Collecting high-quality leads is a challenging task that marketers face. Even once you’ve created a fantastic, high-converting landing page, you’re not done.

The good news is that there are a number of plugins available that you can add to your WordPress website to help with lead generation.

Before we dive into 18 of the best plugins available, let’s cover the characteristics of a powerful and useful lead generation WordPress plugin.

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What to Look For in a Lead Generation Plugin for Your WordPress Website

Here are some tips to help you pick the best lead generation plugin(s) for your website:

1. There are positioning options.

Your lead capture form’s positioning and location on your website play a role in conversion rate. Make sure your chosen tool offers the positioning options you want. Ask yourself: “Do I want to use a popup? A two-step opt-in? An in-content form?”

2. You can add integrations.

Many lead generation plugins exist to help you capture leads and get those leads into your CRM or list management tool. Whether it’s your CRM, Sales Hub, or management tool your team uses, make sure your plugin can integrate.

3. There are customizable fields.

Effective lead capture forms are all about balancing the number of fields on a form and the form’s conversion rates. Usually, a shorter form means a higher conversion rate. But at the same time, it can also mean less qualified leads.

For each tool, you want the flexibility to collect as much info as you need to qualify a lead. Some tools will only let you collect a name and email, while others let you add and customize as many fields as you want — so keep an eye out for this option while browsing plugins.

There are a number of lead generation plugins for WordPress available — here are 18 of our favorites.

1. HubSpot WordPress Plugin

With HubSpot’s WordPress plugin, you get lead generation support that helps you capture leads via multiple avenues on your website. Here are some examples:

• Lead capture forms (use the drag-and-drop form builder to control what information you collect from your leads)
• Popup options (use popups, top banners, and slide-in boxes to capture leads)
• Free live chat module (connect with visitors and offer support or sales information)
• Automated chatbot (respond to FAQs while live chat reps are offline)

No matter which avenue your leads come in from, they’re all stored in your free HubSpot CRM which makes tagging and segmention simple.

The plugin can help with tasks outside of lead generation as well including email marketing, CRM and contact management, marketing automation, and reporting and analytics.

You have the ability to integrate HubSpot with over 500 other tools to further enhance capabilities and functionality. Lastly, HubSpot’s WordPress plugin is simple to install and applies to all plans and products.

Price: Free

2. Gravity Forms

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Gravity Forms is a general WordPress form plugin that you can use to create all kinds of lead capture forms. The plugin gives you a drag-and-drop form builder as well as 30+ custom field types to collect the information you want from leads.

There are also some neat extensions to enhance your lead collection. For example, the Partial Entries add-on lets you collect information even if someone doesn’t fill out the entire form.

By default, Gravity Forms stores all form submissions in your WordPress dashboard — you can also integrate your forms with a variety of email marketing services, CRMs, and help desks. And if that’s not enough, the Zapier and Webhooks integrations can help you connect to pretty much anywhere else, too.

Additionally, if you’re already using HubSpot’s WordPress plugin, HubSpot will automatically grab Gravity Forms submissions and put them into your CRM for easy management.

Price: Starts at $59

3. Hustle

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Hustle is a WordPress marketing plugin featuring customizable popups, slide-ins, embeds, and social sharing bars. All include a wide array of display options, including:

• Posts or pages
• Categories or tags
• Visitor logged-in status
• Device
• Referring website
• Number of times a visitor has been seen
• Specific URLs
• If the visitor has commented before
• Country
• Include on 404 page or not

Embeds are your in-content ads or opt-ins — they can be displayed before or after your post content, or both. You can also use shortcodes or widgets to display the embeds in more specific locations.

What makes Hustle stand out is the fact that every feature and integration is included in the free version. You get all 18+ integrations, including Zapier.

If you’re using our HubSpot WordPress plugin, Hustle will automatically grab your submissions and send them into your CRM. Alternatively, you can enable Hustle’s native HubSpot integration.

The only limitation of the free version is the amount of popups, slide-ins, embeds, and social share bars you can create in each installation. It’s limited to 3 of each, but that should be plenty for the average user.

Price: Free to start, premium version costs $49 per month

4. Bloom

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Bloom is a popular email opt-in plugin from Elegant Themes. It helps you capture email leads using a variety of form types, including:

• Pop-ups
• Slide-ins
• Content lockers (e.g. lock certain content behind an email subscribe form)
• In-content forms

You get some unique options for triggering your lead capture forms like displaying a form after a person leaves a comment on your site.

The only downside is that you’re limited in how much control you have over your forms. For example, you can only customize the existing templates — you can’t make your own. And you’re limited in the amount of information you can collect from visitors.

If you’re okay with those limitations, this tool could be a good one for your team. Plus, you get a nice dashboard where you can view analytics and track lead growth as well as the option to run A/B tests.

Price: $89

5. WPForms

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WPForms is a popular WordPress form plugin that you can use to create … well, pretty much any type of form.

Using its drag-and-drop builder and a variety of form fields, you can create customized lead capture forms to collect as much or as little information as you want from your leads.

Once you have your form, you have a few different ways to work with leads that you collect. WPForms stores all your leads in its own entry manager, which you can access from your WordPress dashboard.

Alternatively, you can sync your forms up with:

• A variety of email marketing services
• Zapier

Additionally, if you’re using HubSpot, you can also automatically pull your WPForms submissions into your HubSpot CRM for tagging and segmentation.

Price: Starts free, paid plans range from $39.50 to $199.50

6. Thrive Leads

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Thrive Leads is a popular WordPress lead generation plugin that helps collect email addresses with several different opt-in types, including:

• Lightbox popups
• “Sticky” ribbons
• In-line forms
• Slide-ins
• 2-step opt-ins
• Screen fillers
• Content lockers
• Scroll/welcome mat

For all the various form types, you can use the included templates and drag-and-drop builder to customize things to make them your own.

One area where Thrive Leads goes further than a lot of other solutions is its SmartLinks feature, which lets you display different forms to people depending on where they’re coming from. With this feature, you can ensure you’re sending different forms to your email list than what appears on your homepage.

Price: $67 for one license, $97 for five licenses

7. Elementor Pro

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Elementor Pro is a popular WordPress page builder plugin that can help you build both lead capture pages and lead capture forms.

Elementor gives you a visual, drag-and-drop builder interface that you can use to create posts or pages on your site — including standalone landing pages.

With Elementor Pro, you also implement a Popup Builder that lets you use the same interface to design and display popups anywhere on your site.

To actually capture leads, you can use Elementor Pro’s Form widget, which lets you build custom forms with as many fields as needed. You can then connect those forms to Zapier to send data to your favorite CRM for tagging and segmentation.

Price: $49

8. OptinMonster

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OptinMonster helps you create a variety of different lead capture forms using 75+ pre-built templates and drag-and-drop form builder. With it, you can create:

• Pop-ups
• Floating bars
• Fullscreen overlays
• Slide-ins

One of the areas where OptinMonster really excels is with its targeting and triggering rules. Using detailed rulesets and AND/OR conditions, you can control exactly where and when your lead capture forms appear.

Another helpful feature is its OnSite Retargeting feature, which lets you display different offers to visitors who have already submitted a lead capture form.

OptinMonster isn’t technically a WordPress plugin (it’s a SaaS), but it’s easy to integrate the OptinMonster service into your WordPress site via its dedicated plugin at WordPress.org.

Price: Starts at $108 per year

9. BoxZilla

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BoxZilla, formerly known as Scroll Triggered Popups, is a useful lead capture plugin that helps you create simple forms that display as either popups or slide-ins on your site.

As the previous name of the plugin suggests, one way you can trigger these forms is as a user scrolls down your page. However, BoxZilla supports other triggers, too, like time on site or exit intent.

Price: Starts free, premium version starts at $48

10. Holler Box

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Holler Box is a simple lead capture plugin that targets itself towards WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads stores, but can really be used for all kinds of WordPress sites.

Holler Box lets you create seven different types of lead capture forms, including popups and slide-ins. However, the most unique option here is Holler Box’s faux live chat widget.

This widget looks like a live chat box, but is really just a vehicle to capture leads. Your visitor enters their message and email address.

Then, you can either receive an email notification email yourself, or connect that information to popular email marketing services or your own custom HTML form.

Price: Starts free, premium version starts at $99

11. CallPage

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CallPage is a simple lead capture plugin that helps you collect telephone numbers from potential leads.

To collect phone numbers, it displays a widget that lets visitors enter their phone numbers to receive a call back either right away, or at some point in the future. If you want, you can also collect additional information about your leads, like names or email addresses.

By integrating with Google Analytics, you can also use CallPage to view call histories and analyze the call performance for each traffic source at your site.

Price: Starts free, paid plans start at $159 per month

12. Optin Forms

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Optin Forms is a free lead capture plugin that helps you create simple email opt-in forms on your site and connect those forms to:

• AWeber
• iContact
• MailChimp
• GetResponse
• MadMimi
• Interspire Email Marketer
• ConvertKit

You can choose from five different templates and customize all the text and colors to make them match your site and branding.

