so you can easily build online quizzes, exams, tests, and surveys. The quizzes can be integrated with major marketing automation tools like ActiveCampaign, Constant Contact, MailChimp, and more.

The tool offers three plans with an option to bill monthly or annually. However, some of its advanced features are confined to the enterprise plans.

6. Outgrow

Price: From $14 per month

Pricing: Freelancer Limited Plan, $14/month per user; Freelancer Plan, $25/month per user; Essentials Plan, $95/month per user; Business Plan, $600/month per user

Using Outgrow you can easily create interactive quizzes as well as calculation quizzes, contests quizzes, tests, recommendation quizzes, and chatbot-styled quizzes. Outgrow’s highly-intuitive drag-and-drop builder allows you to build from scratch or choose from more than 1000 templates.

These templates can include recommendation quizzes helpful for B2B, B2C, and eCommerce businesses. Outgrow allows users to embed their quizzes in 10 diverse ways including Email, Popup, Adverts, Sidebar, Floating Rectangle, Full page, Inpage, Chatbot, ExitIntent, and FacebookTab.

7. Qzzr

Pricing: Basic Plan, $25/month per user; Pro Plan, contact for pricing; Enterprise Plan, contact for pricing

Qzzr was built by inbound marketers with the specific goal of bringing in qualified leads. It creates fully customizable quizzes and surveys through its simple, elegant interface.

Users can also leverage its comprehensive data analysis of the responses, and use its social sharing integrations to reach a larger audience.

One of the most impressive features is the ability to target offers based on the users’ answers. For example, you can add a ‘Buy Now’ CTA on the results page for a product a user expressed interest in.

It’s one of the cheaper options on the list, but lacks the advanced logic features of some of its competitors.

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8. GetFeedback

Pricing: Pricing available upon request

GetFeedback prides itself on its aesthetically-pleasing interface — both customer-facing, and the back-end. It’s one of the more advanced options for quiz and survey creation but is still relatively easy to use for novices. It offers integration into Salesforce CRM software, and detailed analytics so you can put your newfound data to use.

Offering full customization to your branding and coming very highly-rated, GetFeedback is one of the premium options on the market, ideal for larger teams and companies that really want to drill down into their audience data.

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9. Google Forms

Price: Free

Google Forms is a free and easy-to-use form tool that runs within G Suite. The functionality is on the basic side and the interface isn’t very customizable, but you can make decent forms and create quizzes to capture customer data. Since Google Forms is part of G Suite, you can pull data straight into Google Sheets for analysis.

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10. Riddle’s Quizmaker

Pricing: Basic Plan, $29/month per user; Pro Plan, $49/month per user; Team Plan, $199/month per user

Riddle’s Quizmaker is another easy-to-use tool with a focus on capturing email addresses. You can collect data from leads and send it directly to your lists in MailChimp or other software. Riddle’s Quizmaker is particularly good value for small businesses and entrepreneurs.

The tool is available as a WordPress plugin, or quizzes can be embedded into your site via an embed code. The quizzes are fully customizable, so you can stamp your branding all over them.

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11. Playbuzz

Price: Free

Full of cheap-looking ads, but absolutely free, Playbuzz is a great option for those who want to jump in and have a go at creating quizzes without the outlay upfront. Try it out, and if it works for you, move onto a premium quiz maker with more features and a better, ad-free interface.

The tool is quick and easy to get started, so it’s a good beginner’s option. Additionally, it’s easy to share your pro-looking quizzes on social media once you’re done.

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12. Alchemer

Pricing: Collaborator Plan, $49/month per user; Professional Plan, $149/month per user; Full Access Plan, $249/month per user

Alchemer is a feature-rich quiz and survey creation tool with a user-friendly interface. There are two versions — one geared towards individuals and small businesses, and another for larger enterprises. The former focuses on ease-of-use, while the latter enables deeper analysis of data and focuses more on customer research.

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13. Wufoo

Pricing: Starter Plan, $14/month per user; Professional Plan, $29/month per user; Advanced Plan, $74/month per user; Ultimate Plan, $183/month per user

A versatile tool for form design, survey creation, and quiz making, Wufoo is a cloud-based platform used by some of the biggest names in the industry. Its most notable feature is the advanced form logic and the ease with which you can collect, store, and organize data.

Not as easy to use as some of the more basic tools out there, Wufoo takes a bit of getting used to if you’re using the more advanced features (basic coding may be required!), but for routine form creation, it’s still pretty intuitive.

The free version limits the number of responses, but above that there are a number of price points, so it’s a good option for businesses that are growing quickly.

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14. Ask Nicely

Pricing: Pricing available upon request

Ask Nicely is a form and survey creator with a focus on customer feedback and improving your Net Promoter Score (NPS). The software integrates with HubSpot, Salesforce, or Slack and allows you to automate customer follow-up to improve ratings and reviews on sites like Google.

Ask Nicely is more than just a quiz maker — it’s an advanced marketing tool suitable for medium to large companies who really value customer engagement. Pricing is based on your needs, but $375 is a rough idea of how much it will cost you. (It’s not cheap.)

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15. Brandquiz

Pricing: Free Limited Plan; Starter Plan, $25/month per user; Professional Plan, $75/month per user; Business Plan, $195/month per user

Brandquiz is a good option for quickly and easily creating fun branded quizzes with a range of templates available. The platform enables integration with major marketing tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, or MailChimp, to make the most of the data collected.

The free version extends to up to 100 participants per month, while a range of paid plans offer value for growing companies.

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16. Microsoft Forms

Pricing: Free

Microsoft Forms, similar to Google forms, is a great tool for those who are proficient in Microsoft Office as it has seamless integration with other Microsoft Office software. With easy step-by-step guides for creating basic forms and quizzes, Microsoft Forms keeps it simple.

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17. Form Crafts

Pricing: Free Limited Plan; Standard Plan, $29/month per user; Plus Plan, $79/month per user; Enterprise Plan, $179/month per user

Although designed for creating simple questionnaires, newsletter sign-ups, and the like, Form Crafts supports multi-page forms so it can also be used to make quizzes. With real-time analytics, conditional logic, and easy integration with WordPress via a plugin, it offers a good alternative to the mainstream options.

Pricing is competitive with a range of options to suit any growing business.

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18. ClassMarker

Pricing: Professional 1 Plan, $39.95/month per user; Professional 2 Plan, $79.95/month per user

ClassMarker is a quiz maker designed for education professionals with custom plans for business users, too. You can create tests and exams that are accessible to as many users as you like. The test can be customized to your branding and can even include branded certificates. A sophisticated results platform allows you to easily analyze the data and draw conclusions.

This is a good option for large businesses that need to survey a lot of users. Pricing plans are pretty competitive for the level of functionality and customization available.

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Now I know there are a lot of quiz makers to choose from this list, so let’s figure out which quiz makers are right for you.

Which quiz maker is right for me?

Different quiz makers can serve different purposes — it all depends on what you’re looking for. Figure out your intentions for the quiz, what you hope to gain from it, and then start your search for the best one.

Best Online Quiz Software for Marketers

• Interact

Marketers focus on how their content can generate leads, segment their audience, and drive traffic to their websites — and Interact is the quiz maker just for that.

With built-in analytics, marketers can take real-time data from their quizzes and integrate them with email marketing and automation systems to capture and segment leads.

Best Online Quiz Maker for Teachers

• Typeform

This quiz maker engages students, but also goes a step further with more functionality. For example, if you’re teaching a topic that involves math, Typeform offers a calculator function during quizzes. It also offers subgrouping of answers and questions to divide the types of questions offered, too.

Best Online Quiz Creator for Fun

• Kahoot

To engage quiz takers both young and old, Kahoot is a fun and interactive quiz maker because it makes quizzes into a game.

Boost Your Engagement with Engaging Quizzes

Sharing engaging quizzes is a solid way to capture more leads. With the help of a great quiz maker, you can make the great ones that showcase your company goals and appeal to your audience.

Check out our comprehensive guide if you want to find out the best ways to capture more leads with quizzes — and good luck in your quest for the best quizzer on the market.

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

Let’s say a salesperson comes up to you and says, “Here’s something you should know about.” If you don’t see this person as a trustworthy, knowledgeable source, you probably have no reason to listen.

Let’s replace the salesperson with your cousin Dave. The odds of you listening to what Dave has to say likely goes up, depending on your relationship with Dave and the topic he’s leaning into.

Now let’s replace Dave with an expert in the field who has done extensive research on the topic using a variety of credible sources. This expert also has the background to simplify and provide context to the topic. Now you have a reason to listen (and not just because you’re related).

Done well, an email newsletter is like the expert in the field of your email marketing efforts.

The curation serves to up-level the journalistic quality of your content, which results in two things:

• Increases the value you provide
• Improves your authority and credibility in your audience’s eyes

When people first start doing email marketing, they often assume they need an email newsletter. However, newsletters are only effective when done well.

“It’ll have everything our customers care about, all in one place,” they rationalize. “Our list will be different — people will actually look forward to getting our newsletter,” they argue. “Since we’re only sending it once a month, it’ll be a breeze to put together,” they say.

And while all of those things may become true for a few lucky individuals, lots of email newsletters flop. They become an uninteresting mush of content people automatically ignore, archive, delete, or straight up unsubscribe from. And this isn’t great for you, your metrics, or your company’s success.

So if you’re thinking about creating an email newsletter, keep on reading. In this post, we’ll cover:

• Ideas to make your newsletter an effective one
• Design tips that help ensure a great reading experience
• Examples of newsletters that are crushing it (to draw inspiration from)

Email Newsletter Ideas

Email newsletters can include a weekly round-up of blog posts, case studies regarding your product or service, upcoming company events and webinars, or even a behind-the-scenes look at your company.

Of course, you don’t want to create a newsletter just for the sake of creating one — instead, you should do thorough research on what your audience might prefer, and what your company is well-suited to offer.

If you’re looking for general email newsletter inspiration, you’re in luck. Here’s a list of some of our favorite ideas for email newsletters:

• Round-up of popular or recent blog posts or videos
• New job openings at your company
• New case studies or product launches
• Membership/customer deals and promotions
• New best practices or tips
• Industry news
• Quotes
• Recent survey results related to your industry
• Internal employee news, including anniversaries, promotions, and birthdays
• Listicles (i.e. “10 Best Vacation Spots of 2020” if you work for a Travel publication)
• A team spotlight with pictures and bios
• Photos or stories customers have shared
• Behind-the-scenes at your company, or interviews with company executives
• Monthly business recap
• New training opportunities
• FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) and answers
• Upcoming webinars, or recordings of past webinars

Next, let’s explore some newsletter designs to inspire the aesthetic of your newsletter.

Featured Guide: Email Newsletter Design Examples Lookbook

Learn how to build an email newsletter from scratch, and see dozens of email newsletter examples from real businesses with this free guide.

Email Newsletter Design

While you can get creative with the structure of your email newsletter, the general anatomy typically includes:

• Your logo or masthead
• A featured image and other eye-catching visuals
• Top stories featured at the top
• Additional content and promotions following
• An email footer with social links and subscription information

From a design standpoint, your company’s newsletter should be a true reflection of your brand. For instance, if your website features minimalist design and clean, plain black-and-white text, then you don’t want to create a super colorful newsletter, which might confuse new subscribers.

There are a few best practices, however, you can employ to ensure your design is up-to-par regardless of your audience’s preferences:

• Clean, crisp images (no blurry images)
• Text (use same text throughout), company logo, and icons
• Try filters, memes, or video
• Make the CTA clear and obvious — and just have one (i.e. “Click here to shop” or “Click here to read”)
• Create a hierarchy with CTA early-on
• Mobile-responsive
• Test the length of your newsletter to ensure it’s not too short or too long for your audience

Of course, the design of your newsletter will depend on your brand, as well as the message. For instance, you might want to create a colorful, attention-grabbing newsletter if it largely focuses on visuals of new products — alternatively, if it’s a round-up of recent blog posts, perhaps you try a more minimalist look to mimic the appearance of a letter.

Of course, you’ll want to A/B test whichever design(s) you choose, to ensure they resonate with your audience.

