Category Archives: B2B

Educator and computer pioneer Alan Kay once said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

If you work for a growing company, be it a startup or scale-up, you’ll know that attempting to “invent” the future isn’t a matter of waiting around for flashes of inspiration and eureka moments — rather, it requires proactive planning, excellent execution, and awesome alignment. You’ll also know that these ingredients aren’t easy to come by. Not by a long shot.

That’s why I swear by a simple, unique framework to help me and my team at HubSpot prepare for the future. It’s called ‘rhythm of the business,’ and it involves visually mapping out the key events, milestones, and activities scheduled across the business year and ensuring that every team is intimately familiar with the plan — or rhythm — for the months ahead.

As a member of HubSpot’s revenue operations team, understanding the ‘rhythm of the business’ is critical for our success. Our team’s north-star goal is to remove friction for our customer-facing teams and help them to pass that friction-free experience on to customers.

The RevOps model sets us up for success because it breaks down silos between operations professionals, unifies them as a central team, and allows them to work collaboratively on the systems and processes that power a business.

As a result, duplicative work gets weeded out, repeatable tasks get automated, and time is spent proactively improving the customer experience, not frantically reacting to glitches in the system.

As the RevOps model aligns teams around the customer, the ‘rhythm of the business’ framework aligns the entire company around key events in the business year — those moments where outsized impact is possible and execution is everything.

Together, RevOps and ‘rhythm of the business’ are greater than the sum of their parts; a combination of mindset and method that enables growing continually to delight customers, even as their internal operating model becomes more complex.

How I Became a ‘Rhythm of the Business’ Believer

It was during my time working for Amazon that I first embraced ‘rhythm of the business.’ I picked up the habit of keeping a record of important milestones throughout the year, noting on my calendar the “fire drills” that occurred during the year and color-coded them.

Annual kick-offs were highlighted in blue, big customer events were orange. I used a printed wall calendar, which I know is “old school,” but it allowed me to visualize the entire year in a nanosecond.

Later in my time at Amazon, when I was in charge of planning, strategy, and enablement, I looked at the previous year’s calendar and noticed that some events had gone well for my team while others should have been given more preparation time. In short, I realized that we needed to plan better for the next 12 months.

So, when the time came to map out our calendar for the year ahead, I was able to take the learnings from the past 12 months and provide some informed structure to what otherwise would have been, in essence, an act of guesswork.

By structuring my team’s year in this way, not only were we able to kick off earlier than most teams, we gained the time needed to develop and refine our hypotheses, test them, and lay out a defensible data-driven strategy for the future.

This in turn enabled us to pursue better investments, see greater returns on those investments, and then be in a position to make greater investments going forward. The process took the form of a flywheel, feeding off its own momentum.

When I joined HubSpot in 2018, I brought the ‘rhythm of the business’ approach with me. Although the company had been growing well, it was about to hit a new phase of scale and we had the opportunity to improve our operating model by taking a step back from the whiteboard and considering the ebb and flow of the year.

This enabled us to kick off planning at the right time and be prepared for major milestones throughout the course of the year.

3 Ways ‘Rhythm of the Business’ Helps HubSpot Scale Better

At HubSpot, we have an annual planning cycle, and we recently observed that there were some areas of misalignment between teams. That was causing internal friction, and where there’s internal friction, it’s never too long before that friction seeps into the customer experience.

For example, at times our engineering team and product team were at advanced stages of their annual planning before other teams had fully defined what they needed from them.

At best, this type of disconnect can lead to a lot of lost time in meetings trying to re-assess plans, and at worst it can lead to ineffective, disjointed strategic execution — a thought that would keep most operations professionals I know up at night.

We turned to the ‘rhythm of the business’ model to root out this misalignment and implemented it with three straightforward steps that are easy for growing companies of any size to replicate.

1. Map the milestones.

The first thing my team at HubSpot did when adopting the ‘rhythm of the business’ was to note on our physical calendar when other teams were doing their annual planning and when their key milestones were due to occur.

We worked backward from those dates to set deadlines for the deliverables we owned for other teams’ key milestones, and once finalized, we distributed the calendar digitally across the company.

That allowed us to align our activities and priorities with those of other teams, giving us a tightly knit strategy for the year ahead.

2. Look long-term.

As important as it is to have the rhythm of the forthcoming year mapped out, it’s just as important to have a long-term plan in place.

At HubSpot, we recently mapped out a three-to-five-year plan, which is critically helpful from a systems perspective — it enables us to build a business strategy that is consistent, coherent, and clear. It also gives us the opportunity to ensure we’re making investments in the right systems at the right times.