From there, you can either automatically add your lead capture form to all your blog posts, or use a shortcode to choose exactly where and when to include your forms.

Price: Free

13. Ninja Forms

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Ninja Forms is another WordPress form plugin that follows in the vein of WPForms or Gravity Forms by letting you use drag-and-drop to build your own custom forms and then hook that data up to various email marketing services, CRMs, or even Zapier or Webhooks. You can also automatically pull in form submissions to your HubSpot CRM as well.

Among other things, you can use Ninja Forms for:

• Contact forms
• Email opt-in forms
• Surveys and polls

Price: Starts free, paid extensions vary in price

14. OnePress Opt-In Panda

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OnePress Opt-In Panda helps you capture leads by locking parts of your content behind a lead capture form. In order to “unlock” the content, your visitors will need to enter their email addresses.

Or, with the premium version of the plugin, you can also add custom fields to collect additional information about your leads.

The plugin works by wrapping your restricted content in a short code, which means that you can restrict as much (or as little) of your content as you want.

With the paid version of the plugin, you also get other helpful features like a lead management dashboard and analytics.

Price: Starts free, premium version costs $26

15. Lead Champion

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Lead Champion detects the leads who leave your website whether or not they complete and submit one of your contact forms. The plugin assigns site visitors a score (that you establish) based on their behavior while on your website — this allows you to evaluate prospects, the effectiveness of your campaigns, and more. 

The plugin helps you easily create forms that complement your branding and website with the configuration panel. It also integrates with other tools — such as Mailchimp, Zapier, and CRMs — to enhance its capabilities. 

Price: Multiple plans available; must contact for price and must have a Lead Champion Booster License

16. Popups, Welcome Bar, Optins and Lead Generation Plugin

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This plugin allows you to design and share branded, eye-catching optins, forms, and calls-to-action on your website to attract your leads. There’s never a need to hire a developer with the plugin, as it’s simple to set up and use. You can quickly create unique popups with different themes and positions on your site to target leads that way, too. 

The plugin offers four types of optins you can choose from including: 

• Lightbox Popups
• Header & Footer Action Bars
• Toast Notifications
• Slide-in Messengers

The plugin comes with 20 customizable form templates that have responsive design so your leads can view and complete your forms on any device seamlessly. These forms have customizable elements so you can design them in a way that complements your branding and website.

Price: Free, or upgrade to one of two paid plans for more features

17. Forminator

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With Forminator, you can use the drag-and-drop builder to add and customize the layout of forms on your WordPress website. The plugin allows you to easily collect any information you want to ask your leads for, as well as make your forms interactive to boost engagement and generate more conversions. 

With Forminator, you can customize forms with as many fields as you want. You can also create interactive polls, quizzes (that are shareable on social), make calculations and take orders, accept payment, and more. 

The plugin integrates with a number of tools and over 1,000 apps — Forminator is compatible with integrations across multiple categories including email, CRM (including HubSpot), storage, and project managers.

Price: Free

18. Optinly

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Optinly is a WordPress lead generation tool that helps you grow your email list with ease. What makes this plugin stand out is its goal-based approach to campaign creation. You choose your marketing goal, a relevant popup template, and then set your campaign live. With the tool, you can create quite a variety of popups such as:

• Fullscreen Overlays
• Sidebar Widgets
• Floating Bars
• Notification Popups 
• Gamification Popups

The tool comes with several methods to trigger a popup such as exit intent, time-delay, page-based, and device-based. You can also display popups to the same visitor after a specific number of days using the re-targeting options menu. 

With Optinly, you can make nearly any customization with a user-friendly WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. And with animation options such as fade-in, zoom, and flip-in, you can make your popups catch a visitor’s attention quickly.

You can easily integrate Optinly with email marketing platforms like HubSpot, MailChimp, Constant Contact Contact, and AWeber. 

Price: Free to start, growth plan costs $25 per month.

Build Your Lead Generation Plugin Toolbox

When it comes to the best WordPress lead generation plugins, you have a ton of options available — only you know which ones will best fit into your lead generation efforts.

The important thing to remember here is that you don’t have to pick just one — you can combine multiple plugins into one cohesive lead generation strategy.

Learn how to build a WordPress website using Elementor with this free course.

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

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

I once heard a new business owner define their target market as … wait for it … “everyone”.

*cringe*

While it’s nice to believe that everyone would be interested in purchasing your product or service, it’s not wise to define your target market as such.

Not only does this definition (or lack thereof) create way more work for you; it also does a disservice to your actual target market — by over-widening your scope, you fail to inform and educate your audience about how your product or service can improve their lives.

This is where segmentation, targeting, and positioning come into play. We developed this guide to help you understand how and why you should invest time into better understanding your audience and targeting your marketing. Let’s dive in.

At its core, STP helps you to better target your marketing messages and better serve your customer base.

The model can also reveal niche markets, uncover new customer or market opportunities, and, ultimately, make your marketing efforts more efficient and cost-effective.

STP allows you to take a large, anonymous audience and define how your different products (or different components of the same product) relate to specific consumer segments within that larger audience — thus understanding how to position your product(s) and messaging to grab the attention of each segment.

Let’s unpack each part of the segmentation-targeting-positioning model.

1. Segmentation

Segmentation refers to the process of dividing your audience into smaller groups based on certain characteristics. This process allows you to group your individual audience members into similar groups so you can better communicate your products, features, and benefits that may be most relevant to them.

You can segment your audience based on one or more of these criteria:

• Demographics, which typically answer the question of who your buyer is (e.g. age, gender, education, location, and profession)
• Psychographics, which answer the question of why your buyer buys (e.g. priorities, personality traits, and beliefs and values)
• Lifestyle traits, such as hobbies, entertainment preferences, and non-work activities
• Behavior, such as brand loyalty, channel preferences, and other shopping habits

Segmentation may sound a little familiar to another process we often discuss here on the HubSpot blog — creating buyer personas. The two are very similar as they help you drill down the most important factors in your target audience.

But where buyer personas help you create a handful customer profiles that represent your broader audience, segmentation allows you to split your audience into countless segments, each of which you can uniquely target.

For example, let’s say Paws & Tails is a Chicago pet-sitting company that offers pet-sitting, dog walking, and boarding services. Given the vast number of pet owners in the city, they need to segment their audience into smaller groups to better understand how to position their services.

Based on their research and current customer base, they split their audience into three main segments:

1. Segment A is made up of high-income pet owners who work often and need daytime dog walking and pet pop-in visits
2. Segment B is made up of middle-class individuals and families who travel and need overnight boarding or pet-sitting services
3. Segment C is made up of older pet owners and retirees who need help caring for their pets

2. Targeting

With your audience segments in hand, it’s time to move on to the targeting phase. First, however, you must decide which segments are worth targeting with your marketing. To decipher this, ask yourself some questions about each segment:

• Is this segment composed of enough potential customers to justify targeting? Would it yield enough profits if the segment were to convert?
• Is it measurably different from the other segments?
• Is it accessible by all members of Marketing and Sales?
• Is your company equipped and able to serve the segment? Are there any physical, legal, social, or technological barriers that could prevent that?

Choosing what segments to target is a strategic decision. Thankfully, certain strategic planning models like the PESTLE analysis can help you better understand the viability of each segment.

It takes a lot of work to successfully target a segment of your audience. Whether you’ve identified two segments or ten, don’t feel the need to target more than one segment at once. Plus — targeting one at a time will help you better position your marketing for each specific segment much better.

Following our example from before, Paws & Tails conducts research to better understand its Chicago audience. Paws & Tails finds that Segment A makes up 60% of its market size, Segment B makes up 30%, and Segment C makes up 10%. Moreover, Segment A has a higher average income and is willing to pay more for pet-sitting and walking services. Because of this, they choose to focus on Segment A.

3. Positioning

At this point, you should understand the demographics, psychographics, motivations, and pain points of the segment(s) you’ve chosen to target, which can provide a place to start when it comes to positioning your product or service.

First, take a step back and examine your product or service through the perspective of your chosen segment. If you were in their shoes, why would you choose your product over a competitor’s? What features or benefits are most relevant to you, based on the motivations and pain points you’ve identified?

This information is important to defining your brand positioning and understanding how it stacks up next to your competitors. One way to understand where you, well, stand is by building a positioning map, which is “the visual plotting of specific brands against axes, where each axis represents an attribute that is known to drive brand selection.”

The segment you choose to target should dictate what two attributes you plot on your positioning map. For example, let’s say Paws & Tails decides Segment A selects pet-sitting brands based on two attributes: service area and reliability. Here’s what a brand positioning map (with fictitious brands) may look like.

By understanding 1) what the target segment deems most important for brand selection and 2) where its competitors succeed (and fall short), Paws & Tails is able to identify an open market opportunity and position its marketing to best fit the needs and goals of its audience.

What is segmentation, targeting, and positioning in marketing?

The STP model is a priceless addition to any marketing strategy, regardless of your industry, product, or audience. It prioritizes efficient and effective marketing and ensures you’re delivering only the most relevant, targeted messaging across the board.

It also plays an important role in developing other strategies, such as your buyer personas, customer lifecycle stages, and core brand proposition.