I’d also recommend looking into pre-made templates if you’re not familiar with designing emails. If you’re a HubSpot customer, you’ll have a bunch of pre-made templates in the email tool.

However, if you’re still unsure about your newsletter design, there’s nothing better than looking at examples for further inspiration.

Take a look at the following newsletters that knocked it out of the park, and consider using some of their design elements as inspiration for your own.

Each newsletter on this list is fabulous for different reasons. Some have exceptional design, some have exceptional copy, some have exceptional calls-to-action … but all are exceptional at solving for their subscribers’ needs.

1. The Hustle

The Hustle is a daily newsletter that promises “business and tech in 5 minutes or less.”

While there are a ton of business and tech newsletters out there, what makes The Hustle remarkable is its tone at the intersection of informational and hilarious.

Take two of their most notable headlines from 2020 as an example:

• “The man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship”
• “The economics of vending machines”

The Hustle also allows subscribers to customize the content they receive to fit their interests (see the “Snippets” section in the example below).

The formula of great content + unique tone + personalization works well for The Hustle’s audience as they’ve grown to more than 1.5 million subscribers.

2. NextDraft

NextDraft is a daily email written by a man named Dave Pell, which is a curation of the best web content of the day. As Pell describes it, “Each morning I visit about fifty news sites and from that swirling nightmare of information quicksand, I pluck the top ten most fascinating items of the day, which I deliver with a fast, pithy wit that will make your computer device vibrate with delight.”

You can tell he’s a great writer. His copywriting is one of my favorite things about the newsletter. It starts with the subject line, which is usually a play on words or a clever one-liner on the top news of the day. It then extends to the body of the email itself, which is always descriptive, accurate, and clever. Finally, the minimalist design is fantastic.

Not only is content delivery is clear, organized, and digestible, but also the inclusion of social share buttons underneath each story is brilliant. Rather than assuming that the reader is going to make it to a social sharing option at the bottom of the newsletter, Pell provides them with multiple opportunities throughout. Social engagement can play a big role in growing your newsletter, as every share on social opens up a valuable opportunity to attract more subscribers.

For those who’d rather read news like this in a mobile app, the NextDraft app is free in Apple’s app store.

[Click here to see the entire email.]

3. REI

REI, the recreational sports outfitter, is a model of success in several areas of content marketing — and their membership email is no exception.

We included this email newsletter on our list because it does what many ecommerce and consumer product vendors find challenging: promote good products with good content. In the newsletter example below, you’ll see how REI delivers many different types of material to its subscribers, and each type relates to one another. Following the seasonal product offerings at the top of the email, the company offers trainings to help educate readers on its new products and blog posts for even more insight into the outdoor lifestyle.

Did you notice something else about this newsletter? It’s dedicated entirely to runners. Catering your email newsletter to a single audience — even if that audience belongs to an even bigger buyer persona — can help you tell a story in your email that resonates with the recipient from start to finish.

4. Austin Kleon

Not to play favorites, but this newsletter from Austin Kleon is one I really look forward to. First, I love the simplicity. It’s not flashy, nor is it overly promotional. That’s the hallmark of a successful email newsletter: The most effective newsletters aim to educate, not sell.

I also love the overall informal tone he takes, as it makes it feel as though you’re hearing from a friend. If you’re looking to lower the barrier between your company and your audience, consider using language that is friendly and inviting, not buttoned-up and jargony.

[Click here to see the entire email.]

5. FandangoNOW

FandangoNOW is a movie streaming app that allows you to build a library of purchased and rented movies around your interests. And it uses the below email newsletter as part of its customer retention strategy.

The email below offers movie suggestions for the weekend, making it a well-timed newsletter if it lands in your inbox on Friday afternoon. In addition, its design is easy to digest, despite being so graphic-intense. Using numbered icons and consistent “Buy” and “Rent” CTAs in corners of each movie tile, the email compartmentalizes a lot of content while still connecting each movie to the FandangoNOW brand.

6. InVision

InVision’s newsletter is a weekly digest of their best blog content, a roundup of their favorite design links from the week, and a new opportunity to win a free t-shirt.

Not only is their newsletter a great mix of content, but I also love the nice balance between images and text, making it easy to read and mobile-friendly. They make great use of animated GIFs in their emails. I also love the clever copy on their call-to-action buttons:

• “Cat GIFs on Every Page”
• “Set Your Sights”
• “Why So Serious?”

In addition to classic CTA buttons, they engage their audience at the bottom of every newsletter with a “You tell us!” text CTA.

7. Community.is

Community.is is a handcrafted newsletter created for people who “put people at the center of their work.” This unique concept attracts a variety of readers from executives at ad agencies, to community managers at startups, to marketers and creatives of all shapes and sizes.

In an effort to cater to their melting pot of subscribers, Community.is adopted a three-tier format: Short, Mid, and Long. While an executive may only have time to skim the short stuff, a marketer might be looking for a more in-depth read to spark some inspiration for their next campaign. Organizing a newsletter in this way helps ensure that you’re serving the distinct needs of your audience without it being too confusing.

[Click here to see the entire email.]

8. Vox Sentences

Vox Sentences is a nightly email meant to quickly get its readers up to speed on the best stories from the day. The content ranges from the day’s top news to fun stories from all over the web. They do a great job balancing their own content with external sources, and the stories they choose are always really high quality.

You can read Vox’s entire newsletter from start to finish and get a great sense of the stories they’re covering — but you can also click through to any of the linked stories to get a more in-depth approach.

9. Fizzle

Fizzle’s newsletter is aimed at entrepreneurs who want weekly tips on building a business sent directly to their inbox and all in the email itself. Although they have a business blog and a podcast, what makes Fizzle’s newsletter unique is that the email content is independent from those other content assets. In other words, it’s written entirely for their subscribers.

The copywriting style makes the newsletter unique and appealing, too: It’s casual, honest, and written like the author is writing to a friend. The writing gives off the vibe of real, down-to-earth business advice — without the fluffy stuff. At the same time, it’s written with clear headers and sub-headers to break it up, and the important stuff is bolded, making for easy skimming.

10. TheSkimm

If you want to stay up on what’s happening in the world and have some delightful writing delivered to your inbox first thing in the morning, look no further than TheSkimm. It’s a daily roundup of what’s happened in the news in short, punchy paragraphs.

The best part? You don’t have to click out of the email to read the news if you don’t want to — although they do link to their sources if you want to read further.

For your own email marketing, TheSkimm is the place to go if you’re looking for writing inspiration or for emails without much visual content.

11. Medium

Medium is a blog-publishing platform that has been continuously building momentum since its launch in 2012. Publishing on the site has really picked up in the past few years, and nowadays, there are a ton of people publishing posts on the site every day.

Of course, that means there’s a lot of content for the average person to filter through. To help bring great content to the surface, Medium uses email newsletters. And after I open this newsletter every day, I end up going to visit several Medium posts without fail. (Mission accomplished for Medium, right?)

Here’s why: The newsletter feels pretty minimal. Because of the way that Medium uses colors and section dividers, they’re able to give you a ton of content in one email without it feeling overwhelming. Plus, they offer both a daily and a weekly version of the digest, allowing users to opt in for the email frequency they feel most comfortable with.

12. BrainPickings

BrainPickings is one of the most interesting newsletters out there. In fact, the folks who write it call it an “interestingness digest.” Every Sunday morning, subscribers get the past week’s most unmissable articles about creativity, psychology, art, science, design, and philosophy — topics that are really appealing to a wide audience. At its core, it explores what it means to live a good life.

This is one of the longest newsletters I’ve ever read, but what makes it still work well is how high quality and well packaged the content is.

(Bonus: Check out the delightful microcopy in the top right-hand corner.)

[Click here to see the entire email.]

13. Litmus

You’d hope that an email marketing testing company would have great emails … and Litmus definitely does. While the content of the emails is certainly interesting, I’m especially digging the design. The blocks of color help break up the newsletter into sections that are easy to differentiate.

I also like that the text calls-to-action at the end of each post’s description don’t just say something generic, like “Read this post.” Instead, they are matched with specific actions related to the post’s content, like “Get the checklist” and “Discover why you should test.”

14. General Assembly

There are a lot of creative things you can do with images in your emails, from designing your own custom graphics to creating animated GIFs. General Assembly, an organization that helps expand professionals’ skill sets, likes to employ tactics like these in their newsletter.

From their attractive and minimal layout to their concise copy and helpful information, this is a great example of a newsletter that gives subscribers quick information in an easily scannable format.

15. The Ringer

Remember Grantland, the sports and pop culture blog owned by ESPN that was started by sports journalist Bill Simmons? In October 2015, ESPN announced it would be ending the publication of Grantland. Shortly thereafter, Simmons formed Bill Simmon Media Group and recruited a whole bunch of former Grantland staffers to launch a brand new newsletter in March 2016 called The Ringer.

Although The Ringer is written and run by many former Grantland employees it’s a different project than Grantland was. Where Grantland focused on sports and pop culture, The Ringer branches out into other areas like tech and politics. Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama, is among the contributors. I like how focused they are on experimentation: “We want to have fun, take chances, analyze, theorize, obsess, and try not to take ourselves too seriously,” said Editor-in-Chief Sean Fennessey.

Another differentiator? The Ringer’s website was developed in partnership with publishing platform Medium — which means the newsletter reflects that clean, minimal design.

[Click here to see the entire email.]

16. Hacker Newsletter

Many marketers don’t frequent Hacker News, but they should still check out this hand-picked curation of the social network’s top stories of the day.

Why? The newsletter is clean and minimal, but still sends a ton of really great content its subscribers’ way. The way it distills potentially overwhelming information is by bucketing content into sections. The newsletter also looks very similar to the site, so for those who love the site and how it’s laid out, the newsletter feels like a comforting, familiar way to consume content.

[Click here to see the entire email.]

17. Below the Fold

Below the Fold is a weekly newsletter (from Acciyo) that surfaces important and interesting stories that simply aren’t making headlines due to the crowded, never-ending news cycle we all experience day in and day out.

Acciyo’s editorial team handpicks great news stories that they believe deserve “front-page love” but are being beaten out by an “infinite scroll of breaking headlines” — stories that range from how investors are profiting from emergency room bills, to how one Mexican company turned prickly pear into sustainable fuel.

What I love most about Below the Fold is not just that I get to read super interesting stories that would be hard to find on my own, but that the mission behind their newsletter is unique and creates new value for their readers. They’re not just curating content on a single topic; they’re appealing to an audience who’s tired of reading the same headlines across their feeds and want to know what else is happening in the world.

Some of their most engaged sends are weeks where one story dominates coverage, preventing other important stories from reaching people. It’s easy to get caught up in what’s trending and miss what else is happening in the world. They do a great job of communicating a mission that truly differentiates them and creates value readers won’t get anywhere else.

18. #SEOFOMO

Things can change quickly in the world of SEO, so fear of missing out (or, affectionately dubbed, FOMO) is a real mood among professionals immersed in the industry.

That’s why Aleyda Solis, an expert in the space, started the newsletter: “#SEOFOMO was born with the goal to share the type of newsletter I wished to receive myself as an SEO consultant.”

The newsletter itself is comprehensive, containing search- and algorithm-related news, curated articles, guides and resources, and open SEO jobs.

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Creating an Email Newsletter Your Subscribers Love

Even though newsletters are one of the most common types of emails to send, they are actually some of the hardest to do right. We hope these examples gave you some quality inspiration so you can create newsletters your subscribers love to get in their inboxes.

The quality of your CRM data impacts your entire organization, bottom to top.

Your marketing teams rely on quality data to segment contacts, personalize messaging, and create targeted campaigns.

Your sales teams require accurate data to speak to your prospects’ biggest concerns.

Your customer support team needs accurate data for context in conversations with customers. Finance teams need accurate customer data for forecasting. Even your executive team relies on accurate CRM data for strategic decision-making.

Most organizations know this. Yet, bad data costs U.S. companies as much as $3 trillion per year, and up to 60% of organizations do not calculate the true cost of their bad data.