Without this foresight, each team would likely pursue its own agenda and strategy, leading to different departments pointing in different directions, fractured investments, and potentially a clunky, cobbled-together tech stack — something that’s deeply detrimental to the customer experience.

3. Be a theme player.

With the key milestones for the year mapped out, it’s helpful to group them together under certain themes or seasons. This makes it easier for teams to organize their work mentally and remain focused on the overarching business purpose of their activities at any time of the year.

Here’s an example of how we at HubSpot group milestones by theme:

Q1: Kickoff Season

We kick the year off, set targets, and make sure that people have a clear understanding of their goals and feel motivated by them.

Q2: Think-big Season

We step back from the business and explore big opportunities and plan long-term. We look at what’s working well, we think about the future that’s not yet illuminated, and we assess the external factors that could impact our business.

It’s one of my favorite seasons because we consider the trends that might emerge three to five years from now. And that thinking helps inform the company in Q3.

Q3: Compass Season

We plan for the next year and identify the big plays we want to make, as well as the opportunities we will omit.

These choices are made with the learnings from Q2’s “think-big” season fresh in our minds, helping us to make decisions in the short term that will set us up for success in the long term.

Q4: Planning Season

You wrap up the year, finalizing the subsequent years’ targets, goals, investments, and divestments…and take some time to recharge!

Alignment Over Strategy

The ‘rhythm of the business’ framework has allowed the revenue operations team at HubSpot ensure that all teams are aligned on not only our priorities for the year ahead but also our vision of the future.

This in turn allows us to effectively create processes, construct systems, and organize data for our customer-facing teams, setting them up to successfully deliver a friction-free experience to our customers.

As our Chief Customer Officer Yamini Rangan often says, “Alignment eats strategy for breakfast.” This has become a mantra for us RevOps professionals at HubSpot as we ride the rhythm of the year.

After all, a strategy is only as good as its execution, and execution is entirely dependent on alignment, particularly at a scaling company.

To get started with “rhythm of the business” in your organization, start by looking back through your calendar — whether print, digital or memory-based — and mark down when key milestones occurred over the course of the previous year.

Then earmark when you began planning for each milestone and assess whether your team’s preparation was adequate or if it would benefit from more time, information, or support next year.

Once you’ve constructed this simple plan, you’ll be able to give your team a clear sense of the rhythm of your business for the next year. And in doing so, you’ll not only be able to prepare for the future, you’ll be able to invent it.

Final Thoughts

If you’d like to look into visualizing the future with the “rhythm of business” model, explore whether your company has rhythm or how to create a rhythm of business model. I also recommend a book we use at HubSpot, “Playing to Win,” which helped us ensure that we were all using similar nomenclature and frameworks.

Ultimately, the specific nomenclature or framework doesn’t matter. What matters is that everyone is on the same page and uses it – this speeds up communication, decision-making, and results.

If you’re anything like me, you probably mainly consider Wikipedia a good source for a behind-the-scenes look at the production of Game of Thrones, or a collection of random facts on Zebras.

In short, you likely haven’t given it much thought as a channel for brand awareness.

But, if you think about it, Wikipedia is one of the best third-party sources for ranking on page one of Google. Typically, when you search an intended keyword, you don’t have to scroll far before you see its accompanying Wikipedia page:

Additionally, it’s a recognizable website, so it’s often one of the first pages someone will click on if they want to learn more about what your business does.

If you want to boost your business’s visibility online, take a look at this quick guide so you can create a Wikipedia page for your company, today.

1. Create an account.

Go to Wikipedia’s homepage and click “Create account” in the top right.

Enter the necessary information, including username and password, then click “Create your account”.

2. Get promoted to an autoconfirmed user.

When you first join Wikipedia, you’ll see a box pop-up that reads, “Help improve Wikipedia” with a link to start editing an article:

Before creating your page, you’ll need to become an autoconfirmed user.

These are Wikipedia’s typical guidelines for an autoconfirmed user: “Although the precise requirements for autoconfirmed status vary according to circumstances, most English Wikipedia user accounts that are more than four days old and have made at least 10 edits (including deleted ones) are considered autoconfirmed.”

Here, you’ll need to practice patience — spend the first couple days once you open an account editing other people’s pages. Once you click “Edit a page”, there are links on the top right of every paragraph with the word “Edit”, so it shouldn’t be too time-consuming.

Once you’re autoconfirmed, proceed to the next step.

3. Create the page.

Now we’ve reached the most challenging part — creating the page.