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By leading with a consumer-centric approach like STP, you can be sure that every inch of your marketing is relevant to your audience — thus, increasing the likelihood that they convert, purchase, and become lifelong customers.

Examples of Great Market Segmentation and Positioning

Brands are segmenting, targeting, and positioning their audiences and marketing constantly, oftentimes without us (consumers) even noticing. Ever seen a brand or product and thought “Huh, that’s perfect for me” or “Wow, right place at the right time”? Yeah … you’ve been subject to the STP model.

Let’s review a few examples of great marketing segmentation and positioning.

1. Panera Bread

With countless fast casual restaurants on the map, it’s hard to decide where to eat when you’re in the mood for a quick meal, But, for some reason, Panera Bread always comes to mind (at least for me).

Panera has successfully cornered the “health-conscious” and “climate-conscious” segment of the fast casual dining industry. Is Panera’s food so different from other fast casual options? Not entirely.

But by branding themselves with the perspective that “we believe that good food, food you can feel good about, can bring out the best in all of us”, Panera remains top-of-mind as a place to get high-quality food, fast.

2. AllBirds

Like dining opinions, there are so many shoe brands on the market. But AllBirds didn’t let that stop it from carving out a new niche in a busy space full of comfortable, active shoe options.

How did AllBirds position itself to set itself apart from the competition? By elevating it’s eco-consciousness and placing that front and center in its marketing. According to the AllBirds website, the brand “crafts with planet-friendly natural materials, like merino wool and eucalyptus trees, because they’re our best chance for a sustainable future.”

At first glance, AllBirds shoes don’t look too terribly different from other running or walking shoes. However, its audience segment that cares about sustainability and earth-conscious products knows the difference.

3. Billie

No longer can businesses simply segment their audiences by “men” and women” — the individuals within each broad gender group vary too much, and razor brand Billie took note of this.

In an effort to extinguish the “pink tax,” Billie markets cost-friendly razors and associated products. Moreover, they work to normalize body hair and other forgotten or shamed parts of women’s bodies.

Through this positioning, Billie is able to set their products apart from competitors and create a strong, positive community around their brand.

4. Hinge

The world of online dating is a busy, strange place. From Tinder to FarmersOnly.com, there seems to be a place for everyone to meet, well, anyone. Hinge came on the scene only a handful of years ago, yet it has skyrocketed to the top of the list of the most popular and reliable dating app.

Time and time again, I’ve heard that Hinge is a favorite because it works — meaning it helps people meet people and make real relationships. You wouldn’t think a dating app would position themselves to eventually be unnecessary, but that’s exactly what Hinge has done. In fact, it’s mission statement is “we built an app that’s designed to be deleted.”

By putting the needs and desires of its audience front and center, Hinge has created a more trustworthy, in-demand online dating experience and set itself apart from its competitors.

The segmentation-targeting-positioning model is designed to help you better target your marketing messages and better serve your customer base. It’s a win-win for you and your customers!

When I sit down to write an article, I have a pretty standard routine. I outline the story in our Content Optimization System (COS), copy and paste it into a Google doc, find a good photo to accompany it, do research, write, proofread, and carry it back over to our COS. It’s a weird series of steps that doesn’t necessarily work for everyone, but it does for me. They’re my very own personal blogging habits.

Those habits aren’t just limited to my writing process. I have morning, evening, and weekend routines, as if my entire life has become a series of established patterns. Knowing what those habits are, I learned during step four of the above, is a veritable goldmine for marketers.

I figured that out from a 2012 New York Times article called, “How Companies Learn Your Secrets.” Penned by Charles Duhigg, it was written largely as a follow-up to what became a public incident: An angry father marched into a Minnesota Target store, demanded to know why his teenage daughter received coupons for baby products, only to later find out that she was, in fact, pregnant.

The retailer, it turned out, was able to predict her pregnancy and subsequently personalize the promotions she received, thanks in large part to a ton of (completely legal) data collection and analysis. Creepy — or great marketing?

Today, we’re still asking ourselves that question. But, ultimately, it seems that there can be a good balance between knowing your customer way too well and solid marketing. In fact, in 2018, Harvard Business Review revealed that although people want to keep their information secure online, they still value personalized and meaningful marketing experience.

But how does personalized marketing work, and how have other brands put it into practice without coming off as creepy? Here are eight great examples of brands that nailed it in a way that came off as fun rather than intrusive.

9 Personalized Marketing Examples

1. Shutterfly

Shutterfly is a website and app that allows you to create canvases, photobooks, calendars, and even items with your own photos laminated on to them. While Shutterfly has gotten creative with personalized emails and subject lines, one unique thing it did recently was personalize item offerings on its app.

If you download the Shutterfly smartphone app, create an account, and give Shutterfly permission to access your photos, it will automatically identify photos with faces in them and place them on items that you can purchase from the app — like these mugs, for example.

Source

The Takeaway

If you sell products that are personalized to begin with, it can be helpful to show your customer what they could look like before they buy them as well as photos or words related to their life that would look great on the product.

However, when you do this, be very careful that you get explicit permission to go through someone’s information to pull this data. When it came to Shutterfly, Pamela had already given the app permission to access her photos and connected the account to her Facebook account where she approved a number of other related permissions. If you don’t get proper permissions and pull appropriate personalization data, you could come off as untrustworthy or downright creepy.

2. Snapchat’s Bitmoji

In 2016. Snapchat launched an app called Bitmoji which allows users to design cartoonish avatars of themselves that can be featured as their Snapchat profile picture and or on the Snap Map, if permitted.

Since then, Snapchat has also launched an autogenerated daily Story in its Discover feed, called “Bitmoji Stories.”

When you click into a Bitmoji Story, you can see a series of comic-book-like images that tell a story about your own Bitmoji avatar. If you’ve recently spoken to a friend with a Bitmoji attached to the app, you can also see your friends pop up in your daily Story.

Below is an example of a Bitmoji Story where Pamela Bump’s Bitmoji shows her cousin’s Bitmoji a new app:

The Takeaway

Because Bitmoji Stories appear in Discover, with all the other branded content and advertisements on Snapchat, the app company has found a great way to bring people to this particular area of the app — even if they aren’t interested in seeing branded content. While audiences are on this Discover page, they might find a brand or content that catches their attention and further interact with feed.

This is a great example of how an app creatively used personalization to bring traffic from one area of its app to another.

3. Target

To continue the above tale, we thought it might be helpful to share more information on how, exactly, the retailer pulled off the aforementioned personal prediction. As Duhigg explains in his article — which goes into much greater detail than I will here — every Target customer is assigned a Guest ID number after the very first interaction with the brand.

That ID is used to store the customer’s demographic information, ranging from ethnicity to job history, and to track buying behavior. And by doing the latter, specifically with those who had baby registries with the store, Target’s marketing analysts were able to form a “pregnancy prediction” score, which allowed them to determine which purchasing patterns indicated a customer was in the early expectant stages.

It was a game-changer. “Once consumers’ shopping habits are ingrained,” Duhigg writes, “it’s incredibly difficult to change them.” That is, until, a major life event takes place, like finding out that a baby is one the way.

That’s when routines are forced to change. Suddenly, there’s a deadline, and people start to buy products that they never previously considered, like “cocoa-butter lotion” and “a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag,” the article says. Those are the behaviors that trigger Target’s pregnancy prediction score, prompting the customer to receive special deals on baby-related items.

The Takeaway

While this level of personalized marketing is admittedly fascinating, it could backfire. Duhigg summarized it well in his article:

Using data to predict a woman’s pregnancy, Target realized … could be a public-relations disaster. So the question became: how could they get their advertisements into expectant mothers’ hands without making it appear they were spying on them? How do you take advantage of someone’s habits without letting them know you’re studying their lives?”

That’s not to say that marketers should completely do away with personalization, as it’s effective when done correctly — personalized emails, for example, have a 6.2% higher open rate than those that aren’t. But in an era with growing concern over privacy and security, tread lightly.

Let your customers know that you understand them, without being intrusive. Curious to learn how to do that with your HubSpot Marketing and Sales software? Read more about how personalization tokens work here.

4. Vidyard

Last week, my colleague, HubSpot Academy Sales Professor Kyle Jepsen, forwarded me an email with the comment, “Taking personalization to a whole new level.” The video below followed:

Source

He wasn’t kidding. This particular brand could have just superimposed each recipient’s name onto the whiteboard in this video and kept the same script for each one. But it didn’t stop there — Cole, the gentleman speaking in the video, not only addressed Kyle by his first name, but also referred to his specific colleagues and the conversations he had with them.

The Takeaway

Considering that the average online reader loses interest after about 15 seconds, personalizing your mixed media content is an interesting and often effective approach. “I mean, clearly he made the video just for me,” Jepson said. “It’s an interesting case study.”

And while this sort of personalization is memorable, it’s also extremely time-consuming. So if you set out to create it, be absolutely sure you’re targeting the right people. There’s nothing worse than taking the time to produce something highly customized, only to find out you’ve sent it to someone who doesn’t have the decision-making power you need.