That signals that there is a lot of room for improvement in data maintenance in many companies. Companies of any size would be impacted by that much inaccurate data in their customer database, although they may be unaware of just how painful the impact may be, with many of the day-to-day issues flying under the radar.

That much “bad” data represents a huge problem for your marketing teams in particular. How do you speak to your customers’ biggest concerns if you can’t be sure that you know exactly who they are and what they care about? You need accurate, reliable data to be confident in your assertions.

Today, companies often lean too heavily on manual work to fix data issues, which can be extremely time-consuming and draining for your teams. Relying on your employees to export data, fix it in Excel using complicated formulas, and import it back into your CRM issue-free is a big ask.

Let’s consider how poor data quality impacts your marketing teams, slowing them down and giving them less creative options when launching new campaigns.

Impact of Data Quality On Your Marketing Efforts

While the impact of poor customer data quality is felt throughout your organization, it has an especially volatile impact on your marketing teams.

Everything that a marketing team does — every strategy employed, campaign launched, messaging delivered, & creative produced — is influenced by customer data. Or at least it should be.

That’s what great marketing teams do — understand their customers deeply and speak directly to them in a way that resonates. You can’t do that if you don’t know them, and you can’t be sure that you know them if you can’t rely on your data.

Let’s look at some of the specific ways that data issues and low-quality data can impact your marketing teams.

Segmentation

A big piece of any marketer’s job is segmentation. Or, the practice of analyzing long lists of customers and breaking them down into smaller lists so that you can more reliably speak to each segment’s concerns.

You wouldn’t market your B2B software product in the same way to both CEOs and Marketing Managers, even though both might be targeted buyer personas for your product. They have different needs and concerns. If you try, the language that you use will never fully resonate with both.

So you break things down. You make the list of people that you are speaking to smaller and more manageable. Then, you can use specific language that will resonate with that segment. But if your data isn’t reliable, you can’t effectively segment it down into those smaller groups.

Marketers cannot properly segment contacts with inconsistent data. With inconsistencies, creating even basic campaigns becomes a complicated analysis effort that requires experts on hand that understand all of the nuances. As a result, it prevents marketers from creating effective campaigns and impedes their ability to execute quickly.

Let’s consider an example. Let’s say you’re a B2B software company, and you want to send out an email campaign to CEOs in your HubSpot CRM.

If you aren’t regularly standardizing and formatting your job title field data, you’ll find that CEOs are listed in your database in many different ways:

• CEO
• C.E.O.
• Chief Executive Officer
• Founder/CEO
• Founder & CEO
• Owner and CEO
• Etc.

And there are likely to be many other variations as well.

To run a thorough campaign, you need to bring all of these different job titles together, as they are all effectively the same title. To do this, you’ll need to either run some creative Excel formulas, create complicated search filters to “catch” all the relevant titles, or enlist the help of a developer. Either way, you are still unlikely to catch every single error in the field.

This doesn’t even include typos and other errors in your data, either. Some people might be listed as “CEOn” or have job titles listed that include other data issues. And these standardization and data quality issues can potentially impact your entire database.

For instance, this standardization problem wouldn’t only affect CEOs, but every job title in your database. Or, what if you wanted to segment your CRM contacts by city, country, area code, or years of experience? Data issues are present in every field.

Every data point in your database has a host of potential issues that could impact your ability to segment your contacts and deliver effective campaigns that meet your KPI goals.

Data issues make your segmentation efforts complicated and unreliable. Ultimately your marketing teams will be forced to segment less often and less creatively until the issues are rectified.

Personalization

Data issues will also impact your ability to personalize your messaging as well. And personalized messages are critical for successful campaigns.

80% of consumers are more likely to purchase a brand that provides personalized experiences. 72% of consumers say they only engage with personalized messaging.

Your ability to personalize messaging is critical and relies on high-quality, consistent data in your CRM. Have you ever received an email and had your name uncapitalized, or been mistakenly referred to by your last name?

Inherently, you probably know that this is a simple data oversight. They didn’t mean to refer to you by your last name. But it does still impact your feelings about the company in question, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s not intentionally rude, but it’s unprofessional to keep your customer data in disarray.

And it’s not just about {FirstName} or {JobTitle} either, although those are important. True, deep personalization may not reference the data so directly, but use conclusions drawn from that data to guide your messaging.

For example, one common personalization issue that arises out of CRM data problems comes from associations. In HubSpot CRM, your B2B contacts are associated with companies.

If that association was missing and a portion of your contacts were free-floating, that would make it impossible to execute account-based marketing strategies. Additionally, personalizing the message based on account engagement becomes difficult when you are missing data.

Inconsistent associations also contribute to inaccurate lead scores in account-based marketing. Because scores are applied on the account level, based on variables for the independent contacts within the account, missing contacts will impact the account scores. Ultimately, the difference in lead scoring could affect the lifecycle stage of the entire account, slowing its movement through your pipeline and potentially derailing a deal.  

Customer Experience

Issues with segmentation and personalization ultimately impact the experience that customers have during their customer journey. With less specific marketing messaging that is less likely to resonate, their experiences and opinion of your brand will suffer.

92% of marketing professionals see personalization as a “crucial” element of the customer experience. And personalization often relies on your ability to segment customer data effectively to deliver relevant messaging. All of these impacts are interconnected, hurting your entire marketing operation.

Duplicate data, for instance, presents a customer experience issue that can potentially harm your brand reputation. If you don’t regularly merge duplicates, many of your customers will receive your messaging multiple times. This drives up the costs of your campaigns, harms your brand reputation, and makes your reporting less reliable.

Deduplication helps achieve a single customer view, which is when your data on your contacts and accounts can all be reliably found in one system. Having one single ‘record of truth’ means that your marketing teams can effectively segment and personalize communications. A single customer view provides your teams with faith in your data, allowing them to focus their attention on other areas.

The quality of your data impacts customers every step of the way. Without reliable data, each of those touchpoints is cheapened. Less data, or less reliable data, limits what can be used and what your teams know about each contact. Across months and dozens of touchpoints, that adds up.  

The only way for companies to fix these issues is to recognize and embrace data management strategy and regular CRM data maintenance.

What is CRM data maintenance?

CRM data maintenance is the ongoing process of auditing your CRM data, identifying issues, and fixing those issues within your database.

The larger process of maintaining your CRM data can be broken down into numerous focus areas, including:

• Data Quality
• Data Cleansing
• Data Operations
• Data Deduplication
• Data Purging
• Data Monitoring and KPIs

Data Quality

Data quality refers to data that is accessible, consistent, and relevant. Your entire organization is impacted by the quality of your data — from individual campaigns through larger strategic decisions.

Accessible means not only that the data is accurate, but that the right people within your organization can access it when they need it. Siloed data creates bureaucratic redundancies that slow your organization down.

Data consistency largely refers to how consistently data is formatted and standardized in your database. Are your phone numbers formatted uniformly? Are your job titles standardized? Are your contact names appropriately capitalized? Consistency allows you to slice and dice data in interesting ways.

Then there is relevance. It doesn’t matter if you have a million perfectly accurate records in your CRM if none of them are in your target market. The data that you collect must be relevant to be useful.

Data quality is achieved through other data maintenance processes like data cleansing.

Data Cleansing

Data cleansing is the process of fixing or removing incorrect, improperly formatted, duplicate, or incomplete data within your CRM.

• Fixing first and last name capitalization issues (jane vs. Jane)
• Standardizing addresses and phone numbers (1234567890 vs 123-456-7890)
• Standardizing Job titles (CEO vs. C.E.O vs. Chief Executive Officer)
• Removing redundant data
• Removing incorrect and fake data
• Removing special characters
• Identifying and fixing outlying issues

The process of cleansing data can be time-consuming. Often it involves breaking out chunks of your database and assigning fixes and tasks to members of your team. Then, they will load the data into Excel and use VLOOKUP and complicated formulas to identify and fix errors in your data. Once complete, the data has to be reimported back into your CRM.

It’s a non-exact process. Unless you have a true Excel wizard on your team, you’re likely to miss many issues and still require ongoing help from developers to update data in bulk.

Data Deduplication

All companies deal with duplicate data. Duplicate contact or company records might be created through manual entry, either by your customers into forms or by your team through your backend CRM. Or, they may be created through data imports or integrations with other software.

No matter how duplicate records are created, they can be a thorn in the side of your marketing team.

Duplicate data leads to increased campaign costs and lost productivity. As your teams spend time ironing out data issues instead of focusing on other areas, leading to missed opportunities. Every second they spend sifting through records to identify the “correct” or most complete record is wasted time. Duplicate data shatters your single customer view, as there is no single ‘source of truth’ that can be relied on.

When you have high duplication rates, your marketing teams will always be aware of that fact. They know that they will have to deduplicate any list of prospects or customers before new campaigns go out, adding a new task to every campaign launch.

Most critically, duplicate data harms the customer experience. Not just because they are likely to receive mixed messages and redundant messaging. But because your ability to understand them will be halved throughout the customer lifecycle, leading to less fulfilling interactions over and over again.

Data Operations

Data operations encompasses the ongoing day-to-day tasks that are required to maintain your CRM data and ensure the usability of that data across your organization.

Data operations tasks include day-to-day bulk updating of data, consolidating fields and redundant data, migrating free-text fields to picklists, importing data (from events or third-party sources), and other tasks.

These tasks are a necessity for high-quality data, and for putting your data in a position where data cleansing can be as effective as possible.

Data Purging

Data purging encompasses the removal of garbage data, outdated data, redundant data, and low-quality data that will only serve to clutter up your database and negatively impact your reputation and email open rates.

There are many types of data issues that could potentially make records a good candidate for purging. Examples include:

• Undelivered emails
• Clearly fake data
• Outdated records
• Unqualified prospects
• Bad records from integrations
• Incomplete Contact Data
• Free and role-based email addresses
• Unengaged contacts
• Unqualified contacts
• Duplicate contacts

Purging this data is critical for improving the usability of your CRM data as a whole. Without having to continually sift through and remove garbage data for campaigns, your productivity will improve.

Without clutter, you’ll be able to keep costs down on data storage and contact-based CRM fees, along with the time that your teams would usually spend dealing with the purged records.

Without low-quality data dragging down your email delivery and open rates, you’ll avoid being penalized and enjoy an improved sender reputation.

Data Monitoring and KPIs

To fix issues in your CRM database, you’ll need to be able to identify where those issues lie. Between the different data issues that you’ll find in your database, understanding what those issues are and what kind of issues there are helps you to prioritize fixing the most impactful problems.

Of course, you could monitor your KPIs and generate reports manually. But that involves running reports or exporting data to Excel and analyzing it. However, some tools can automate diagnostics and collections KPIs.

For example, the CRM Data Grader is a tool that connects directly to HubSpot, analyzes the CRM database, and surfaces specific issues that you need to fix. This ensures you have visibility into the quality of your data and actionable insights for dealing with those issues.  

Having a clear key performance indicator, such as the percentage of clean records in your database, allows you to track your progress and quickly assess the overall health of your customer data.

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Differences Data Maintenance and Standard Cleanup Projects

Standard data cleanup projects are short-term and tactical. You find a fire, you put it out. Data cleanup projects are reactive because they have to be. Sometimes unexpected data issues can grind things to a halt and need to be fixed immediately. Those needs will always be there, but less often with a data maintenance strategy.

Unlike one-off cleanup projects, data maintenance is an ongoing strategy. It requires consistent investment and attention, but with the help of modern data management tools you can automate a majority of your data maintenance tasks, improving operations across your teams.

As your customer data grows, management of that data becomes more complicated. It requires more focus and planning to ensure your data is accessible, consistent, and relevant.

As this happens, companies tend to move through several stages on their way toward true data maintenance optimization:

1. Undefined and chaotic. No understanding of issues and no processes in place to deal with them.
2. Visibility. Aware of data-related problems have visibility into the specific problems in their database, with reporting generated automatically regularly.
3. Standardization. Established data quality standards and alignment among cross-functional teams about data expectations and goals. To execute effectively, standards need to be enforced automatically.
4. Optimization. Employ automation to proactively cleanse and maintain data, avoid repetitive manual work, streamline data corrections and collaboration, alert about exceptions.