First, go to Wikipedia’s “Writing an article” page. As you scroll down the page, you’ll see a blue button that reads, “Article wizard: an easy way to create articles.” Click this button (as long as you’re autoconfirmed):

Next, you’ll be redirected to Wikipedia’s Article Wizard. Here, you have two options — immediately begin creating your page by clicking “Next”, or practicing editing your page in Wikipedia’s sandbox, first.

For our purposes, we’ll click “Next”:

It’s important to note — since there’s likely no Wikipedia page already available for your company, you can include as much or as little information as you want. Additionally, you’ll want to structure the page for easy readability, featuring some of the most important and basic information (like what your company does), first.

For instance, take a look at how HubSpot’s Wikipedia page is structured:

The page starts with a two sentence overview of what HubSpot does, followed by a table of contents on the left, and a “fact sheet” on the right. Below the table of contents you’ll first find HubSpot’s history, followed by a description of HubSpot’s software and services.

On HubSpot’s Wikipedia page, the information that is above-the-fold is likely most useful for a new visitor who hasn’t heard of HubSpot before — a quick glance at the page can tell her, for instance, what HubSpot does, how much revenue HubSpot makes, what third-party sources such as Forbes say about HubSpot, and who HubSpot’s founders are.

While readers can continue scrolling for more product-specific information, it’s critical Wikipedia is mainly used as a broad brand awareness platform.

We’ll look at more examples later on.

4. Provide citations.

Wikipedia is ultimately an encyclopedia, so to prove the validity of your topic, you must include citations to various articles and third-party sources.

Before you begin creating your page, Wikipedia warns you of this, stating — “the topic of an article must already be covered in reliable sources that are independent of the subject. These include journals, books, newspapers, magazines, and websites with a reputation for fact checking. Social media, press releases, or corporate/professional profiles do not qualify”:

Ultimately, citations give your business credibility and allow the reader to trust your company is real. Look for magazine or newspaper articles that mention your company, other websites that backlink to your website as a resource, or directories that link to your company’s profile.

5. Submit the page for review.

When you’re finished with your page, submit it for review. Once Wikipedia deems it a credible source, it will be uploaded as an official Wikipedia page.

6. Update it regularly.

Remember — the hard work isn’t over, just yet. As your Wikipedia page begins ranking on page one of Google for your company name, it’s vital you regularly update it to ensure it provides the most up-to-date information regarding your products or services.

Additionally, by updating it regularly with company developments, you’re maintaining transparency, which is comforting for both your customers and leads.

Examples of Company Pages on Wikipedia

There are over 6 million articles in the English Wikipedia. A good chunk of those are company pages. The best company pages share the following characteristics:

• adequately describe the company
• maintain a neutral point of view
• include references to notable, independent sources
• includes a link to company website

Below we’ll take a look at two examples of company pages that can inspire your own. 

World Wide Technology

World Wide Technology’s wikipedia page is an excellent example of a company page. First, it offers a brief overview describing what type of company it is, how much revenue it earns, and how many people it employs. It then offers a timeline of notable events, starting with when it was founded and ending with its latest recognition in TIME magazine in 2021. 

The page ends with a comprehensive list of independent reliable sources, which have been published about the organization. Such a list helps Wikipedia understand why the organization is notable and avoids the appearance of a conflict of interest. Without such a list of references, your company page could be deleted. 

Urban One

Urban One’s wikipedia page is another excellent example of a company page. It begins by describing what the company is, who its primary audience is, and how large it is. While details like the fact that it’s the largest African-American-owned broadcasting company and one of the highest-earning African-American-owned businesses in the United States are impressive, they are stated objectively and cited properly to avoid the appearance of self-promotion. 

Wikipedia requires significant coverage in multiple independent sources for articles on organizations to be considered noticeable — a requirement which Urban One has easily met. Towards the bottom of the page you’ll find a references section with over 54 entries.

Getting Your Company on Wikipedia

Nowadays, a quick Google search provides us with an abundance of information — including social media profiles, directories, and press releases — on a given subject. By ensuring you have an up-to-date Wikipedia page, you’re covering your bases and giving viewers a trustworthy source of information related to your business or brand.

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

The digital-first world has arrived. Survey data from McKinsey shows that decision-makers now prefer digital interactions over ones occurring face-to-face. As this change unfolds, however, the opportunities to build connections with the same strength as face-to-face interactions dwindle. But that doesn’t change the fact that the world has shifted and now companies of all sizes need to know how to accommodate it. 

How can businesses evolve and take on this brave new world?