5. Coca Cola

Source

Back in 2011, Coca Cola launched its famous “Share a Coke” campaign in Australia, bringing it to the U.S. in 2014. It was an effort to reach millennials, in which each bottle contained one of the most popular first names assigned to that generation. Eventually, bottles contained semi-personal labels beyond first names, like “better half.” Today, according to Ad Age, over 800 first names are used.

According to that same source, Coke will soon be adding surnames to bottles, like Garcia and Thompson. “Last names give us an opportunity to invite more people into the campaign,” Evan Holod, Coca-Cola’s brand director told Ad Age. “It’s just a great way to up the reach.”

In addition to that effort, according CNBC, Coca-Cola Great Britain will soon be including the names of famous vacation destinations on bottles, like Hawaii and Miami. The goal of that initiative is “to remind people of the refreshment and great taste that only an ice-cold Coke can bring on a hot summer day,” read the official statement. Plus, those bottles will come with the chance to win a trip to those locales.

The Takeaway

Putting first names on Coke bottles was a successful move. In the U.S., it resulted in increased sales volume for the first time in roughly four years. Plus, it provides a cheap thrill — I know that I internally squeal with excitement when I actually find a bottle that says “Amanda.”

The last name move, however, could be a bit different. While there is the option to customize your own bottle labels at ShareaCoke.com — which allows you to write whatever you want, like a customized event hashtag or something like “congratulations” — it could be deemed as exclusionary to those with unique or hyphenated last names.

For example, while my feelings aren’t hurt knowing that I won’t find a bottle labeled with “Zantal-Wiener,” I’m not about to pay $5 for a customized one, either. So when you set out to personalize a product, make sure it’s appropriately customized to reach the right segment of your audience, but isn’t restrictive, either.

6. Amazon

Amazon’s personalization efforts aren’t exactly new. Since at least 2013, its product curation and recommendation algorithm has made for headlines and case studies. And yet, every time I visit my Amazon homepage, I can’t help but scroll down and get a kick out of its recommendations for me. Have a look:

Source

Those who know me are aware of my borderline obsession with hip hop, which is also the motivation for a lot of my online shopping behavior. Clearly, Amazon has taken notice.

And as I continued scrolling down, the fitting personalization went on. There was a header reading “For a night in” with recommendations on what to stream on Amazon Prime — an activity that comprised the majority of my weekend. Its recommendations for dog and kitchen products were on point, as well. After all, those are the categories where I make the most purchases.

It’s not just me. When I asked my colleagues what their Amazon homepages looked like, they were equally pleased. Sophia Bernazzani, a fellow Marketing Blog staff writer (and self-proclaimed “cat mother of three”), had a plethora of personalized cat food recommendations, while Managing Editor Emma Brudner’s suggested Prime streaming titles came with the header, “Bingeable TV.”

“Amazon,” Brudner remarked, “You know me so well.”

The Takeaway

Here’s a personalization example where we don’t have a ton of complaints. As Brudner said, Amazon seems to know us pretty well, though I do question why, as per the image above, its algorithm thought I might like to buy a pair of leg warmers.

The nice thing about personalization of this nature, when it’s executed correctly, is that it often can lead to unplanned purchasing decisions.

For example, the purpose of my most recent visit to Amazon was to check out its personalization features for this article. But then, I discovered that Rapper’s Delight: The Hip Hop Cookbook was in my recommended books. Did I buy something I don’t need? Sure. But I also was left delighted by the fact that it was brought to my attention with very little effort.

If you’re in the business of personalizing curated items or recommendations for your customers, remember: The best part about it, for the user, is the resulting discovery of new things that we like — whether it’s a book, a tool, or an article.

7. Spotify

In 2015, Adam Pasick penned a story for Quartz explaining the “magic” behind Spotify’s “Discover Weekly”: A curated playlist of tracks that it thinks a given user will like. It’s carried out, like many other personalization and recommendation platforms, largely with the help of an algorithm that determines a user’s “taste profile,” based on listening behavior and the most popular playlists among the entire Spotify audience.

The technology behind it is from Echo Nest, a “music intelligence company” that was acquired, according to Pasick, by Spotify in 2014. Here’s a great diagram from the article that visually represents the process:

Source

As much as I use Spotify — which is close to daily — I’ve never actually bothered listening to my Discover Weekly playlist. So after a colleague brought it to my attention, I decided to take it for a spin.

The results were hit-or-miss. There were a few new songs that I was thrilled to discover and plan to listen to again. But for the most part, my experience was similar to Pasick’s, who described many of the songs on his personalized playlist as “meh.”

But those behind Discover Weekly acknowledge that personalization isn’t a perfect science. They also have suggestions for how to make it better, like adding the Discover Weekly songs you like to your library, or skipping the ones you don’t — “If users fast-forward within the first 30 seconds of a song,”

Spotify Product Director Matthew Ogle and Engineering Manager Edward Newett told Pasick, “the Discover Weekly algorithm interprets that as a ‘thumbs-down’ for that particular song and artist.”

The Takeaway

Most personalization initiatives aren’t going to be perfect. Even with a great algorithm, they are, at best, very educated guesses as to what’s going to be applicable to your customers. For that reason, it might be best to take a conservative approach to your recommendations, especially in the earliest stages of any personalization efforts you make.

This is an area where small-batch testing can be helpful. When you want to try out a personalization project or algorithm, identify your most active users, and invite them to pilot out the technology. Listen carefully to their feedback — good and bad — and see what you can do to make it better.

8. Iberia Airlines

During the 2016 holiday season, Iberia Airlines customers received emails posing the question: If you could visit any vacation destination, what would it be, and who would you go with? To answer, customers were redirected to a microsite where they would fill in responses, as well as the email address of the person they wanted to travel with.

Not long after that, the friend would receive an email with a holiday greeting about the dream vacation — only, in order to view the card, that person had to click a link to view it in his or her browser.

It was that last step, Skift writer Brian Sumers explained, where “Iberia … put its advertising budget to work, using cookies [with the user’s permission] so the traveler’s friend would see banners across the web, suggesting the perfect Christmas gift.” That gift, of course, was the dream vacation.

Let’s say, for example, I sent one of these cards to a friend. She might subsequently see several ads while browsing that said things like, “It’s never too late to fulfill Amanda’s dream. Do it with a trip to Mykonos.”

The Takeaway

The idea is certainly a cute one — and around here, we’re suckers for a good holiday marketing campaign. But one of the most important items to highlight here is Iberia’s use of cookies, and the fact that the brand wasn’t sneaky about it.

As per the video above, a clear request was made to the user to allow cookies, and that’s essential. Even the best-customized marketing becomes less personal, and definitely less desirable if it’s carried out without the user’s agreement.

9. Twiddy

Source

Having enough data is essential for marketing personalization — but knowing what to look at and how to use it is just as important. That’s what made a tremendous difference for Twiddy, a vacation rental company based in the Outer Banks.

“Unless we had a good way of looking at the data,” Marketing Director Ross Twiddy told Inc., “how could we make good decisions?”

One of the major pieces of information that Twiddy began to more closely examine was how rental volume and demand shifted from week-to-week. Noticing those trends allowed the company to start making “pricing recommendations” to homeowners, according to Inc., “on the basis of market conditions, seasonal trends, and the size and location of a home.”

The week after Independence Day was one that stood out to the team in particular, in that rentals showed a precipitous drop during that period.

Because Twiddy observed that trend (among others), it allowed the owners of its managed properties to start experimenting with pricing for that particular week as early as January.

Not only did it benefit the customer — setting more realistic prices for lower-demand periods actually increased the bookings made for them — but it was just one way that Twiddy was delighting its customers with helpful, actionable information. It paid off, too. Since the brand began to use this data to help homeowners with decisions like pricing, its portfolio increased over 10%.

The Takeaway

There’s a famous saying that goes, “Help me help you.” Data, in general, can be a tremendous asset to brands. And it doesn’t have to be about your customers’ behavior — it can be about the habits of their customers, like the vacationers that rented from Twiddy’s homeowner clients.

As long as it’s something that can be shared ethically — like objective buying or seasonal trends — share the data and insights with your customers that’s going to help make them more successful. That’s the type of thing that makes a brand remarkable, and can help benefit your business, too.

Get Personal

One of the fundamental purposes of any personalization effort is to let your customers know that you’re paying attention to them. But striking a balance between, “We think you might find this helpful” and “we’re watching you” isn’t a simple process, so be sure to do some careful research, planning, and testing before you jump into any large-scale customization initiatives.

Remember that while you might be a marketer, you’re also a consumer. When it comes to experiments like these, put yourself into the shoes of the customer and ask, “Is this delightful? Or is it just creepy?” If it leans toward the latter, find out what’s giving it that vibe, and try something different.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in December 2013 and has was updated for comprehensiveness in November 2019.

When I sit down to write an article, I have a pretty standard routine. I outline the story in our Content Optimization System (COS), copy and paste it into a Google doc, find a good photo to accompany it, do research, write, proofread, and carry it back over to our COS. It’s a weird series of steps that doesn’t necessarily work for everyone, but it does for me. They’re my very own personal blogging habits.