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Data maintenance isn’t something that you do once and then never again. This process is something that you’ll need to do over and over again. You need accurate documentation and processes in place to minimize your time investment.

New data is always flowing into your CRM database, and with that data will come a range of issues and errors that have the potential to slow down nearly every team in your organization. Tools like Insycle help you to audit your existing data, identify common data issues, and fix them on an automated set schedule.

Improving your CRM data maintenance processes enable your marketing teams to produce more marketing qualified leads through improved segmentation, personalization, and nurturing.

Quality data means that you can represent your brand professionally in all communications with customers while improving their experience throughout the customer lifecycle.

In 1898, Elias St. Elmo Lewis, an eventual inductee of the Advertising Hall of Fame, anonymously wrote a column about three advertising principles he found useful throughout his career in a printing magazine called The Inland Printer, one of the most influential American magazines of the 19th century.

In his column, he states that a successful advertisement should always follow a specific formula.

“The mission of an advertisement is to attract a reader, so that he will look at the advertisement and start to read it; then to interest him, so that he will continue to read it; then to convince him, so that when he has read it he will believe it. If an advertisement contains these three qualities of success, it is a successful advertisement.”

In other words, copy is only good if it attracts attention, generates interest, and creates conviction, in that order.

Over a century later, Lewis’ principles still ring true. They’re expressed as an acronym, AIDA, and widely used in the advertising industry. In the digital age, brands have even based their entire marketing strategy on the AIDA model.

Before we cover how you can apply the AIDA model to your own content marketing strategy, let’s go over what it is and why it works.

Brands use the AIDA model to determine the way they should craft and distribute marketing messages to their target audience at each stage of the buyer’s journey.

The AIDA model is considered a hierarchy of effects model, which means consumers must move through each stage of the model to complete the desired action. Just like a typical marketing funnel, each stage has fewer consumers than the previous one.

How to Apply the AIDA Model to Your Marketing

By creating campaigns and structuring your website with the AIDA model in mind, you can get more control over your prospects’ paths to a purchasing decision.

In theory, as they progress through each stage of the model, consumers who learn about your brand will develop certain feelings or emotions about your product or service, which is what ultimately compels them to act.

Here’s what you can do to implement AIDA:

Attract Attention

If your content can grab their attention and deeply engage them, your target audience will start to become curious about what your company actually does.

In this stage, the consumer is asking, “What is it?”

In order to get to this stage, you must first get your content in front of them. This comes with increased brand awareness and effective messaging.

Example

Effective content marketing is one method of attracting visitors to your website. If you create content that solves their problems and focuses on their passions, you’ll be able to draw them in and provide a solution. When executed effectively, your target audience should be able to discover your content through Google, social media, and other channels.

Wistia does this well with their content marketing, producing not just educational blog posts that drive traffic but also entertaining or inspiring “shows.” This tactic allows them to not just address the pains their prospects have but also go above and beyond to make solving that problem easier (and, in some cases, entertaining). Leaning into video as a medium instead of just blogging ties into their product and mission, keeping Wistia’s solutions top of mind as prospects consume this content.

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Generate Interest

Once your target audience is interested in your product or service, they’ll want to learn more about your brand, the benefits of your solution, and your potential fit with them.

In this stage, the goal is to get them to think, “I like it.”

In order to get to this stage, your content must be persuasive and engaging. While the first stage of AIDA is capturing their attention, this stage is about holding it. You can do this with a hook.

Example

Let’s say your content marketing was effective in drawing them to the website to learn about a pain, problem, or need they have. You might then “hook” them with engaging storytelling that demonstrates the why behind your solution.

Stories resonate with humans, and it’s a simple way to convey information in a way that stimulates empathy and curiosity.

To generate enough excitement in your prospects to compel them to act, you need to make sure their affinity for your brand hits a certain threshold. The more aligned you are with their needs and values, the more likely you are to achieve success.

Below the Fold is a service that delivers relevant news articles to its users. It generates interest with its hook: “Stories that don’t make it to the front page.” The intrigue in this line opens up a loop (What have I been missing without this service?) while highlighting their value proposition of surfacing stories that aren’t getting coverage but are still important.

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Stimulate Desire

People do business with those they know, like, and trust. The first two stages of the AIDA model establish the know and the like.

The goal of this stage is to change “I like it” to “I want it.”

And that’s done by cementing in the final piece of the puzzle: Trust.

To do this, keep serving them content. Make sure they subscribe to your blog, follow you on social media, and download your offers. The more prospects interact with your brand, the more they’ll trust you, boosting the chances they’ll eventually buy your product or service.

Example

The prospects you’re most likely to close are the consumers who envision a future with you — they already enjoy consuming your content and think your product or service will be even better.

For this reason, you must institute a gap between where they are and where they could be with your solution. At the same time, you must establish social proof with case studies and testimonials.

“Before and After” style content is a great example of how to stimulate desire while gaining trust. Check out the headline on this case study by Calendly: “Convert 60% more PPC leads into bookings using Black Propeller’s secret weapon.” This helps a prospect envision a future with this product (What would my life be like if I achieved similar results?). The “before” is them at their current stage, and the “after” is the vision of them with a 60% increase in conversions. Then, if they read the full case study, they get exposed to social proof from a customer just like them.

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Spur Into Action

After you generate enough desire for your product or service, give your prospects the chance to act on it. After all, what’s the point of creating content and building deep relationships with prospects if there isn’t a clear next step?

The goal is to get them to decide, “I’m getting it.”

No matter what the “next step” is, you should compel them to respond with low-friction but high-incentive calls to action.

Example

Whether they’re far away or close to a purchasing decision, the next step that you present should be “high-value.” In other words, it must help them in some way.

If they understand what the outcome of your offer is and find it valuable to them, they’ll be more likely to act (since they aren’t simply committing to a sales call or sales content).

Consider exactly how you can provide that value while motivating them to engage with you.

The CTA for this “next step” or offer should be prominent, clear, and uncomplicated. Perhaps it’s a button or banner that spells out what action they must take and what they get if they do. By eliminating friction in the process, you increase your likelihood of success.

Nerdwallet, a personal finance site that provides resources on everything from credit to mortgages, has such a CTA. The idea is that they can engage their audience and compel them to action by offering a comparison tool. They highlight this tool directly on their homepage with a grabby headline and value-driven subheadline along with a high-contrast button. The setup is uncomplicated and friction-free. Nerdwallet is simultaneously able to generate leads while empowering and delighting those leads with high-value information.

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AIDA Drawbacks

Now that you are familiar with the AIDA framework and how it operates, you should also consider some of its limitations:

1. It doesn’t take into account non-linear buyer’s journeys.

AIDA does a fantastic job of describing a linear thought process for a purchasing decision. However, not all purchasing decisions are linear.

A prospective customer might get their interest peaked but ultimately choose a different solution, only coming back to the original provider if their needs aren’t met.

More commonly, someone might have a desire for a solution before being aware of it and taking action to find it (thus experiencing the Desire and Action before the Attention and Interest).

2. It doesn’t take into account impulse purchases or super short sales cycles.

In addition to a non-linear journey, a prospective customer might cycle through multiple stages of AIDA at the same time — all four for an impulse buy or emergency purchase.

3. It’s only a small piece of a holistic business strategy.

AIDA is also limited to first-time purchases. Some organizations try to align their strategy around marketing funnels like AIDA, but this is a mistake. Funnels have customers as an output when they should be at the center of a growth strategy. After all, it’s easier to retain and/or upsell an existing customer than acquire a new one. In addition, with a little customer delight, you can earn testimonials and referrals, generating more attention, interest, and (therefore) customers.

AIDA doesn’t accommodate for this, which is why other models — like the flywheel — are more appropriate for holistic business strategy.

4. Focusing on one AIDA element per marketing tactic may not be effective.

Even when using a funnel for one particular aspect of your business rather than a holistic strategy, it can still be easy to fall into the trap of segmenting out the four letters of AIDA and applying one letter per each tactic in your marketing strategy. For example, you might think, “This blog post is to get their attention,” and only focus on that. However, a blog post should ideally attract awareness and generate interest… and at least get them to take some kind of action before they leave your site.

In other words, marketing should be able to cycle a prospect through multiple stages of AIDA. An effective ad, for example, might prompt three or four stages of AIDA, spurring a potential buyer to action.

5. It’s almost too simple.

AIDA might also be effective in conceptualizing the buying process in a consumer’s mind when they are faced with an ad or other piece of marketing collateral. However, AIDA may be too simplistic to describe the stages of a buying process, particularly for decisions that are more involved or nuanced. Today’s buyers have more resources at their disposal to research, comparison shop, etc.

Using the AIDA Framework

Despite its drawbacks, the AIDA model is a sturdy framework for guiding your audience through the buyer’s journey and spurring them to act. And if you apply it to your content marketing, you’ll be leveraging a proven formula that can consistently engage, persuade, and convert an audience into customers. However, it starts with knowing your customer journey.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in October 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Magnets, in marketing, are an effective technique for gaining a prospect’s contact information.

The problem is these magnets can take a lot of time and energy to produce. Podcasts, e-learning courses, video series, and contests all sound great – but who has time to create them all?

In this article, I’ll reveal 19 lead magnet ideas you can create today by repurposing content you already have.

Before I share lead magnet examples, let’s quickly review the conversion path that turns website visitors into leads – and the role email marketing plays in this process:

1. Call to Action (CTA): This is the button that website visitors click to access the resource you’re offering.
2. Landing Page: This is where your lead magnet captures information provided by the visitor. Once visitors click on the CTA, they’re brought to a landing page where they fill out a form with their name, email address, and any other relevant information you’ve deemed important.
3. Thank-You Page: The visitor-turned-lead now lands on a thank-you page with information on where to access their resource and is added to your mailing list.
4. Kickback Email: The kickback email is your follow-up message to the lead a short time after the exchange takes place. This email marketing campaign starts a conversation with the lead to keep them engaged with your business.

Every blog post in your archive has the potential to generate new leads for your company, so let’s make sure that your blog is a lead-generating machine.

1. Figure out who you’re targeting and what they want.

The goal of a lead magnet is to offer something your audience wants in exchange for their contact information.

To do this, you have to know what user persona you’re targeting and what offer would entice them.

You may have one to three personas with different needs and pain points. That means one lead magnet likely won’t appeal to all three personas.

For instance, let’s say you are an influencer marketing agency. You may have two personas, each facing these issues:

• Influencer #1 doesn’t fully understand the inner workings of an influencer-brand relationship. They don’t have all the tools to brand themselves and foster relationships.
• Influencer #2 is overrun with brand partnerships and has reached a point in their success where they are so busy with managing administrative tasks that they have limited time to create content.

Knowing this, the agency could create knowledge-based lead magnets for influencer #1, focusing on ebooks and knowledge libraries. For influencer #2, the agency may offer resource-based magnets, such as templates and tools.

During this process, you can also get some ideas from your competitors. What offers are they creating? What are they including in their offers? Use that as your starting point.

In addition, look at your current content library. What has your audience responded most to? Are they asking questions on a particular topic? Are they more engaged in videos or blog posts? This can be a big indicator of what they’ll want in a content offer.

2. Create, design, and name your lead magnet.

Now that you know what your offer will be, it’s production time. You have to create and design your lead magnet.

If you don’t have an in-house designer, you can utilize a platform like Canva. Their platform offers hundreds of templates that you can customize to build your lead magnet, everything from books and presentation slides to worksheets and reports.

You can also outsource the work using an independent contractor with the skills to produce a high-quality offer.

Once the design work is done, name your lead magnet.

Think of something catchy that will pull in your audience and highlight its benefits, like “The Ultimate Worksheet Every Influencer Needs,” and “101 Ways to Monetize Your Brand.”

3. Build your conversion path.

The next step is building your conversion path, which must include your landing page, thank-you page, form, and email sequence.

Starting with your landing page, there are a few best practices to improve conversions:

• Have a dedicated landing page that doesn’t include a navigation bar. This will keep users’ focus on your offer and not the other pages on your website.

• Write a clear call to action. Your CTA should be clear, short, and to the point. It should also use words that will appeal most to your audience.