The answer: To provide digital experiences that are so compelling that audiences are drawn in to engage.

What Your Digital Experiences Need to Truly Engage Your Audience

Together with our friends at ON24, we compiled a lookbook detailing 10 inspiring and award-winning digital experiences that will help you better understand what consumers are expecting and how you can incorporate it into your B2B strategy. Inside 10 Outstanding Digital Experiences That Marketers Can Use you’ll find some of the hottest tips and latest trends to accelerate engagement thanks to first-party data from NetLine and ON24.

Let’s take a look at two examples of the 10 this guide includes.

Webinars: The Digital Experience Hub

At the heart of the digital-first approach are webinars—one of the most powerful channels for engaging an audience. ON24’s updated Webinar Benchmarks Report shows that in April 2020, audiences consumed nearly 170,000 hours of webinar content each day—almost 3x what was consumed in 2019. While other formats like eBooks and blogs might get more registrations, webinars offer the ability to create two-way conversations (like social media) all while providing the content and information audiences need.

But while webinars are increasing in popularity, it comes with a caveat: Audiences will not glom on to irrelevant or poorly conceived webinar topics like they may with other formats. What ON24 has found is that in order to build and strengthen worthwhile connections that last into the future, B2B organizations need to create webinar series worth investing in. 

How Zendesk Used Digital Experiences to Double Their Bookings

Zendesk is synonymous with customer service. Ultimately, what customer service is all about is connection and making sure there’s always an avenue for said connection to occur. When Zendesk wanted to find a way to interact with its own clients at scale and at any time, all without compromising on quality; the ON24 platform turned out to be the perfect solution. Using the platform ended up elevating the company’s, ‘What’s New at Zendesk’ from a single webinar that played a supporting role to the company’s major in-person event, to a standalone premier event experience. 

Using the ON24 console’s media player, Zendesk was able to webcast content that was highly engaging and sophisticated for viewers, but simple to execute, with speakers webcasting from home webcams. Rather than just providing technical product information,  Zendesk focused on providing real solutions to their clients by answering audience questions in real-time with up to 20 product experts. 

All of these digital experience executions paid off big time for Zendesk, as pipeline and bookings attribution more than doubled from the previous quarter. It also saw an increase in registrations by 42% and attendance by 36% quarter-over-quarter. 

Creating Fully-Integrated Digital Experiences

Photo by Stephen Dawson on Unsplash

While webinars are perfectly suited for creating excellent digital experiences, there are ways to get even more out of them. One particularly good example of how great webinars, personalized Target pages, and a rich Engagement Hub can work together to create a compelling digital experience is from omnichannel customer engagement platform Emarsys.

How Emarsys Used Digital Experiences to Support Its Customer Base

In September of 2020, Emarsys knew that its customers were facing a time of great change. As customer behaviors shifted rapidly and the retail industry turned upside down, digital and eCommerce professionals needed a place to unify, learn, and inspire each other en masse. Emarsys responded, creating ‘Retail Renaissance 2020’, using the ON24 platform. The experience combined ON24 webinars, Engagement Hub, and Target pages for a three-day festival, bringing together 50+ hours of webinar content in a range of formats. 

Inspired by the alternative context of a virtual experience versus a live conference, Emarsys developed a round-the-clock agenda, with 24-hour content in a range of languages adapted to suit attendees across the world, in any time zone. Through the ON24 platform, Retail Renaissance was explorable via tracks and themes, leading attendees to live Q&As with keynote speakers, panel sessions, and breakout sessions in their native language. Emarsys labeled this digital experience their biggest demand driver of 2020, and that value continues to be generated today with recyclable, evergreen content.

Download 10 Outstanding Digital Experiences That Marketers Can Use

By featuring examples that stand out from the others, this lookbook aims to show a different path forward. From best-in-class webinars to fully integrated digital experiences, we hope you’ll be inspired to provide opportunities that your audiences cannot resist. 

Beyond the two examples we walked through in detail, by downloading this lookbook you’ll learn:

• The basic building blocks of modern digital experiences
• What makes a comprehensive digital experience work and why
• How to combine webinars, personalized landing pages, and engagement hubs into an experience
• Discover what it takes to go from simple webinars to complex, fully integrated digital experiences.

Find out how you can take your digital experiences to the next level. The future has arrived.

Download your copy of 10 Outstanding Digital Experiences That Marketers Can Use.

One of the best ways to deliver valve to and engage with your subscribers — those who already like, know, and trust your brand — is through an email newsletter. With the strategy in place, newsletters help you keep your contacts engaged with your business, establish your brand authority and trustworthiness, and ultimately drive more leads.