Those habits aren’t just limited to my writing process. I have morning, evening, and weekend routines, as if my entire life has become a series of established patterns. Knowing what those habits are, I learned during step four of the above, is a veritable goldmine for marketers.

I figured that out from a 2012 New York Times article called, “How Companies Learn Your Secrets.” Penned by Charles Duhigg, it was written largely as a follow-up to what became a public incident: An angry father marched into a Minnesota Target store, demanded to know why his teenage daughter received coupons for baby products, only to later find out that she was, in fact, pregnant.

The retailer, it turned out, was able to predict her pregnancy and subsequently personalize the promotions she received, thanks in large part to a ton of (completely legal) data collection and analysis. Creepy — or great marketing?

Today, we’re still asking ourselves that question. But, ultimately, it seems that there can be a good balance between knowing your customer way too well and solid marketing. In fact, in 2018, Harvard Business Review revealed that although people want to keep their information secure online, they still value personalized and meaningful marketing experience.

But how does personalized marketing work, and how have other brands put it into practice without coming off as creepy? Here are eight great examples of brands that nailed it in a way that came off as fun rather than intrusive.

9 Personalized Marketing Examples

1. Shutterfly

Shutterfly is a website and app that allows you to create canvases, photobooks, calendars, and even items with your own photos laminated on to them. While Shutterfly has gotten creative with personalized emails and subject lines, one unique thing it did recently was personalize item offerings on its app.

If you download the Shutterfly smartphone app, create an account, and give Shutterfly permission to access your photos, it will automatically identify photos with faces in them and place them on items that you can purchase from the app — like these mugs, for example.

Source

The Takeaway

If you sell products that are personalized to begin with, it can be helpful to show your customer what they could look like before they buy them as well as photos or words related to their life that would look great on the product.

However, when you do this, be very careful that you get explicit permission to go through someone’s information to pull this data. When it came to Shutterfly, Pamela had already given the app permission to access her photos and connected the account to her Facebook account where she approved a number of other related permissions. If you don’t get proper permissions and pull appropriate personalization data, you could come off as untrustworthy or downright creepy.

2. Snapchat’s Bitmoji

In 2016. Snapchat launched an app called Bitmoji which allows users to design cartoonish avatars of themselves that can be featured as their Snapchat profile picture and or on the Snap Map, if permitted.

Since then, Snapchat has also launched an autogenerated daily Story in its Discover feed, called “Bitmoji Stories.”

When you click into a Bitmoji Story, you can see a series of comic-book-like images that tell a story about your own Bitmoji avatar. If you’ve recently spoken to a friend with a Bitmoji attached to the app, you can also see your friends pop up in your daily Story.

Below is an example of a Bitmoji Story where Pamela Bump’s Bitmoji shows her cousin’s Bitmoji a new app:

The Takeaway

Because Bitmoji Stories appear in Discover, with all the other branded content and advertisements on Snapchat, the app company has found a great way to bring people to this particular area of the app — even if they aren’t interested in seeing branded content. While audiences are on this Discover page, they might find a brand or content that catches their attention and further interact with feed.

This is a great example of how an app creatively used personalization to bring traffic from one area of its app to another.

3. Target

To continue the above tale, we thought it might be helpful to share more information on how, exactly, the retailer pulled off the aforementioned personal prediction. As Duhigg explains in his article — which goes into much greater detail than I will here — every Target customer is assigned a Guest ID number after the very first interaction with the brand.

That ID is used to store the customer’s demographic information, ranging from ethnicity to job history, and to track buying behavior. And by doing the latter, specifically with those who had baby registries with the store, Target’s marketing analysts were able to form a “pregnancy prediction” score, which allowed them to determine which purchasing patterns indicated a customer was in the early expectant stages.

It was a game-changer. “Once consumers’ shopping habits are ingrained,” Duhigg writes, “it’s incredibly difficult to change them.” That is, until, a major life event takes place, like finding out that a baby is one the way.

That’s when routines are forced to change. Suddenly, there’s a deadline, and people start to buy products that they never previously considered, like “cocoa-butter lotion” and “a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag,” the article says. Those are the behaviors that trigger Target’s pregnancy prediction score, prompting the customer to receive special deals on baby-related items.

The Takeaway

While this level of personalized marketing is admittedly fascinating, it could backfire. Duhigg summarized it well in his article:

Using data to predict a woman’s pregnancy, Target realized … could be a public-relations disaster. So the question became: how could they get their advertisements into expectant mothers’ hands without making it appear they were spying on them? How do you take advantage of someone’s habits without letting them know you’re studying their lives?”

That’s not to say that marketers should completely do away with personalization, as it’s effective when done correctly — personalized emails, for example, have a 6.2% higher open rate than those that aren’t. But in an era with growing concern over privacy and security, tread lightly.

Let your customers know that you understand them, without being intrusive. Curious to learn how to do that with your HubSpot Marketing and Sales software? Read more about how personalization tokens work here.

4. Vidyard

Last week, my colleague, HubSpot Academy Sales Professor Kyle Jepsen, forwarded me an email with the comment, “Taking personalization to a whole new level.” The video below followed:

Source

He wasn’t kidding. This particular brand could have just superimposed each recipient’s name onto the whiteboard in this video and kept the same script for each one. But it didn’t stop there — Cole, the gentleman speaking in the video, not only addressed Kyle by his first name, but also referred to his specific colleagues and the conversations he had with them.

The Takeaway

Considering that the average online reader loses interest after about 15 seconds, personalizing your mixed media content is an interesting and often effective approach. “I mean, clearly he made the video just for me,” Jepson said. “It’s an interesting case study.”

And while this sort of personalization is memorable, it’s also extremely time-consuming. So if you set out to create it, be absolutely sure you’re targeting the right people. There’s nothing worse than taking the time to produce something highly customized, only to find out you’ve sent it to someone who doesn’t have the decision-making power you need.

5. Coca Cola

Source

Back in 2011, Coca Cola launched its famous “Share a Coke” campaign in Australia, bringing it to the U.S. in 2014. It was an effort to reach millennials, in which each bottle contained one of the most popular first names assigned to that generation. Eventually, bottles contained semi-personal labels beyond first names, like “better half.” Today, according to Ad Age, over 800 first names are used.

According to that same source, Coke will soon be adding surnames to bottles, like Garcia and Thompson. “Last names give us an opportunity to invite more people into the campaign,” Evan Holod, Coca-Cola’s brand director told Ad Age. “It’s just a great way to up the reach.”

In addition to that effort, according CNBC, Coca-Cola Great Britain will soon be including the names of famous vacation destinations on bottles, like Hawaii and Miami. The goal of that initiative is “to remind people of the refreshment and great taste that only an ice-cold Coke can bring on a hot summer day,” read the official statement. Plus, those bottles will come with the chance to win a trip to those locales.

The Takeaway

Putting first names on Coke bottles was a successful move. In the U.S., it resulted in increased sales volume for the first time in roughly four years. Plus, it provides a cheap thrill — I know that I internally squeal with excitement when I actually find a bottle that says “Amanda.”

The last name move, however, could be a bit different. While there is the option to customize your own bottle labels at ShareaCoke.com — which allows you to write whatever you want, like a customized event hashtag or something like “congratulations” — it could be deemed as exclusionary to those with unique or hyphenated last names.

For example, while my feelings aren’t hurt knowing that I won’t find a bottle labeled with “Zantal-Wiener,” I’m not about to pay $5 for a customized one, either. So when you set out to personalize a product, make sure it’s appropriately customized to reach the right segment of your audience, but isn’t restrictive, either.

6. Amazon

Amazon’s personalization efforts aren’t exactly new. Since at least 2013, its product curation and recommendation algorithm has made for headlines and case studies. And yet, every time I visit my Amazon homepage, I can’t help but scroll down and get a kick out of its recommendations for me. Have a look:

Source

Those who know me are aware of my borderline obsession with hip hop, which is also the motivation for a lot of my online shopping behavior. Clearly, Amazon has taken notice.

And as I continued scrolling down, the fitting personalization went on. There was a header reading “For a night in” with recommendations on what to stream on Amazon Prime — an activity that comprised the majority of my weekend. Its recommendations for dog and kitchen products were on point, as well. After all, those are the categories where I make the most purchases.

It’s not just me. When I asked my colleagues what their Amazon homepages looked like, they were equally pleased. Sophia Bernazzani, a fellow Marketing Blog staff writer (and self-proclaimed “cat mother of three”), had a plethora of personalized cat food recommendations, while Managing Editor Emma Brudner’s suggested Prime streaming titles came with the header, “Bingeable TV.”

“Amazon,” Brudner remarked, “You know me so well.”

The Takeaway

Here’s a personalization example where we don’t have a ton of complaints. As Brudner said, Amazon seems to know us pretty well, though I do question why, as per the image above, its algorithm thought I might like to buy a pair of leg warmers.

The nice thing about personalization of this nature, when it’s executed correctly, is that it often can lead to unplanned purchasing decisions.