• Consider eye scanning patterns. Users in Western cultures typically follow F- and Z- reading patterns, which is why most landing pages are designed with key elements placed in those zones.

• Add social proof. Adding reviews and testimonials to your landing pages adds credibility to your offer and can increase your conversion rate.

For your form, the two pieces of information you’ll want to include are name and email. Everything else is optional. However, keep in mind that the more fields you include, the higher the chance a user may abandon the form.

Next up, your email sequence: Once you’ve acquired your lead, you can add them to a nurturing sequence that will lead them further down the funnel. This can include additional resources, such as webinars and newsletters.

Lastly, make sure to set up tracking on your conversion path to see how users are behaving on it and identify optimization opportunities.

4. Set a schedule to update regularly.

Depending on the type of lead magnet you create, you may need to update it every six months to a year.

For instance, let’s say you created a report on 2021 data science salaries. As you get closer to 2022, you’ll need to update the information on the report to reflect current data. Otherwise, your offer may no longer be valuable to your audience.

In addition, if you conduct feedback surveys on your offers, sift through your leads’ comments. Their comments could give you ideas on how to improve your current offer.

Lead Magnet Examples

1. The Sales Evangelist

The Sales Evangelist is a sales coaching and training business designed to help sales managers and their teams thrive.

The company offers a free ebook titled “How to Transform Your Small Business Sales,” which offers insights on how to generate more sales.

What’s clear is that this particular offer targets small business owners who may not have the proper sales process in place to make sales consistently.

The copy addresses the user’s pain point, provides the potential reasons, and leads into why this offer will help resolve it – a classic and effective formula for landing page copy.

2. Karmen Kendrick Creative

When you think of a lead magnet, you probably think of an ebook.

But here’s another quick and easy lead magnet you can develop that will only take you a few hours (at most): a quiz.

In this example, this brand, which offers WordPress maintenance services, tests its audience with their WordPress knowledge.

After answering a few questions, they must enter their email address to view the full results. Then, you land on a landing page with your knowledge level and the option to share your results on social media.

As a maintenance service, this is a great lead magnet strategy. It can serve as a signal to users who are considering outsourcing this service that they may not have the knowledge to manage their site on their own. And it’s interactive, which is already a win.

In addition, this quiz will require little to no maintenance, as all the questions are based on historical facts – making it a simple but effective lead magnet.

3. HubSpot

Another interactive lead magnet you can consider is a grader or calculator.

HubSpot offers a website grader, which takes seconds to scan your website and provides a score based on performance, mobile experience, SEO, and security.

After providing your email and website, you get a detailed report about your website’s performance along with a corresponding course based on your results.

What works well: The grader helps you identify potential issues with your website and offers a solution to resolve them.

4. Clever Girl Finance

Clever Girl Finance is a personal finance platform that empowers women to take charge of their finances.

Among the host of free resources on their site, this one, in particular, stands out.

It’s a video library filled with recordings from personal finance coaching calls and when users sign up, they gain access to past and future recordings.

What’s great about this tactic is it answers a need.

Clever Girl Finance’s target audience likely wants a community in which to discuss financial topics, get their questions answered, and hear directly from experts. This lead magnet does just that.

It’s also one of those one-and-done magnets that require little maintenance beyond uploading new recordings.

The team can then repurpose the content of those recordings for future blogs, video snippets, and more.

15 Additional Lead Magnet Ideas to Try

1. Ebooks

The ebook is perfect when you have a series of blog posts about a related subject.

For example, if you were running an online pet store, you might pick out the following five posts from your blog to combine into an ebook:

• “The 5 Pieces of Equipment That Every Puppy Needs”
• “The Ultimate Guide To Housetraining a Puppy”
• “The First 6 Months: What You Can Expect From Your New Puppy”
• “The Puppy Nutrition Guide: What Your Dog Should and Shouldn’t Eat”
• “The 7 Things You Should Never Do When Training a Puppy”

These posts could be logically compiled into an ebook entitled: “The Puppy Planner: Everything You Need To Know To Prepare for Your First Puppy.”

This type of ebook is effective because you’re making the lives of your website visitors easier – which should be the goal of any lead magnet you create. Rather than asking them to find all this content one article at a time, you’re packing it up into a convenient bundle that they can keep and refer back to.

The most successful lead magnets offer an irresistible and instant reward to your visitors, and the ebook checks off that box.

Featured Resource: 18 Free Ebook Templates

2. Guides

If you’re in an industry that is already well established, it can be hard to come up with original content.

Sometimes other people have covered a subject in such detail that it’s almost impossible to add extra value. In this situation, I’d recommend producing an ultimate guide.

An ultimate guide is a comprehensive collection of the best articles about a particular subject. The main difference between this and an ebook? You’re not recycling posts from your blog; you’re linking directly to other sites.

It’s important that you don’t copy and paste someone else’s content into your guide, but rather include a link back to the original article.

In the example below, Brian Dean from Backlinko.com produced “Link Building: The Definitive Guide.”

Link building is a complicated and broad subject. Dean’s definitive guide saves his audience a lot of time looking for this content.

And because so many other experts have written fantastic content about link building, Dean also saved himself the time of competing with content that already exists.

Rather than just listing the links, Dean adds extra value to his audience by categorizing them and including a brief introduction for each category.

This guide has also been well designed, reiterating that this is a valuable resource that should be kept and referred back to.

Do you work in an industry that is already bursting with quality content? Think about making your own ultimate guide.

Do you work in an industry that is already bursting with quality content? Think about making your own Ultimate Guide.

3. Bonus Packs

Offering additional content that is not included in the original blog post is the perfect way to reward readers who opt-in.

If you have an article titled, “The 5 Pieces of Equipment That Every Puppy Needs,” you could offer readers an exclusive PDF with a few more pieces of equipment that may have come on the market since the original post was published.

In his article, “How to Go From One Facebook Ad to $197 in Less Than 60 Seconds,” blogger Bryan Harris took this one step further and combined a PDF version of the article along with five links that weren’t in the original post – people only received these bonuses when they subscribed.

4. Resource Libraries

If you’ve already written a strategic blog post, consider offering a resource library or guide as a lead magnet.

A resource library is a collection of tools that help people achieve results.

David Dean from Backlinko used this strategy in his post, “SEO Tools: The Complete List.” He offered a free download that detailed the 153 tools featured in his post – the perfect resource for a reader to keep and refer to whenever they need.

This library could be as simple as a list of five books or apps that you recommend.

What resources could you recommend to a potential customer that would help them to achieve better results?

5. Checklists

Instructional blog posts are just waiting to be turned into checklists – and they couldn’t be easier to create.

Just take your blog post and simplify it into a series of bullet points. Next, remove any points that don’t contain actionable advice. Split the list into several numbered steps to make the outcome more achievable.

Bonus points if you offer the checklist in a printable format so people can physically tick off each item on the list as they complete it. This sense of achievement is a great feeling that people will attribute back to your business.

The “Ultimate Webinar Checklist” from HubSpot above is a valuable lead magnet because of how practical it is.

Hosting a webinar involves balancing a lot of different tasks coming together at the same time. This checklist informs you about everything you need to watch out for, from pre- to post-webinar.

6. Workbooks

In its simplest form, a workbook is a download-and-complete resource that helps people to apply the principles of your blog post to their own business.

The goal of a workbook is to have the participant learn by doing. As the teacher in this scenario, you’re positioning your business as an expert on the subject matter at hand.

With that in mind, you’ll want to choose the exercises included in your workbook carefully. Tease information out of the participant gradually, so that at the end of the workbook they can combine their short answers into a comprehensive piece of work.

A workbook is the perfect stepping stone to your premium products or services, so be sure to include a strong call to action at the end that tells the participant how you can help them to apply their newfound knowledge.

Is there a particular subject that you could help your audience understand more clearly with a workbook?

7. Case Studies

Case studies depend on very specific types of content, but the successes they reveal can entice a site visitor to take action.

If you have a blog post or interview clip that spotlights a real customer you’ve worked with, package this content into a written case study that expands on the need the client came in with and the metrics of their success.

Then, gate this case study behind a form that website visitors can fill out with their name and email address to access.

Keep in mind that you’ll need permission and approval from the client on which you’d like to create a case study.

Once you receive this approval, however, it’s a perfect lead magnet to host content that tells your readers about a customer success story.

Featured Resource: 3 Free Case Study Templates

8. Webinars

Webinars don’t have to be long, collaborative presentations with multiple colleagues or partners.

If you’ve got a blog post that merely touches on a subject you’re an expert in, use this blog post as a springboard into a live talk hosted by you and a coworker.

If you’ve written an article about the latest IOS cookie restrictions, for example, convert this article into a slide presentation and present it through a live conferencing platform, using helpful visuals.

You should also provide insight that listeners wouldn’t have gotten from just the blog post.

As a bonus, you can use the webinar recording as an additional offer.

9. Cheatsheets

If your blog post covers a complicated topic, it might be a good idea to offer readers a one-page sheet that they can refer back to when they need to refresh their memory. This could be a glossary of terms or just a summary of some key points.

This type of download-and-keep resource takes the pressure off readers so they don’t have to memorize or implement your strategy immediately. It does compel readers to opt-in to your list though, which is the ultimate goal.

In addition, the compact format means that people can quickly glance at it while they are going through the editing process. It’s a complementary tool for an existing process.

10. Guestbooks

Guest blogging is a terrific backlink strategy, but those who use it typically agree to not republish that particular post on their own blog.

This is fairly common, as Google punishes sites that duplicate content onto two publications – it’s in nobody’s interest to do so.

What you can do, though, is compile all these guest posts into a book format.

Since the content will be gated behind a lead capture form, there is no risk of Google flagging it as duplicate content and you get to squeeze a little bit of extra value from that content you worked so hard on.

11. Whitepapers

Have an interesting survey that your team recently ran? Or perhaps you know your audience is looking for specific information to inform their future strategy?

If so, leverage this knowledge to create downloadable reports based on your team’s research.

You may have talked about these findings in a blog post or a recent webinar. Repurpose that content for a detailed report.

This will position you as a credible resource in your industry and bring you that much closer to converting your target audience.

12. Templates

Templates are some of the most popular lead magnets out there.

Why? Because they help users streamline their processes and save time. But at the core of it, it solves the problem many of us have: creating and designing from scratch.

You can create templates for just about anything:

• Emails
• Social media
• Spreadsheets
• Graphic designs

It’s all about tapping into what your audience needs the most and creating that for them. Plus, it’s another low-maintenance magnet.

13. Email Course

Companies offer online courses all the time, but they’re not the only place to launch a course.

A 2019 Statista survey found that most people (over 80%) check their emails every few hours including outside of normal business hours.

We also know that email newsletters are very popular, with just about every company sending its top insights to your inbox every day.

With this in mind, starting an email course is a great lead magnet option.

An email course is a series of emails that can be anywhere from three to 10+ emails that cover a topic in depth.

The benefit for you? It’s a format most users are familiar with and it’s quick to launch.

In addition, you have multiple opportunities to nurture your audience and guide them down the buyer’s journey, compared to a one-and-done ebook that a user may or may not read.

14.Access to a Private Group

As a business, community management is a key aspect in gaining brand loyalists. It can also be an effective way to generate leads.

Platforms like Slack, Facebook Group, and LinkedIn allow you to do both.

For many businesses, their target audiences value community and want a space to discuss topics relating to their needs, goals, and challenges.

Creating that space will help you generate leads and get to know your audience better.

15. Behind-The-Scenes or “Secret” Insights

One of the best lead magnets I’ve ever seen was produced by Tim Soulo. It was so effective that I immediately opted-in without thinking twice. Suolo had written a blog post about sending an outreach email to well-known SEO expert Rand Fishkin. His call-to-action was the following:

This call-to-action was pitch perfect because it got me curious. I just had to know what the email subject was.

I also knew that it would be a relatively short read so I wouldn’t have to commit to a lengthy ebook – lazy, I know, but that’s human nature sometimes.

Suolo’s lead magnet is just one page and was made using a standard word processor. There was no point in spending time or money on the design in this case because the secret is the only thing that matters.