Once you have an email marketing plan for engaging your subscribers, the next step is choosing newsletter software to support your efforts.

Newsletter software is essential since it allows you to beautifully design a newsletter email and deliver the email to your subscribers with features such as:

• A/B testing
• Smart content
• Templates and customizability
• Analytics

However, not all email newsletter tools are created equal.

What’s the best newsletter software?

There’s no one reigning champion of email newsletter tools. Ultimately, you’ll need to make the best decision for your unique needs based on the following criteria:

• Price – This one goes without saying, but if you want ROI from your email efforts, you’ll need to choose a solution that fits your budget.
• Features – If you’re new to email marketing, you’ll want a solution with a simple interface and easy-to-use features (like drag-and-drop email design). More advanced users may require more robust functionality.
• Subscriber Limits – Many solutions will base their pricing around the size of the database or the number of monthly email sends. Consider the size of your current audience and the rate at which you want to grow to choose a provider that offers plans to accommodate that.

With differences in features, pricing, and availability, choosing an email newsletter can be hard — especially with the number of options available. Additionally, newsletter tools differ in how much of the customer journey they can cover.

Ultimately, when choosing your email newsletter tool, you’ll want to ensure the tool matches your business’s goals — which is why we wanted to take out the guesswork and highlight the top email newsletters out there for your business.

1. HubSpot’s Email Marketing Tool

Pricing: Starts Free

Designing, sending, and analyzing email newsletters has never been easier with the HubSpot Email tool. HubSpot offers a drag-and-drop email editor so you can easily create a polished email newsletter that you can personalize to fit your brand’s design without needing a designer or IT professional.

Additionally, you can experiment with smart content rules, personalization, A/B testing, and advanced reporting — ensuring your email newsletters are optimized for your business. You can also see who’s engaging with each newsletter email and when, what device they’re using, the most popular links and documents, and more. You can use these insights to design tests that will take conversion rates to new heights for your business.

Ultimately, what makes HubSpot’s Email tool so exceptional is its ability to pair with HubSpot’s free forms tool to easily collect email leads, as well as HubSpot’s free CRM to give you insight into how your marketing emails are performing.

For example, you can use an email subscriber’s lifecycle stage, list membership, or any information in their contact records to automatically serve up the most relevant subject lines, content, links, attachments, and calls-to-action.

Best of all, it can grow with you as you grow.

2. Moosend

Pricing: Free up to 2,000 subscribers

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Moosend is a well-rounded email marketing newsletter tool that requires no technical skill whatsoever. Through Moosend’s email editor, you can easily build personalized email newsletters using interactive elements like videos and images. Alternatively, you can get started immediately by picking one of the ready-made templates available in the platform’s template library.

The tool also comes with landing pages and subscription forms to boost your lead generation efforts. You also get detailed reporting and analytics that allow you to make data-driven decisions.

Finally, to top it off, Moosend’s platform allows you to create or use some ready-made automation recipes to boost conversion.

3. Benchmark

Pricing: Free up to 250 emails per month

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Benchmark offers the ability to easily create email newsletters via drag-and-drop functionality, giving non-technical marketers the power to create beautiful newsletters. There’s also a good selection of newsletter templates that you can choose from in the Benchmark template library.

Some of Benchmark’s most valuable features include detailed analytics on how each email campaign performs, A/B split testing to ensure you’re sending the best emails, spam testing tools that ensure your emails get to inboxes, responsive designs and templates, list segmentation tools, and auto-responders.

4. SendInBlue

Pricing: Free up to 300 emails per day

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With SendInBlue, you don’t need technical skills to create well-designed email newsletters. The drag-and-drop functionality, HTML editor, and expansive template gallery gives you the tools you need to create stunning emails.

You can personalize the design of your newsletters with easy builders, choose the form fields for your subscription form, and design many ways for your visitors to opt-in. SendInBlue has a robust automation pipeline, allowing you to send different emails based on specific actions taken by your contacts. However, SendInBlue does not have a CRM, so it’s not the best option for scaling teams.

5. Stripo

Pricing: Starts free

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Stripo is an email template builder that allows you to design HTML email templates and export them to your email newsletter software of choice. If you’re not a fan of working in HTML, you also have the option to use the drag-and-drop editor, or even combine the two editing formats, depending on your preference. With Stripo, you’ll have access to interactive elements (such as rollover effects on buttons and images) and features for embedded dynamic content and personalization.

Stripo also offers over 350 prebuilt templates with over 100,000 free stock images and 1,000 prebuilt modules that you can use across your campaigns.