For example, the purpose of my most recent visit to Amazon was to check out its personalization features for this article. But then, I discovered that Rapper’s Delight: The Hip Hop Cookbook was in my recommended books. Did I buy something I don’t need? Sure. But I also was left delighted by the fact that it was brought to my attention with very little effort.

If you’re in the business of personalizing curated items or recommendations for your customers, remember: The best part about it, for the user, is the resulting discovery of new things that we like — whether it’s a book, a tool, or an article.

7. Spotify

In 2015, Adam Pasick penned a story for Quartz explaining the “magic” behind Spotify’s “Discover Weekly”: A curated playlist of tracks that it thinks a given user will like. It’s carried out, like many other personalization and recommendation platforms, largely with the help of an algorithm that determines a user’s “taste profile,” based on listening behavior and the most popular playlists among the entire Spotify audience.

The technology behind it is from Echo Nest, a “music intelligence company” that was acquired, according to Pasick, by Spotify in 2014. Here’s a great diagram from the article that visually represents the process:

Source

As much as I use Spotify — which is close to daily — I’ve never actually bothered listening to my Discover Weekly playlist. So after a colleague brought it to my attention, I decided to take it for a spin.

The results were hit-or-miss. There were a few new songs that I was thrilled to discover and plan to listen to again. But for the most part, my experience was similar to Pasick’s, who described many of the songs on his personalized playlist as “meh.”

But those behind Discover Weekly acknowledge that personalization isn’t a perfect science. They also have suggestions for how to make it better, like adding the Discover Weekly songs you like to your library, or skipping the ones you don’t — “If users fast-forward within the first 30 seconds of a song,”

Spotify Product Director Matthew Ogle and Engineering Manager Edward Newett told Pasick, “the Discover Weekly algorithm interprets that as a ‘thumbs-down’ for that particular song and artist.”

The Takeaway

Most personalization initiatives aren’t going to be perfect. Even with a great algorithm, they are, at best, very educated guesses as to what’s going to be applicable to your customers. For that reason, it might be best to take a conservative approach to your recommendations, especially in the earliest stages of any personalization efforts you make.

This is an area where small-batch testing can be helpful. When you want to try out a personalization project or algorithm, identify your most active users, and invite them to pilot out the technology. Listen carefully to their feedback — good and bad — and see what you can do to make it better.

8. Iberia Airlines

During the 2016 holiday season, Iberia Airlines customers received emails posing the question: If you could visit any vacation destination, what would it be, and who would you go with? To answer, customers were redirected to a microsite where they would fill in responses, as well as the email address of the person they wanted to travel with.

Not long after that, the friend would receive an email with a holiday greeting about the dream vacation — only, in order to view the card, that person had to click a link to view it in his or her browser.

It was that last step, Skift writer Brian Sumers explained, where “Iberia … put its advertising budget to work, using cookies [with the user’s permission] so the traveler’s friend would see banners across the web, suggesting the perfect Christmas gift.” That gift, of course, was the dream vacation.

Let’s say, for example, I sent one of these cards to a friend. She might subsequently see several ads while browsing that said things like, “It’s never too late to fulfill Amanda’s dream. Do it with a trip to Mykonos.”

The Takeaway

The idea is certainly a cute one — and around here, we’re suckers for a good holiday marketing campaign. But one of the most important items to highlight here is Iberia’s use of cookies, and the fact that the brand wasn’t sneaky about it.

As per the video above, a clear request was made to the user to allow cookies, and that’s essential. Even the best-customized marketing becomes less personal, and definitely less desirable if it’s carried out without the user’s agreement.

9. Twiddy

Source

Having enough data is essential for marketing personalization — but knowing what to look at and how to use it is just as important. That’s what made a tremendous difference for Twiddy, a vacation rental company based in the Outer Banks.

“Unless we had a good way of looking at the data,” Marketing Director Ross Twiddy told Inc., “how could we make good decisions?”

One of the major pieces of information that Twiddy began to more closely examine was how rental volume and demand shifted from week-to-week. Noticing those trends allowed the company to start making “pricing recommendations” to homeowners, according to Inc., “on the basis of market conditions, seasonal trends, and the size and location of a home.”

The week after Independence Day was one that stood out to the team in particular, in that rentals showed a precipitous drop during that period.

Because Twiddy observed that trend (among others), it allowed the owners of its managed properties to start experimenting with pricing for that particular week as early as January.

Not only did it benefit the customer — setting more realistic prices for lower-demand periods actually increased the bookings made for them — but it was just one way that Twiddy was delighting its customers with helpful, actionable information. It paid off, too. Since the brand began to use this data to help homeowners with decisions like pricing, its portfolio increased over 10%.

The Takeaway

There’s a famous saying that goes, “Help me help you.” Data, in general, can be a tremendous asset to brands. And it doesn’t have to be about your customers’ behavior — it can be about the habits of their customers, like the vacationers that rented from Twiddy’s homeowner clients.

As long as it’s something that can be shared ethically — like objective buying or seasonal trends — share the data and insights with your customers that’s going to help make them more successful. That’s the type of thing that makes a brand remarkable, and can help benefit your business, too.

Get Personal

One of the fundamental purposes of any personalization effort is to let your customers know that you’re paying attention to them. But striking a balance between, “We think you might find this helpful” and “we’re watching you” isn’t a simple process, so be sure to do some careful research, planning, and testing before you jump into any large-scale customization initiatives.

Remember that while you might be a marketer, you’re also a consumer. When it comes to experiments like these, put yourself into the shoes of the customer and ask, “Is this delightful? Or is it just creepy?” If it leans toward the latter, find out what’s giving it that vibe, and try something different.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in December 2013 and has was updated for comprehensiveness in November 2019.

Data: You can’t live with it, and you can’t live without it. At least, that’s how a lot of marketers feel. In fact, the affair between marketers and their data is often somewhat of a love-hate relationship.

Data can help you be a much more successful, analytical marketer who makes decisions based on facts rather than hunches. But wrangling together all that data — and then properly analyzing it ? It can give you quite a headache, and frankly, it can get pretty overwhelming at times.

But even though data can come with its challenges, successful marketers understand that it’s a necessary evil, and most even learn to love data because it makes them better marketers.

When I first started working at HubSpot, I’ll admit I wasn’t the most analytically-minded person. But boy, has that changed.

So be empowered, marketers! Learning how to be truly data-driven can be extremely rewarding, helping you be more effective and achieve much better marketing results. 

11 Tips to Help You Cultivate a Data-Driven Marketing Team

1. Put the right analytics in place.

It’s no wonder data can be such a headache — you need to have the right tools in place to collect it! And for many marketers, their analytics live in silos, making it difficult to compare data and metrics across channels.

For example, you might have analytics for your email marketing over here, social media marketing analytics over there, there … and there, and blog analytics hanging out in an entirely different place. Furthermore, if you don’t have this data connected to your customer relationship management (CRM) system, you’re also missing out on some extremely valuable closed-loop analytics that can truly report on the ROI of each individual marketing channel — and your marketing strategy as a whole. You can imagine how all of this disconnected and incomplete data can make things awfully difficult to handle.

So if you’re not happy with your current marketing analytics solution and its ability to integrate all your marketing data, searching for a new solution is a great place to start. We wrote a blog post to guide you through the process of selecting the perfect marketing analytics solution for your needs. It highlights important questions you should ask potential analytics providers (including HubSpot!) before making a purchase.

2. Assign specific metrics to individual marketers. 

Now that you have a reliable, integrated, and all-encompassing analytics tool in place, use it to its fullest potential. Measure everything you can possibly measure. Believe us, as a data-driven marketing team, we know there really is no shortage of metrics you can track — just check out this introductory marketing analytics ebook for some great ideas to get you started.

The best way to divvy up the measurement work is to hold individual members (or teams, if your marketing department is on the larger side) accountable for specific metrics. Identify the most important metrics you’ll use to measure the success of each particular marketing channel and prioritize them by importance.

Then assign the tracking and managing of these metrics to individual team members. For example, you might assign your social media manager/team with the task of monitoring high-priority metrics such as customers, leads, and visits generated from social media overall, as well as those same metrics segmented by individual social network, plus even more granular metrics like engagement per social network (think “likes,” comments, shares, etc.).

Not only will this ensure you have all your important metrics covered, but it will also hold your teams accountable for regularly keeping track of and reporting them.

3. Establish data benchmarks.

What are your company’s typical email click-through rates? How many “likes” do you generally get on an individual Facebook post? What is your average landing page conversion rate? Setting benchmarks helps you not only understand what your business’ marketing “norms” are, but it also gives you a standard that you can work toward meeting — and exceeding — incrementally. That being said, setting benchmarks is easier said than done. How are you supposed to know what “good” is to begin with?

There are a couple of ways to approach this:

• First, you could do some research to see if there are any established industry marketing benchmarks out there to compare yourself to. This can give you a general sense of how others in the industry are faring, and how you stack up in comparison.
• More likely, however, you’ll probably want to establish benchmarks that are specific to your own business and industry. This is where your analytics come into play.
• Once you’ve had some time (say, a few months) for your analytics to marinate, you can start to notice and record general patterns in the performance of your individual marketing metrics.