I blurred out the tell-tale image and text in the above screenshot – if you want to know Suolo’s secret, you’ll just have to download the lead magnet!

Do you have any behind-the-scenes insights to a blog post that are compelling enough to offer as a downloadable secret?

There you have it, 19 ways to recycle your existing content into lead-generating assets. You already have the blog content – all you have to do is implement lead magnets and an email campaign that gets them into your contact database.

Editor’s note: This piece was originally published in May 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Last November, my husband and I were on our honeymoon in Maui. One of the main activities we wanted to do was a hiking tour near the waterfalls. We dreamt of swimming in the cascading water at sunrise.

When you hear the word “waterfall,” that’s typically what you imagine. However, today, we’re going to talk about a different kind of waterfall — the waterfall chart.

Waterfall charts are a data visualization resource that can help you gather and track important data such as traffic goals and lead generation. Below, let’s review what a waterfall chart is, how to read one, and how to create one.

In marketing, a waterfall chart could display the number of leads, traffic sources, or blog views over a period of time. More specifically, you could use a waterfall chart to showcase how your blog traffic has increased or decreased in the last year, giving values month over month.

You could potentially use line charts, bar charts, and even bullet graphs to show this type of data. But waterfall charts have the advantage of showing your gains as they’re impacted by losses over time.

Why use a waterfall chart?

You should use a waterfall chart instead of other types of charts when trying to visualize data that experiences both gains and losses. It’s especially useful if you want to see how a loss affects a subsequent value.

One of the reasons that waterfall charts are effective in marketing is because they give context on the data it’s reporting. Most data visualizations suffer from ignoring circumstances that result in a fall or rise in numbers, such as seasonality.

For instance, let’s say you create a waterfall chart of your Twitter followers over time. Rather than using a line graph that shows your total number of users over time, a waterfall chart shows how many you lost — and how that impacts subsequent figures.

At first glance, these charts can be difficult to read. Below, let’s review how to read a waterfall chart.

How to Read a Waterfall Chart

Reading a waterfall chart will seem foreign at first if you’ve never done it.

However, it’s important to remember that you’re reading it sequentially, from left to right.

For instance, let’s say you’re tracking blog traffic from month to month. On the far left, you’ll have the total traffic from the previous year. Then, you’ll include the gains and losses month over month for the entire year. At the end of the chart, you’ll see the total traffic for the year.

Here’s what that looks like:

Notice how each value ends either where the previous value ended or began. In January, there was a gain of 5,000 visitors, but in February and March, there was a loss of 2,000. April’s traffic value takes that into account by starting from the -2,000 figure and going up from there.

Essentially, a waterfall chart is supposed to show you where you started and where you ended up, with details of how you got there. In this example, you can see which months gained the most traffic compared to the months that lost traffic. This could help you see seasonal adjustments, while also keeping the big picture in mind.

Now, you might be wondering, “That chart looks difficult to make. How can I make my own in Excel?” Below, we’ll review the simple process to creating your own waterfall chart.

Not sure how to actually get it done? Below, we include a template and further instructions.

Bonus: You’ll also find instructions for creating waterfall charts in Google Sheets, in case that’s your preferred spreadsheet software.

Waterfall Excel Template

1. Create a table with four columns.

Before you can build a waterfall chart, you’ll want to create a table of values that you want represented on your chart.

For example, are you tracking blog traffic numbers? Or perhaps you’re looking at leads generated from a certain marketing campaign? Either way, before you can create a waterfall chart, you’ll need to gather your data.

All you have to do is open Excel or Google Sheets, and begin manually entering your data. When you enter your data, make sure you denote the difference between positive and negative values. To denote a negative value, just add a minus sign in front of the number.

For this template, we’ll track blog traffic. Note: all numbers are arbitrary and not reflective of traffic to any blog.

Create four columns. The first two columns will have no headings. In cells A2 to A15, write START, then all 12 months, then END. 

In cell C1, write “GAIN,” and in cell D1, write  “LOSS.” 

From there, place your traffic numbers. How much traffic are you starting with? Write that in cell B2, next to START. Then, for each month, write how much you gained or lost. 

Add everything together, including negative values, and place them in cell B15, next to END. 

2. Highlight all of your data, then insert your waterfall chart.

Now that you have your values, highlight the table you just created. In Google Sheets, go to Insert → Chart → Waterfall chart.

This will create a waterfall chart and the Chart Editor will show up on the right-hand side. When the Chart Editor comes up, make sure that “Waterfall Chart” is selected under Chart Type.

In Excel, go to Insert → [Waterfall chart symbol] → Waterfall.

Your chart will automatically be created based on the values in our template.

3. Format your waterfall chart.

At this point, all the hard work is done. All you have to do is format your chart and make sure it looks how you want.

In Google Sheets, click on the three dots in the upper right-hand corner of the chart and hit Edit Chart. You’ll get to the Chart Editor. Here, you can choose the colors of your bars, adjust your legend, or add gridlines. Most likely, the main thing you’ll want to do here is to adjust your legend.

In Excel, you’ll click on the chart, then choose “Chart Design” and “Format” on the top ribbon to make the chart look the way you want it to.

The process of creating a waterfall chart manually can be a hassle. Luckily, you can also create a waterfall chart using a dedicated dashboard tool. For example, HubSpot offers marketing dashboard and reporting software that you can use to create charts. Here’s how.

How to Create a Chart in HubSpot

1. Go to analytics tools.

Once you log in to your portal, hover over the Reports tab and click into the Analytics Tools.

2. Choose what you want to track.

Next, you’ll choose what you want to track. Perhaps you want to analyze blog traffic like we did in the example above. Or maybe you want to review analytics for a certain campaign.

Either way, you can choose what you want to track in the Analytics Tools.

3. Choose the chart type.

Lastly, all you have to do is choose the style chart you want. Right now, you can choose between an Area chart, Column chart, Line chart, or a Combination chart. You’ll want to choose “Column,” which is closest to the waterfall chart format.

Waterfall Analysis

Now that you have a waterfall chart, it’s time to analyze it.

To repeat, here’s how to understand your waterfall chart:

• A waterfall chart shows a series of negative and positive values. Each value impacts the value after it.
• For example, if one week you lose 3 leads, the next value will take that into account. If you gain 5 leads, the waterfall chart will use -3 value as a starting point, so that your ending point is a gain of 2 leads.
• Each column is color-coded to distinguish positive from negative values.

And here’s how to analyze it.

Examine the time ranges with the greatest losses.

Which months or weeks did you see the greatest losses? It’s important to see and understand these figures to get the most out of your chart. From there, you can troubleshoot or come up with a new strategy for those months.

Examine the time ranges with the greatest gains.

Conversely, look at the time ranges that saw the greatest gains. You’ll want to emulate what you did during those months — or research trends that gave you a boost during those times.

Examine the net change over the entire time range.

From start to end, how big of a difference did you see? Was it a positive or negative difference? Could your business have seen better results?

Look at week-to-week gains and losses after implementing a new strategy.

After creating a new strategy, it’ll be helpful to use a waterfall chart to see how it impacts you from week to week — whether you’re seeing more positive or negative results.

Use a Waterfall Chart to Better Analyze Your Performance

To ensure you’re examining the full scope of your analytics, we recommend creating a waterfall chart. It’s a worthwhile data visualization tool that can help you understand your analytics sequentially. No longer do you have to rely on typical line graphs — with a waterfall chart, you’ll understand your gains and losses over time at a much more granular level.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in May 2011 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

Until recently, many of us have been doing almost everything from home with no immediate hopes of in-person outings.

But, this summer — as entire countries reopen — people who’ve been stuck inside are finally breathing a sigh of relief. At the same time, some company leaders are doing the opposite.

Why? In past years, entire industries have seen summer slumps — or seasonal dips in sales or web traffic. This year, business leaders are expecting sharper dips as more consumers travel or unplug. They’re also dealing with frequent HR requests from employees who’ve been waiting months to take vacations.

On top of the challenges above, the Society of Human Resources Management reports that 41% of employees feel burnt out while 48% feel mentally exhausted by the end of their workdays. This, in turn, could impact productivity and job retention levels.

Ultimately, many leaders worry that the summer trends above could impact their bottom line.

To help businesses navigate the changing landscape, we dove into 2021 web traffic and deal closing data from over 103,000 anonymous HubSpot customers around the globe. Then, we compared their summer results to pre-pandemic benchmarks from the summer of 2019.

Below are some of our key findings.

Summer Trends to Watch, According to HubSpot Data

Note: When looking at the charts and data below, each year’s traffic or deal benchmark is equal to its April numbers. Therefore, if industries were 10% under benchmark in June 2019, they saw a 10% dip since April 2019.

Web Traffic is Seeing a Summer Slump

So far in 2021, global traffic is dipping across almost all industries and segments. Compared to 2019, websites are also seeing less overall traffic growth.

Trouble seeing this graph? Click here for a PDF.

At this point, the only industry that isn’t slumping is Leisure and Hospitality, which saw a whopping 17.72% traffic increase between April and June of 2021. This is almost the opposite of what we saw in 2019 when traffic decreased for websites in the industry by 13.27% from April to June.

Although Leisure and Hospitality’s current traffic patterns are impressive, they’re still fairly unsurprising as news outlets continue to report spikes in reopening-related travel, outings, and excursions this summer.

 

Trouble seeing this graph? Click here for a PDF.

A few of the industries seeing the largest dips in traffic from April to June 2021 are Construction (-12%), Financial Activities (-11%), Manufacturing (-7.2%), and Trade, Transportation, and Utilities (-7.1%)

As compared to 2019, some of the segments seeing larger traffic slumps this year are Trade, Transportation, and Utilities — which saw 3.7% growth from April to June in 2019 and a 7.11% loss during the same time in 2021; Education and Health Services — which saw 17.52% growth in 2019, but a 2.7% loss in 2021; and Construction — which only saw a 0.16% decrease by June of 2019 but saw a 12.06% loss in 2021.

Aside from Leisure and Hospitality, segments seeing the smallest slumps in summer traffic are Professional and Business Services with under a 1% drop, and Education and Health Services with just a 2.7% drop.

From a geographical standpoint, these web traffic trends are happening in all locations we’ve examined, except for Asia — which is seeing steady traffic growth.

Trouble seeing this graph? Click here for a PDF.

While it’s unclear why Asia’s web traffic is rising, this continued growth could be due to lockdowns and stay-at-home orders in various Asian territories that are still dealing with COVID-19 and its variants. During Q2 and Q3 of 2020, the United States and other territories around the world saw similar traffic bursts as citizens were stuck at home with only the internet to entertain them or connect them to others.

Deals are Going Up

Yes. You read that correctly. While traffic is seeing a summer slowdown, deal closings across industries are climbing.

Industries seeing the biggest growth from April to June of 2021 include Leisure and Hospitality (+44.7%), Manufacturing (+13.65%), and Trade, Transportation, and Utilities (+10.62%), while segments seeing the slowest growth are Construction and Financial Activities, which both have just under a 2% increase from their April benchmarks.

Businesses are also seeing a higher rate of deal closings than they did between April and June of 2019 — when five of the eight segments we studied saw at least a 3.5% dip in deal closings.

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While deal closings were up in June, it’s still important for company leaders to remain cautious at this point of the summer.

Although deals are climbing, businesses could still see dips in later summer months due to consumers continuing to travel, employee vacations, or teams feeling less pressured to close deals at the beginning of a new quarter. However, one optimistic point to consider is that deal closings did not see similar lifts in June 2019, when many industries actually saw dipping.

Ultimately, as the summer continues, it will be key to monitor your traffic, as well as deals created, qualified leads, and deals closed to get a full look at your brand’s performance.

If your team’s seeing more deal closings, but fewer qualified leads, signups, or deals created this summer, it might not be a cause for panic. However, when your business sees a slowdown or shift of any kind, there are plenty of steps you can take to ensure future success.

How to Prepare For and Respond to Summer Business Trends

1. Prepare when you can for business shifts.

Because we’re only halfway through summer, businesses can still take time to predict and prepare for what’s to come.