You can use the embedded email testing tool so you know how your newsletters will render across your contacts’ email clients.

Additionally, Stripo has a native integration with HubSpot, which allows you to push all your emails from Stripo to HubSpot with just a few clicks.

6. GetResponse

Pricing: Starts at $15 per month

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GetResponse offers features that become available as you need them, from a range of starter features all the way to enterprise features such as webinars and landing pages. Hosting landing pages in GetResponse will further enable you to capture email subscribers for your newsletter.

GetResponse also allows you to create well-designed email newsletters with their drag-and-drop email editor, segment contacts tool, campaigns creator, and A/B testing tool. With a ton of templates to choose from, you can create an email to match your brand, and send emails more efficiently.

7. Mailjet

Pricing: Free up to 6,000 email sends per month

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Mailjet offers email solutions for fast-moving teams, especially in Europe, and great scaling opportunities for larger companies. The service is keen on being developer-friendly with a powerful API solution for engineers to build on their email platform. One appealing feature of Mailjet is the ability to create dynamic content that is personalized for each recipient based on data such as name and location.

If your team demands email newsletters are built together and reviewed often before sending, Mailjet’s collaborative tools make it easy for teams to work together on emails. For example, you can create a draft of your newsletter in Mailjet, and your teammates can suggest edits before it’s sent — all within the app.

8. Pabbly Email Marketing

Pricing: Starts free

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Pabbly Email Marketing is a powerful bulk emailing tool that provides features like built-in email templates, auto-followups, custom fields, subscription forms, integrations, all included in the basic plan.

Pabbly provides the ability to choose from more than 50 SMTPs for sending emails. Using the SMTP routing feature, you can divide your email campaign into smaller segments of subscribers and use different SMTPs for each segment. Sending emails using different SMTPs can improve the deliverability of your emails.

9. MailChimp

Pricing: Free up to 2,000 subscribers

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MailChimp offers a free email marketing service with a large selection of templates to choose from for newsletters. MailChimp is ideal for small and medium-sized businesses looking to get their feet wet in email marketing but is not suited for scaling teams since it lacks powerful automation and segmenting features.

MailChimp is a valuable tool nonetheless, especially since its free plan generously offers up to 12,000 free email sends per month. You’ll also like the variety of newsletter templates that MailChimp offers, and the drag-and-drop builder that lets you rework the designs.

10. Constant Contact

Pricing: Starts at $20 per month

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Constant Contact provides a reliable email newsletter solution for small to large businesses. Constant Contact provides a helpful user onboarding for anyone looking to get started quickly and offers easy-to-use features. If you think you’ll be running into complexity with the email marketing tool, you’ll be happy to know that Constant Contact’s multi-channel support system can help walk you through most issues.

In Constant Contact, you can use their email builder to create newsletters that match your brand, select from a variety of templates, and edit to ensure it looks exactly how you want it — although I’m not a big fan of the templates since most of the templates look outdated. Additionally, if you need sophisticated automation features and workflows, I would advise staying away from Constant Contact because it lacks a strong automation system.

11. MailUp

Pricing: 470 € per year

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MailUp offers plenty of the same functionality as what you’d expect from an email marketing service, including a drag-and-drop email builder, beautifully designed templates, and an HTML editor.

However, it’s critical to note — you get more value from MailUp if you choose to send out emails at a slower pace since the price varies depending on delivery speed. So, if your business has a specific number of contacts and doesn’t mind sending newsletters slower, you could save money by using MailUp. If you use WordPress, MailUp also offers a WordPress plugin that you can use to capture newsletter subscribers on your website.

12. Zoho Campaigns

Pricing: Starts at $3 per month

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Zoho offers a great email solution for marketers looking to utilize automation features, including auto-responders and workflows. If you’re already a Zoho CRM customer, it might be worth checking out Zoho Campaigns for an email newsletter tool, since they work better together.

Zoho includes many modern and well-designed templates to choose from. If you’re worried about how your newsletter will look on different mobile devices or browsers, Zoho gives you the ability to check to see how your newsletters look on various devices to ensure your newsletter is optimized for mobile, tablet, and desktop.

13. AWeber

Pricing: Free up to 500 subscribers

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AWeber delivers a well-established email marketing newsletter tool with an array of features for your business, including email designs, list segmentation, automation tools, and detailed reporting. To make design easier, AWeber has more than 6,000 royalty-free stock photos to include in your emails. Of course, you can also upload your own images and gifs.