Use those as your initial benchmarks, and make it a priority to improve those benchmarks over time.

4. Set metrics-driven goals.

Now that you’ve some set benchmarks for your business’ marketing, you can establish metrics-driven goals. Each marketer (or team) in your marketing department should not only be responsible for tracking and reporting on their key metrics, but they should also be assigned specific goals to achieve. How else will you know if your marketing is successful if you don’t know what “success” is? In other words, setting goals helps you define success for your marketing.

The goals you set for your marketers will depend on a number of factors, but should mainly be based on the overarching goals of your business. This will likely involve meeting with your company’s management team to determine your business’ growth projections so you can understand how Marketing fits into this bigger picture.

For example, if your company is looking to grow by 5% in revenue in the following quarter, you’ll need to figure out how many leads you’ll need to generate in order to close 5% more customers or revenue. Based on this overall goal, you can then start to assign individual team goals based on those marketing channels’ benchmarks. In other words, if you know that your email marketing typically contributes 20% of your business’ overall new leads and your blog contributes 10%, you’d logically assign a larger overall leads goal for your email marketing team than you would your blogging team.

To help you with your goal-setting, download our free calculator for determining your monthly traffic and leads goals.

5. Regularly report on progress made towards goals.

Don’t just set and forget your goals. Make it a priority for individual marketers to base their strategies and tactics on the monthly goals they’re required to meet by reporting on their progress regularly. Do you hold weekly and monthly marketing meetings?

At HubSpot, we report on the progress of our most important marketing metrics (such as traffic, leads, and the status of our marketing SLA) at our weekly team meetings. And tracking traffic and leads is easy to do in HubSpot’s software, where all you have to do is input your lead generation goal to easily track the number of leads you generate each day, week, month, or year.

We also have longer monthly meetings during which each individual team reports on their month over month progress and more niche metrics like email unsubscribe rate, social media reach, or blog subscriber growth.

In addition to reporting on these metrics within your marketing team, share a monthly marketing report that highlights the results of individual teams — and the marketing department as a whole — with the rest of your company. Not only will this keep your team more accountable for being data-driven (you want those metrics to look good, right?), but it will also prove to the rest of the company that Marketing does way more than the stereotypical party planning and arts and crafts all day.

6. Back up marketing decisions with data.

This may seem like a no-brainer, but if you refer back to the chart at the beginning of this post, it’s a little less surprising. You’re collecting all this marketing data, sure, but you need to actually do something with it. In other words, to really be a data-driven marketer, you can’t just collect and report on the data. You need to actually use that data to drive your marketing decisions. This requires you to hone your analytical skills. It requires some critical thinking and problem solving.

For example, let’s say you’ve been doing social media marketing for several months because that’s what you’ve thought you needed to do. But now that you’re actually tracking the success of your social media marketing with your marketing analytics tool, you realize that there are certain social media channels that just aren’t performing for you. Maybe you’ve been spending equal amounts of time on Facebook and Pinterest, yet your analytics are telling you that Facebook has 5X the ROI of Pinterest. Wouldn’t it make sense for you to reallocate some (or all) of the time you’re investing in Pinterest to Facebook? By using data to back up your marketing decisions, you’ll not only make smarter decisions, but you’ll also improve your marketing results!

Learn how to think more analytically by checking out this post about nine terrific ways to make your marketing analytics actionable .

7. Find ways to measure “unmeasurable” things.

Truly data-driven marketers find ways to measure seemingly “unmeasurable” things. For example, one of the teams in HubSpot’s marketing department is the Editorial team, which is responsible for HubSpot’s branding. And you can imagine how measuring something like branding isn’t really as cut and dry as measuring something like leads generated from social media, or the clickthrough rate of email marketing, right? But that doesn’t mean our Editorial team is exempt from being analytical. So they measure things such as direct traffic to the HubSpot website and branded search term volume.

Furthermore, one of the challenges our Product Marketing team has is making sure people realize that HubSpot sells software. In other words, they need to figure out people’s perception of what HubSpot. Not exactly an easy feat. As you can imagine, measuring their progress toward achieving this goal isn’t something you can just take a look at a dashboard to gauge. So they administer brief, multiple choice surveys of our audience placed on various thank-you pages for our non-software related marketing offers such as educational ebooks and webinars. This survey simply asks respondents to select what HubSpot does. Their goal is to increase the number of people who select “software” vs. other things like “services” or “marketing content.”

8. Reward record-setting achievements.

One of the best ways to get your marketing team on board with a data-driven culture is to incentivize them. Consider giving out a monthly award for the member of your marketing team that achieves the most impressive record-crushing results based on their specific metrics-driven goals. On HubSpot’s marketing team, for example, we identify a marketing “champion” every month, who gets to attend a Champions Dinner hosted by one of HubSpot’s executives and attended by other “champions” from other departments.

And don’t stop at just incentivizing those record-setting achievements with tangible rewards. Recognize them publicly in front of the entire company, too. Sometimes the most rewarding incentive for your employees is public recognition of their hard work. You should also keep track of employees’ individual metrics-driven achievements and incorporate them into your annual review process.

9. Use data in content creation.

The benefits of data in marketing don’t have to be limited to your marketing analytics or making better marketing decisions. Data can also be used in a number of other ways in your marketing, such as improving your marketing content, including blog posts, ebooks, and other written collateral. In fact, incorporating a little data can go a long way, making your content much more high-quality, credible, authoritative, and interesting. Just be sure you’re selecting trustworthy data and properly attributing it to the original sources .

There are quite a few ways you can go about spicing up your marketing content with data. Some techniques include demonstrating change/consistency over time, providing benchmarks, showing connection/correlation, proving a point, emphasizing why readers should care, backing up opinions, showing discrepancies, including social proof, showing success, offering clarity, showing scale, highlighting original data, and portraying data visually. To learn more about how to use any of these above techniques, read our comprehensive post on using data in your marketing content .

10. Leverage A/B testing.

The savviest data-driven marketers are always looking to get better data and to improve how the analytics look for the metrics they’re responsible for. And what’s one of the best ways to improve the looks of your data? Optimize your marketing with A/B testing, that’s what!

A/B testing enables you to experiment with how different variables affect things like traffic, click-through rates, and conversion rates, and allows you to optimize your marketing efforts using the variables that contribute to the best results. Luckily, there’s no shortage of variables you can test in your marketing , and you can also conduct A/B tests in practically every one of your marketing assets. Check out our complete ebook on A/B testing to get started.

11. Share data-driven research with the rest of your team and company.

If you’re doing all that A/B testing we recommended in our last tip, chances are you’re going to come away from those tests with a bunch of great takeaways about what works — and what doesn’t — for your particular business and its audience. Don’t hoard that data … share it!

At the very least, the rest of the members of your marketing team could probably really benefit from those lessons learned. It will make them better marketers, and it will also probably teach them a thing or two about how your prospects respond to different marketing tactics. Encourage members of your marketing team to present lessons learned from specific A/B test they’ve run during your weekly marketing meetings so everyone can benefit.

Chances are, the rest of your business — even departments outside of Marketing — might appreciate this insight into your marketing lessons, too.

At HubSpot, we have a popular internal wiki, which the marketing team often uses to share the results and lessons from its A/B tests with the rest of the company. Marketing members also regularly present at meetings in other departments to share valuable marketing insights.

Not only is sharing these results educational to them, but it also shows them that the marketing department doesn’t just sit on our butts and act on hunches! Marketing regularly tests its tactics and acts on proven data to make its decisions.

This is sure to boost the R-E-S-P-E-C-T of your marketing team, and it will probably even contribute to more marketing buy-in. And who doesn’t want that?

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in September 2012 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

It’s been over six months since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic. As we reported in March, the initial impact was painful on businesses. But now, six months in, businesses appear to be adapting to the new normal. Digital transformation is accelerating. Inbound marketing strategies are working incredibly well, while outbound sales strategies are struggling. Buyers are more in control than they’ve ever been, and companies delivering a great digital customer experience are winning.

COVID-19 forced many businesses to start operating online, and since then we’ve seen a huge spike in online buyer interest that has steadily increased over the past two months. This digital transformation was already occurring before the pandemic, but COVID-19 accelerated its timeline pressuring businesses and buyers to pivot to an online environment. Now that brands are experiencing the benefits of on-demand tools like live chat, these features will be standardized as consumers come to expect them more over time.

We’ve also seen a simultaneous decline in the effectiveness of outbound strategies. Take sales emails as an example — sends have nearly doubled since March, but open rates continue to remain well below pre-COVID levels. It’s not that buyer interest isn’t there; it’s that consumers now have the liberty to choose when and where they want to interact with businesses. This places greater emphasis on inbound tactics as brands need to prioritize new channels like chat where consumers can interact with marketing, sales, and service at their own pace.