Alicia Butler Pierre, Host of the Business Infrastructure Podcast and CEO of Equilibria, Inc. says, “There are two major ways businesses can predict, diagnose, and/or prepare for a seasonal slump: resource planning and contingency planning.”

• Contingency planning: This strategy — which often includes creating a premortem, failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA), and disaster recovery and business continuity plan –helps brands prepare for unexpected dips or upticks caused by outside factors like news events or national disasters.
• Resource planning: “As your company utilizes different resources that serve as inputs into producing a good or delivering a service (outputs), you should collect data such as transaction dates, sale or invoice amounts, product or service type, and some customer demographic data.” says Butler Pierre. “If you notice the same patterns and trends year after year, you are in a better position to forecast and prepare for seasonal slumps. This, in turn, lets you know when to expand or contract inputs like labor and inventory.”

Image Courtesy of Alicia Butler Pierre

Data shows that a strong plan can be rewarding when business begins to pick up. In 2020, as consumers quickly turned to online stores for essentials, businesses that weren’t online were rushing to build online stores, while online stores were struggling to fulfill high-demand orders on time. Around this time, more than 50% of shoppers chose to buy products from brands with more product availability over brands they were originally loyal to.

“I strongly advocate businesses focus on improvements to their business infrastructure during seasonal slumps. It’s difficult to make improvements while things are moving so quickly, as all hands are on deck trying to fulfill orders and meet project deadlines,” says Butler Pierre.

“Improvements can include things like technology and equipment upgrades, process automation, and reconfiguring (or relocating) your physical work location. With these improvements in place, your company can work through the chaos that can accompany a seasonal uptick without compromising quality and excellent customer service,” Butler Pierre adds.

2. Launch demand plays.

“Unfortunately, when you’re dealing with macro trends in the market a lot is out of your control,” says Emmy Jonassen, HubSpot’s VP of Acquisition. “For example, there’s not much you can do if prospects are not visiting your site or talking to reps because they’re all on vacation.”

While you might not be able to solve seasonal business patterns, Jonassen says there are things you can do in the now to help the short and long term:

• Getting through the slump: When you’re facing a period of slowed demand, any incremental lift at the top of the funnel can go a long way. During times like these consider adjustments you could make in the short term to help in the short term. For example, could you increase your paid spend temporarily? Could you remove a field in your lead form for a period of time to improve CVR? Could you manufacture a bit of demand with a campaign or offer that provides timely and unique value?
• Making the most of what you have: In periods of soft demand, you want to make sure that you’re not leaving anything on the table. One way to do this is to perform an audit of your key acquisition drivers and invest in making optimizations. For example, if you’re able to improve search rankings and conversion rates of core landing pages, it will help you generate incremental demand. Investing in these kinds of optimizations will also put you in a much better position to capture demand when traffic does start to pick up.
• Weatherproof for the long-term: Periods of slowed demand can help us see where the holes are in our demand-generation engines. Use this time to identify where your engine’s holes are and put in place plans that work toward patching them in the future. For example, if your desktop conversion rates are outperforming your mobile conversion rates because you haven’t invested in a mobile-optimized site, now could be a great time to start planning that project.

3. Use data to guide your strategy.

Although dips on website views might concern you, summer traffic slumps aren’t unusual. But, you can use analytics tools to prepare for and respond to them.

On the HubSpot Blog team, we use tools like HubSpot Traffic Analytics to examine and prepare for seasonal dips due to vacations, office closings, and global holidays that take people off-line during the summer. Because summer is filled with vacations and holidays, we often use part of the season to focus on historical optimization, long-term conversion plays, process planning, and trend-responsive content that can gain quick bursts in traffic when search engines are impacted by seasonality.

While a summer slump is a good time to look at and respond to unexpected traffic losses, it’s also important to remember that some decreases could be beyond your control and mostly due to seasonality. Additionally, if you’re a leader, you should look at other data aside from just traffic.

For example, you might also want to take a wider look at KPIs like online leads, email subscriber growth, online sales, and deal creation to learn how much web traffic losses are immediately impacting you. If traffic is down, but leads or deals are up, you might not need to pivot your whole strategy. If everything is going down — that’s when you might want to take a deep look at your overall processes.

Ultimately, as with process planning, digging into the analytics you have available will help you determine the best way to handle a traffic slump or uptick. To learn more about building an effective web analytics strategy specifically, check out this post.

4. Don’t forget about your current customers.

While deals are on the rise at the moment, some industries, such as construction and financial activities historically see dips or slower growth in the summer. Luckily, when business is slow, you can still take the time you need to maintain and potentially gain more business from your current clientele.

From a sales leadership perspective, Dan Tyre, Director at HubSpot, says that managers and teams should “look for ways to upsell or cross-sell new customers from the first six months of the year” or “use the time to work your referral program.”

“I like to call top customers in July to check in regarding the state of our relationship and see if there are other divisions or connections that can use similar help,” Tyre adds.

Additionally, leaders and companies can take more time to ensure their processes and operations are running smoothly when business is slow.

Regardless of whether you’re focused on gaining new clients or maintaining your customer list, tools like HubSpot’s Sales or Service Hubs can help you by allowing you to track deal creation, contact activities, and service inquiries. You can also use these tools to communicate with customers and prospects across different platforms like email, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger.

5. Strengthen team communication.

While you’ll want to stay in contact with prospects and customers during times of slump or business uptick, communication with your team will also be incredibly vital. While poor communication can halt processes completely, great communication could speed up the pace of projects that provide great revenue.

Regardless of how busy your business is, take time to check in with your teams through meetings, platforms like Slack or Zoom, or email updates.

Additionally, to keep everyone in the know of each other’s schedules during a busy summer, you should ensure that calendars are up to date with meeting times, blocks for heads-down solo work, and time off.

6. Balance results with employee well-being.

As summer trends fluctuate, it can be easy for managers and teams to get swept up with work and forget about taking time to unplug. And, as economies reopen and employees gain the ability to travel, the balance between self-care and productivity will be even more important for leaders to consider.

“Time away from the office may be a bit more pronounced this year, but it’s not unique. The key to any process is managing expectations and understanding who’s available when to keep consistency in the sales process,” Tyre explains. “It’s advantageous for everyone to manage lower levels of stress and take time off. In many cases, a no-meeting Friday or work from home Friday can increase salespeople productivity.”

Senior Product Marketing Manager Alex Girard similarly says, “First, I think it’s important to understand the value in taking time off. When employees use their time off, they’ll come back refreshed and able to do their best work.”

“Second, make sure you’re prioritizing the important work that will drive real impact,” Girard adds. “If your team is taking time off, make sure everyone on the team is aligned around what’s important, what is not, and what can be postponed for later. This will ensure you keep things moving during periods of high vacation time.”

Tools to Help You Navigate a Summer Slump or Uptick

• HubSpot Business Software: HubSpot’s CRM, Marketing, Sales, Service, and CMS Hub can help you and your team measure your performance; identify slumps, upticks, or major snags in your process; and assist you in moving customers through the buyer’s journey — even during a time of seasonality.  
• Google Workspace or Microsoft Outlook: These programs allow teams to keep all their documents, calendars, and emails in one suite of tools that can streamline communication, project management, and the creation of new processes that will be vital to business growth.
• Task Management Tools: If you work with multiple teammates or are managing multiple projects this summer, tools like HubSpot, Trello, Asana, and Jira can help you track the progress of what your team is working on and identify where any blockers might exist.
• Communication Tools: Lastly, if you’re on a dispersed team like many HubSpotters, you’ll want to leverage a communication platform like Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Zoom to stay in contact with everyone you’re working with — even when there’s not enough time to schedule a meeting or check-in.

Editor’s Note: The data from HubSpot’s customer base is reflective of companies that have invested in an online presence and use inbound as a key part of their growth strategy. Because the data is aggregated, please keep in mind that individual businesses, including HubSpot’s, may differ based on their own markets, customer base, industry, geography, stage, and/or other factors.

How We Protect the Privacy of Our Customers’ Data

We employ the following anonymization techniques to remove or modify personally identifiable information so that data cannot be associated with any one individual:

• Attribute suppression refers to the removal of an entire part of data in a dataset. Before sharing any customer data we apply suppression to any data attribute that on its own identifies an individual (e.g. name, company name) or has been assigned to an individual.
• Generalization involves a deliberate reduction in the precision of data, such as converting company size into a company size range. We apply generalization to indirect identifiers. These are data attributes that on their own don’t identify individuals, but could identify an individual when combined with other information. We use the k-anonymity model as a guideline to ensure any record’s direct and/or indirect identifiers are shared by at least k(set at 100)-1 other records,  protecting our customer’s data against linking attacks.
• Aggregation refers to converting a dataset from a list of records to summarized values. We apply aggregation by displaying a cohort’s mean or median values for a metric.

Before GDPR, compliance didn’t mean as much to marketers as it does today. It was seen as something that “someone else” should have to worry about, like your legal team. Three years on from the biggest shift in the privacy landscape, organizations around the world have had to adapt company-wide to its effects far beyond the European Union where it has its most direct impact.

A lot of these effects rest on the incumbent shoulders of the marketer — who has had to grapple with the evolution of privacy landscapes as they gain momentum worldwide and has to figure out how to work with them in their day-to-day.

In today’s busy world of communications and data processing, it’s easy to overlook compliance marketing responsibilities with the pressure of deadlines and business objectives. Knowing what the responsibilities are for compliance in marketing is often unclear at an operational level. This inevitably opens your company up to risk which can cost your company dearly if not addressed.

In building your compliance strategy, it is often hard to know where to start and what to focus on — but becoming aware of some basic marketing compliance guidelines can be advantageous for your company, big or small, and equip you with invaluable ammunition to help you achieve your objectives.

That’s why below I have compiled a list of some best practices that every marketer can achieve within their own organization.

5 Things Marketers Should Know About Compliance

1. Wait, What ‘Data’ is It?

As a marketer, you are probably naturally closest to a lot of the user data that your company collects. It can tell you a lot about your users or customers and it is used by teams internally to achieve sales and marketing objectives. 

Unfortunately, such wide use of this data across your organization can open it up to the risk of being misused or unprotected if there are no proper controls put in place. That’s why it’s best to put structures in place to keep this data organized, audited, and secure.

Taking stock of the various data sources that are across your company and how they interact with software and systems is essential.

Using this intel allows you to create a lock-tight plan to maintain consistent data structures and implement necessary changes, whilst giving you the ability to pivot as the business expands.

Maintaining an audit trail of data records is paramount in order to be able to respond to any requests by regulatory bodies. Using automated software to sync system logs and less reliance on excel sheets is by far the best way to manage large data sets and produce reports upon request. Using machine learning to scan and catalog data assets across the enterprise helps you better understand your data so you can derive more value from it.

2. Compliant Data Collection and Use

Most businesses are in the habit of collecting data on their customers, but you must remember that these ultimately belong to them, and not so much you!

A person is merely choosing to share their data with you with the expectation that you will keep their interests safe. Each individual needs to always be informed as to its intended use.

This information is contained in your privacy policy which should be under constant review and if you make changes to this, you are obligated to inform every individual within its purview. Not only that, a person may choose to request and withdraw their data at any time, which you are also obligated to comply with. Having your data organized in tenets as described above and having systems in place that can extract and delete this data are crucial in order to respect your customers’ wishes.

Compliance tools have been developed with these requirements in mind. Using systems that run with precision and reliability, that are flexible and can scale with you as you grow, gives you the ability to adapt to change and be compliant without having to build a bespoke system or rely on pesky excel sheets.

3. Create a Compliance Team

Organizations large and small benefit from having a multi-disciplinary team focussed on compliance who are scattered across various company activities. It is no longer just a siloed issue for one person or team to solve. Undoubtedly, if a marketer needs some help from a web or tech colleague, it can often be difficult to get assistance from them if compliance is not high on their priority list too. 

Each member has the benefit of knowledge in their own specialism, which can only be of benefit if shared. For example, a tech manager’s responsibilities could include knowing how data sets across the org are structured and how compliance controls should be implemented. They need to ensure a marketer is equipped to do their job using data housed in compliant and secure systems. 