AWeber is a great solution if your business uses WordPress since AWeber easily integrates with WordPress. However, it’s important to note you can’t specify multiple segments at once when sending an email newsletter — plus, AWeber lacks some powerful automation features.

14. Campaigner

Pricing: $59 per month up to 5,000 subscribers

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Campaigner is a good option if you work for a growing team since the tool offers robust automation and workflow features available at the enterprise tier. You can set up systems that send email newsletters when contacts fill out specific forms, make a purchase, or engage with a previous email.

As with most of the email newsletter tools in this list, Campaigner offers easy-to-use email builders and a large selection of templates to get you started. If you run into trouble, their support is noted as being helpful at solving technical challenges.

15. Drip

Pricing: Starts at $19 per month up to 500 contacts

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Drip is ideal for more experienced email marketers since it’s not as intuitive and easy to use as some of the others in the list. For example, there’s a limited email template library, so you’ll have to spend time designing your email newsletter. With that said, Drip comes packed with automation features that could be beneficial for your business, particularly if you work in e-commerce.

With Drip’s “ECRM”, you can run personalized email newsletter campaigns that work with information gathered from contact purchases and checkout information, like abandoned cart details. One thing to note — Drip does not offer phone support, so you won’t have that added peace of mind.

16. Postcards

Pricing: Starts free

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Used by major brands like Nike, Disney, and T Mobile, Postcards is a drag-and-drop email builder that enables you to create impressive email newsletters. The tool features a “modular system”, meaning you can stack and re-arrange pre-made designs to create a custom newsletter that fits your brand. Customizable modules include a header and footer, CTA, and menu options.

Additionally, the tool enables you to collaborate with teammates to ensure the newsletter is up to everyone’s standards and gives you a 30-day version history if you decide to revert to an older format. Plus, you’ll get unlimited exports.

17. Campaign Monitor

Pricing: Starts at $9 per month

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Campaign Monitor’s email marketing tool enables you to create an engaging and high-quality email newsletter with a simple drag-and-drop interface. Additionally, the tool includes sign-up forms you can embed on your blog pages to encourage new readers to sign-up for daily content delivered to their inboxes.

Along with unique and customizable templates, Campaign Monitor provides a full analytics suite to help you track the performance of your newsletters over time. You can measure engagement to improve the content you include in your newsletters for the long haul.

18. BEE Pro

Pricing: Starts free

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If you’re a freelance designer or work at an email agency, this tool could be a good fit for you. BEE Pro lets you create mobile-ready emails quickly with smart design tools — plus, you can save custom templates, and even assign projects to specific clients’ to ensure an easy workflow if you’re using this one email tool for multiple brands. Additionally, the tool enables you to invite clients or colleagues to review and make comments on email newsletter drafts to get approval faster.

19. MailerLite

Pricing: Free up to 1,000 subscribers and 12,000 sends per month

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MailerLite is a great free option for starting a newsletter. Its newsletter editor features pre-built design blocks and drag-and-drop functionality, allowing you to build attractive and mobile-friendly emails quickly and easily. To top things off, you get built-in photo editing to help you create without leaving the platform. Mailerlite also has the capability to segment audiences, add personalization, and create dynamic content so you can continually deliver a great experience.

Premium plans include unlimited sends, a custom HTML editor, and the removal of the MailerLite logo. You can also get a Stripe integration for monetizing your newsletter with digital products.

20. ConvertKit

Pricing: Free up to 1,000 subscribers

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ConvertKit offers a whole suite of products for building and growing an email newsletter. With the free version, you’ll be able to create unlimited landing pages and forms to build your subscriber list. You’ll also be able to draw from a library of templates for email creation.

One interesting thing about ConvertKit is that you can sell digital products and memberships without an integration or added premium, giving you monetization capability out of the gate.

Premium plans include automation, subscriber scoring, and even a referral system through SparkLoop.

Growing Your Newsletter

That’s it! These are the best email newsletter tools that I recommend. You can’t go wrong with any of these tools since they all offer similar features, but there will be one that’s best suited for your business. The great thing about HubSpot is that we offer a free solution to get you started — and then, once your business grows, we have plenty of advanced features you’ll need in order to deliver a successful newsletter marketing strategy down the road.

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

When you begin implementing a social media strategy for your business, one of the first questions you’ll ask yourself is this one — Should my business be on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram?

Those three social media sites offer considerable opportunities to connect and engage with a network, increase brand awareness, and drive traffic to your site. But they’re also incredibly different in terms of purpose.

Ultimately, Facebook’s purpose is to connect people with their personal networks including friends and family. People use Facebook to share photos, videos, and general updates on their lives.