Partnering with your legal team on marketing initiatives means you are working together to achieve creative objectives in a compliant manner. Without access to these subject matter experts, who have in-depth knowledge of compliance matters, especially as they change in other jurisdictions, makes it difficult to achieve business goals and can cause roadblocks. Using compliance software to connect these teams/individuals can help a team collaborate on initiatives in a more efficient way.

Building a team that can make compliance a priority and work together on an ongoing basis to maintain and adapt data governance principles is key for success.

4. Create Compliance Checks and Internal Data Governance

With data processes being managed across organizations, it can often be difficult to ensure a cohesive environment when it comes to compliance practices.

Therefore, it’s important to put guardrails and processes in place to mitigate risk by ensuring all employees are up to date on internal data management practices and checks in place to improve these processes. Ensuring regular training is provided is an easy way to meet your due diligence in this regard. After all, data management is everyone’s responsibility, with any misuse resulting in it being costly to the company.

Managing and controlling brand cohesion across all of your marketing content channels including digital, print, and social media is a no-brainer.

Assessment of future campaigns will allow you to anticipate potential compliance issues at an early stage. Maintaining this consistency across partner and co-marketing content campaigns ensures any legal requirements can be followed. Documenting data collection and management practices for different teams is essential and the provision of regular updates can be helpful as the law continues to evolve in different territories where your customers might do business from. 

It’s also very important that each employee knows who to contact with any urgent request as they may be in a customer-facing role where an aggrieved customer may require an urgent response to a grievance with their data. Such requests can be time-sensitive so being able to escalate sensitive issues to a representative needs to be made an easy task in order to avoid any potential regulatory enforcement that could ensue for not responding to an issue within a defined window.

5. Monitor Global Privacy Regimes and Incorporate Changes

You may have noticed that privacy is now top of mind for many countries with local approaches to privacy being spun up on the daily.

Largely following the regulatory aspects that flow from the GDPR and the E-Privacy directive, territories are now adapting, and are seeking to uphold and respect the privacy of each individual. With that, it’s important to know what applies to you. 

While you may think that something like the GDPR has no bearing on you or the privacy of your customers because you are not based in the EU, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

The GDPR is applicable to where you may have users or customers and so being able to meet the privacy needs of individuals in those areas is required.

Whether it is adapting cookie management for web/application use or making sure that your communication to your DACH customers is compliant using a double-opt-in email, it is essential to keep abreast of the regulatory requirements when you develop your marketing initiatives. Consideration needs to extend to local laws also if you are expanding your reach into new territories.

Knowing what is compliant in a new territory should be top of mind in this case as no territory is the same with regards to their approach to marketing compliance. Creating a compliance strategy and working closely with your legal and wider compliance team is vital to achieving your objectives.

Regulatory guidance is constantly evolving, so making sure you are consistently evaluating and meeting the requirements of different jurisdictions — it’s a full-time job.

Final Thoughts

When implementing marketing compliance into your company it’s important to treat it as a key priority for your business. As marketers continue to fight for creativity but are hindered by compliance, it is challenging to strike a balance between the two.

Having a detailed understanding of applicable compliance rules and best practice techniques makes a marketer a valuable asset to any company. Being able to have foresight into potential compliance challenges early on in developing your marketing initiatives is powerful, and can lead to more effective decisions.

More than ever, brand integrity has become a cornerstone for companies. Showing your users that you are serious about marketing compliance and respecting their privacy will set you apart from your competitors.

Email marketing is an undeniably powerful strategy for lead acquisition and customer retention.

Of course, creating an email marketing campaign isn’t easy, and it might require you to build a template using HTML so you’re not designing and altering every new email from scratch.

Thankfully, there are dozens of email template builders available, all of which can help you intuitively and quickly create new email templates for your upcoming campaigns.

Email Template Builders

Now you might be wondering how you’re supposed to know which template builder will best suit your needs?

We’ve done the homework for you, compiling a list of our favorite email template builders, complete with pricing, screenshots, and a general overview of each app’s unique features. Keep reading to choose the best email template builder for your company.

But first — why do you need an email template builder, anyway? Let’s start by answering this important question.

Why You Need an Email Template Builder

An email template builder grants you several advantages:

1. Better Design Features

Without a template builder, you may struggle to arrange your content in blocks as you want, or add videos to your email.

2. Initial Time Savings

Most email template builders rely on intuitive mechanics, like drag-and-drop editors, so you can design your emails faster.

3. Long-Term Time Savings

Creating a library of email templates can save you a ton of time long-term, allowing you to quickly choose and lightly edit past templates for new emails.

4. Replicability

Did you see impressive results with your most recent campaign? With an email template builder, you can easily replicate it with some minor tweaks in the future.

5. Analytics

Most email template builders also feature built-in analytics, which you can use to study your past email marketing efforts and make improvements to your approach.

Additionally, depending on the email template builder you’re using, you may have access to even more features.

Next, let’s dive into some of the best builders.

The Best Email Template Builders

Here are some of the best email template builders — they’re categorized by their pricing plans.

Best All-Around Email Template Builder

1. HubSpot Email Marketing Tools

HubSpot offers a comprehensive, start-to-finish solution for all your marketing needs. You can create a sleek, on-brand email campaign using HubSpot’s drag-and-drop editor, and customize the template to match your brand and align with your goals.

Additionally, you can customize each email depending on your recipient’s lifecycle stage, list membership, or any information in their contact records to ensure each email is designed for optimal conversions.

Best of all, the email tool provides top-notch analytics and A/B testing tools so you can continue to refine your marketing strategy over time.

Pro Tip: Use HubSpot’s Free Email Marketing Tools to create, personalize, and optimize marketing emails without the need for technical or design support.

Unique Features

• Analytics to provide deep insights into your email success rates, including open-rate, most popular links clicked in an email, who engages with each email, when and on which device, and what emails perform best.
• Tailor each email to individual subscribers based on lifecycle stage, list membership, or any other contact information to serve the best calls-to-action to segmented groups.
• Ability to run A/B tests to improve open rates and clickthroughs.
• More than 100 email templates available by default.
• Custom landing page creation tools.
• Advanced social sharing options.
• Integrations with other marketing tools (more than 300 third-party apps).
• 24/7 support from customer service reps.

Pricing

Free, $45/mo (Starter), $800/mo (Professional), $3,200/mo (Enterprise)

Best Free Email Template Builders

4. BEE Free

BEE Free is a free online email editor that has been used by more than a million people. In just a few clicks, you can get started designing your first email template — or use one of the 150 templates currently available by default. It also offers free design ideas on its own blog.

Unique Features

• 150 pre-designed templates (and additional paid templates).
• Full responsiveness for mobile-friendly designs.
• Integration with many SaaS apps.
• Options to pick up where you left off.

Pricing

Free

5. Mosaico

Mosaico.io is an open-source email template builder, which is something of a rarity. You won’t find any predesigned templates, as you would with other email template builders, but you will be able to alter the tool however you see fit.

Unique Features

• A unique click-based design tool, abandoning the traditional “drag-and-drop” model.
• Community support, due to its open-source nature.
• Infinite flexibility, if you’re willing to put in the work to customize it.

Pricing

Free

6. Unlayer

Unlayer is a free HTML email template builder, with a simple, easy-to-grasp approach. You can choose any of its 100+ base kit templates and edit the template as you see fit. You can also install the free Chrome extension if you want to integrate it with Gmail.

Unique Features

• Template designs are immediately available, so you can start in mere minutes.
• A free Chrome plugin so you can use the tool directly in your browser.
• The ability to save and download templates for future use.

Pricing

Free

Best Paid Email Template Builders

2. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is one of the top names in email marketing, in part because of its accessibility. It’s super easy to learn and build your first few email templates, and you can get started right now with a free plan. As you scale your business, you’ll find additional options, features, and tools for your needs.

Unique Features

• More than 100 email templates available by default.
• Custom landing page creation tools.
• Advanced social sharing options.
• Integrations with other marketing tools (more than 300 third-party apps).
• 24/7 support from customer service reps.

Pricing

Free, $9.99 (Essentials), $14.99 (Standard), $299 (Premium)

3. Moosend

Moosend’s easy-to-use drag-and-drop email editor allows you to create professional-looking email templates that include marketing elements — such as countdown timers and videos — without any prior HTML knowledge.

Unique Features

• Customizable, ready-made templates and custom fonts
• Drag-and-drop landing page editor
• Integration with GIPHY, Google Drive, Stock Photos, and social media platforms
• Video email marketing tools
• Customer support for all pricing plans through email, chat, and phone

Pricing

Free, $8/mo (Pro), call for a custom plan (Enterprise)

7. AWeber

AWeber is specifically designed for small businesses eager to get started with email marketing, but who might have trouble knowing where to begin. Predesigned templates, custom designs, and email automation are all available.

Unique Features

• A drag and drop AMP carousel, which allows you to add AMP image carousels to your emails.
• AWeber’s Smart Designer, which uses AI to construct and recommend email templates.
• A campaign marketplace that allows you to design and launch full email campaigns.
• 24/7 customer service.

Pricing

Free, $16.15/mo (Pro)

9. Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor is primarily focused on email marketing but has other features you can use for a variety of other marketing and ecommerce purposes. Because it’s designed to work for teams, it’s ideal if you have many people working together on your campaigns.

Unique Features

• Template management and collaboration for teams.
• Built-in support for surveys with unlimited questions.
• 80 predesigned email templates.

Pricing

$9/mo (Basic), $29/mo (Unlimited), $149/mo (Premier)

9. Chamaileon.io

Chamaileon.io is a cleverly named email template builder that allows your team to design emails collaboratively, complete with drag-and-drop mechanics so you never have to worry about coding. You can also design and follow a set email campaign workflow, simplifying your efforts in the future.

Unique Features

• Collaborative email design for teams working together on the same templates.
• Unique and flexible account roles for multiple levels of access.
• Replicable testing settings to allow for easy testing of new designs.

Pricing

$150/mo (Standard), $250/mo (Premium)

10. Designmodo Postcards

Designmodo Postcards email builder is designed to bring teams together for the email template building process. You can use it to design emails however you like, then export as HTML, or to a full email service provider like Mailchimp.

Unique Features

• Modular designs that help you stack, customize, and rearrange your options.
• Long-term content management to help you revisit previous successes.
• Unlimited exports, which is ideal if you’re exporting to other services frequently.

Pricing

Free, $18/mo (Business), $29/mo (Agency)

11. Stripo.email

Stripo.email helps you create responsive email templates without any HTML coding skills necessary. It also features innate dynamic AMP support, and a robust testing tool to help you preview your email in more than 90 popular environments, including variants for devices and browsers.

Unique Features

• Drag-and-drop AMP blocks for image carousel and/or accordion support.
• Thorough testing in nearly 100 different environments.
• A customizable module library, allowing you to reuse past successful elements.
• Integration with many ESPs and third-party tools.

Pricing

Free, $125/mo (Business), $400/mo (Agency)

12. Taxi for Email

Taxi for Email provides scalable email template creation, as well as the ability to create email workflows. It also allows you to assign various tasks and permissions to your team, so each of your marketers can play a role in perfecting your email campaign.

Unique Features

• Team dynamics, including collaborative tools, access assignment, and user permissions.
• Robust testing on-demand as you design.
• Support for multiple languages and email segmentation.

Pricing

Request a custom quote.

13. SendGrid

SendGrid is an email service that provides support for email template designs — additionally, it offers email functions such as automatic shipping notifications and password resets. It also boasts an open API, which you can use to integrate with just about anything.

Unique Features

• A wide variety of tools, including email design, automation, signup forms, and more.
• APIs, SMTP Relay, and Webhooks.
• Delivery optimization tools so you can increase delivery rates.

Pricing

Free; Essentials and Pro plans vary in pricing based on the number of emails you send per month but plans start at $14.95/mo and 89.95/mo respectively; call for a quote (Premier)

Choose the Best Email Template Builder for Your Needs

There are a number of benefits that result from using an email template builder — so, consider your needs, goals, and budget while reviewing the list above to determine which option is most ideal for your team.

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