Twitter, on the other hand, is used to share ideas, real-time information, and trending news. While people may also use Twitter to connect with friends and family, they largely use it for a bigger purpose — to connect to the wider world and discover what’s happening (in 140 characters or less).

Instagram is used to share photos and videos. People mainly use this app to post their “highlight reel” and follow friends as well as influencers. This is how users become a part of a social media community.

Of course, this still begs the question — where does your business fit into all this? To explore the pros and cons of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, we’ve created a comprehensive breakdown of the three platforms.

Keep reading to figure out which platform is a better business investment for your company.

And what about Instagram?

Twitter vs. Facebook vs. Instagram Users

Let’s start by taking a look at Twitter versus Facebook versus Instagram users.

Twitter vs. Facebook vs. Instagram Demographics

To start, let’s consider the potential demographic your business could reach on each platform.

Here are some quick and informative facts:

Twitter Demographic Facts:

• 24% of U.S. adults are on Twitter.
• 40% of Twitter users are between the ages of 18-29.
• Less than 20% of people ages 50 and up use Twitter.

Facebook Demographic Facts:

• 70% of U.S. adults are on Facebook.
• 80% of Facebook users are between the ages of 18-29.
• 65% of people ages 50 and up use Facebook.

Instagram Demographic Facts:

• 37% of U.S. adults are on Instagram.
• 75% of Instagram users are 18-24.

Twitter vs. Facebook vs. Instagram Engagement

It’s equally critical you determine quality over quantity — how long does each site’s audience stay on the platform? Or, alternatively, how many minutes per day do they spend on each?

Twitter Engagement Facts:

• As of Q1 2019, Twitter averaged 330 million monthly active users.
• About 71% of Twitter users say they use the platform to get news. 
• You have no choice but to engage users with quickly digestible content since the platform has a 140-character limit. 

Facebook Engagement Facts:

• Facebook is the biggest social network worldwide. 
• As of Q1 of 2021, Facebook reported nearly 1.88 billion daily active users. 
• In the U.S., Facebook accounts for over 60% of monthly social media visits. 

Instagram Engagement Facts:

• 59% of Instagram users visit the app daily.

• Accounts with 1,000-5,000 followers typically have a 5.6% engagement rate. On the other hand, accounts with over 1 million followers, average a 1.97% engagement rate.

With all of the above stats in mind, no matter how many followers you have, if you can appeal to your audience with the right content, you’ll likely have the best engagement rates on Facebook. Here’s some research by Statista to prove it. This is a look at the most popular mobile social networking apps in the U.S., as of September 2019, by user engagement (in minutes/ month). Facebook wins by a substantial amount. 

Twitter vs. Facebook vs. Instagram Usage

Here are some points to consider while choosing the right platform for your business to use:

• With less than 140 characters to convey your brand’s message, you might think of Twitter as your business’ “elevator pitch”. What do you want to get across to your audience quickly and succinctly?
• Facebook is your opportunity to engage more in-depth with an audience. You can create full business pages, share videos, and images, and further incentivize prospects to engage with your brand (by offering 10% off if they “like” your business page, for instance).
• With Instagram, you can create an interactive community. This is the platform where users are more likely to engage. People go to Instagram and expect to see influencers and follow brands they like.

Twitter Ads vs Facebook vs Instagram Ads

In general, advertising on Facebook and Instagram allows you to reach a larger audience. Since Instagram is owned by Facebook, they offer similar ad tools. Additionally, Facebook ads come with some impressive targeting tools, so you’re able to narrow down salary, purchase behavior, hobbies, Facebook communities, and more.

Facebook advertising’s interface is relatively easy and intuitive for the user. Facebook ads can be relatively cheap, as well — in fact, Facebook points out that, “Some people spend more on coffee each day than they do on their ad campaigns”. While it depends on the campaign you’re running, you can often set a budget as little as $2 to $3 per day.

Twitter also offers targeting capabilities, including purchase behavior, language, interest, and followers. However, Twitter advertising is typically more expensive than Facebook.

It may be worth the extra money, though — engagement rates for Twitter ads can be as high as 1-3%, much higher than Facebook’s average CTR of 0.119%.

Twitter vs. Facebook vs. Instagram for Business

Ultimately, it’s likely best to try Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for a while if you’re unsure which one works better for your brand. Over time, you’ll gain valuable insights into how well your posts perform on these sites, enabling you to dedicate more time to one over the other. Since they’re free to use, there’s no harm in initially trying all three.

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

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.

Image Source

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.