As more businesses learned how to successfully make this pivot, and the global economy slowly started to reopen, sales outcomes started to gradually improve. In June, we saw a significant change in deal performance as both deals won and deals created increased from just below pre-COVID levels to well above the benchmark by the end of July. Currently, global deal performance is hovering at and above pre-COVID levels as more businesses are getting used to working under these new circumstances. While it’s certainly still a difficult time for businesses, the sales data suggests that we are slowly starting to move forward.

In this post, we’ll take an in-depth look into buyer interest, marketing and sales outreach, and sales outcomes over the past six months. We’ll examine how different industries, regions, and company sizes have been impacted by COVID-19, and offer suggestions for investments that make sense right now.

HubSpot can’t make predictions about what will happen, and nobody knows what the future looks like. But we hope this report from our customer base provides a helpful reference as businesses enter the next quarter, and that the insights are useful to you in some way. To explore the accompanying dataset on your own, you can find our interactive microsite here.

This data is based on benchmarks calculated using weekly averages from Q2 vs. post-holiday weekly averages from Q1. Because the data is aggregated from our customer base, please keep in mind that individual businesses, including HubSpot’s, may differ based on their own markets, customer base, industry, geography, stage, and/or other factors. While certain data is reported by industry, please note that we do not track all industries, and that HubSpot’s industry classifications may not correspond with standard industry classifications.

COVID-19 6-Month Marketing, Sales, & Service Retrospective

1. Buyers Are in Control.

Customer-Initiated Chat Conversations

Buyer research has shifted to a more on-demand, in-the-moment experience than ever before, and live chat usage strongly supports that. Chat volume has steadily increased over the past six months, and have been trending over 90% above the benchmark since September. Since businesses have moved online, consumers have flocked to chat as a resource for real-time help. Now, consumers expect a live chat option when interacting with brands and businesses are slowly starting to implement them on their websites.

Additionally, now that a significant number of people are working from home and communicating on their preferred time and channel, research is happening on the buyer’s schedule — and they want real-time answers, even if the sales team is asleep. Marketing teams have pivoted to chat to engage prospects. Sales teams are using it to nurture leads, and customer service personnel are using it to support customers. Live chat is proving to be one of the most effective channels for communicating with customers because it allows people to interact with a company on demand. The arc of technology bends toward convenience, so even if demand for chat doesn’t stay at this level forever, we feel confident that the pandemic has made chat a table-stakes channel going forward.

Regionally, APAC engaged in the most chat conversations compared to LATAM, EMEA, and NORTHAM. Just three weeks ago, APAC reached 144% above pre-COVID levels and it’s been the highest above the benchmark since July. While every region has experienced significant increases for live chat volume, APAC’s chat conversations have increased 132% since March, EMEA 86%, LATAM increased 81%, and NORTHAM 81%.

We’re not surprised that APAC has been leading the way when it comes to live chat conversations as we’ve seen this region using more chat and SMS technology for quite some time. Apps like WeChat have gained popularity in the region for years, not only because they make it easier for customers to chat with sales and service people, but also because they give brands the opportunity to launch engaging campaigns. For example, in 2019, India alone had 340 million WhatsApp users, which was a significantly higher proportion of the population more than any other country in the world. Countries in APAC have also been early adopters of SMS and chat — Japanese retailers were using WeChat to advertise and offer customer discounts as a way to incentivize Chinese tourists as far back as 2016.

Web Traffic

Two weeks ago, total web traffic was at a year-high 34% above the benchmark and we’ve seen this metric increase over 25% since March. Global web traffic seems to be holding steady at this rate as we push past summer and into fall. In fact, this metric has been over 20% above the benchmark for the past 10 weeks. As buyers continue to do their shopping online, businesses with the most established online presence seem to be seeing the most benefit.

If we look at the industry breakdown, computer software leads the way with the most web traffic at 51% above the benchmark. This reflects the digital transformation that was already occurring before COVID-19 but was sped up due to the effects of the pandemic. Compared to where we were in March, nearly all industries have returned to about pre-COVID levels. For example, entertainment, a structurally impacted industry, was 18% below the benchmark in July but has been above or right below the benchmark for the past seven weeks.

2. Inbound Strategies Continue to Prove Effective for Buyer Outreach.

Marketing Emails

With buyer interest so strong, marketers have reinvested in email. Marketing email volume has increased a total of 49% since the start of the pandemic and is currently a year-high 52% above pre-COVID levels. This is a continuation of the steady increase in traffic we’ve seen over the last few months. At the start of the pandemic, marketing email volume had increased nearly 30% by the end of March. Over the summer, send volume was steady at about 30% above pre-COVID levels and has risen again in the fall.

Response rates are also performing well, remaining at 10-20% above the benchmark since April. In the spring, we saw open rates shoot up immediately following the start of the pandemic, then they leveled out throughout the summer and fall. It’s encouraging to see response rates holding up since email marketing has been declared “dead” many times over the last few years as channels like chat have been on the rise. But, in marketing, it’s not what channel you’re using, it’s how you’re using it. Highly relevant, helpful content will reach buyers in almost any medium, and we’re glad to see marketing teams sustaining high-levels of engagement via email.

Sales Emails

On the sales side, email activity has also increased, but response rates have been on the opposite trajectory. Global send volume has increased 79% since March, but response rates have consistently stayed nearly 30% below the benchmark since April. Send volume continues to grow through the fall as it’s increased 25% over the past five weeks.

It’s not that this approach isn’t working, it’s just not great for customer experience. Consumers are getting overloaded with emails as sales teams try to engage their new online audience. Since the pandemic has placed even more control into the buyer’s hands, they’re really only engaging with sales teams on their terms.

Email is still a valuable channel for salespeople, but blindly emailing prospects isn’t going to increase responses. You need to make sure you’re being deliberate in your prospecting mix because buyers have a lot more options these days to signal interest (visiting a site, converting on an offer, signing up for a demo, etc.). The key is to understand the intent behind these channels instead of just doubling down where it’s easy to spray-and-pray — like with email.

Sales Calls

Even though sales email engagement has been stagnant, a really positive takeaway for sales teams is that call events are now trending 21% above the benchmark and have increased 18% since March. This is a significant turnaround for call prospecting as it dropped to around 25% below the benchmark from March to June, but picked up again later in the summer — about the same time that deal performance began to return to pre-COVID levels.

If we look at call prospecting by company size, smaller companies seemed to have called their prospects sooner than larger ones. Companies with 1-25 employees saw their call prospecting return to pre-COVID levels at the start of July, while 26-200 and over 201 companies are just starting to return to those levels now. Since smaller companies have fewer customers and not as many “set and forget” channels, their sales reps typically have stronger relationships with their customer base. When the pandemic pushed buyers and businesses into a time of uncertainty, these trustworthy relationships are what both sides could lean on to get through hardships. It makes sense that as deal performance began to stabilize in July, smaller companies were the first to return to the phones because they rely so heavily on these close-knit relationships as well as traditional prospecting channels like phones.

Currently, call events are 31% above the benchmark for companies with 0-25 employees and are up 26% since March. We can compare that to other company sizes like 26-200 employees, which is 18% above the benchmark and has increased 17% since March. Over 201 companies are only 2% above the benchmark right now, but this number has increased nearly 30% over the past four months. We’ll look for 201 companies to increase their call prospecting as sales outcomes continue to gradually improve.

3. Sales Outcomes Are Gradually Improving.

Deals Won

Over the last few months, we have seen businesses adapt to new circumstances very rapidly. There was a lot of fluctuation in sales outcomes due to changing buyer circumstances, economic uncertainty, etc., all driven by the spread of COVID biologically. At the 6-month mark, businesses are simply more used to operating under these circumstances, and while it’s certainly a difficult time, the data suggests that companies of all sizes are starting to move forward.

In April, we hit the lowest point for total deals won at 36% below the benchmark. Following that, we saw steady recovery from late-April to mid-June where deals-won returned to the same levels they were at before the start of the pandemic. Deal performance continued to improve through July and August, and at the end of September, deals won reached 10% above the benchmark. That’s more than a 45% increase since the first week of April.

The pandemic has changed the definition of what a “good fit” customer is. Cashflow issues rendered some customers unable to purchase products that they could afford in the past. Changing circumstances affected the urgency customers had around purchases in both directions, accelerating some deals while stalling out others. Businesses have had to reassess their target personas because buyers’ circumstances had changed so dramatically. To be successful, brands need to update their definition of a “good fit” customer as well as their sales motions.

Deals Created

In April, we not only saw the lowest number of deals won recorded, but the lowest number of deals created as well. During the week of April 6, deals created fell to 30% below the benchmark and remained below pre-COVID levels until mid-June. Over the summer, deal creation continuously improved and now it’s at 35% above the benchmark. That’s 65% more deals being created now than they were at the start of April. As businesses pivoted their strategies and learned to operate in a digital world, many found success and are starting to benefit from their new prospecting channels.

Regionally, it appears LATAM was hit the hardest for deal creation in the first three months of the pandemic. It reached its lowest point in April at 43% below the benchmark, but fortunately, bounced back over the summer and is now 16% above the benchmark. EMEA also had a recent return to pre-COVID benchmarks as it was trailing behind all the other regions up until July and August. It was 18% below the benchmark while all other regions sat at least 10% above it. In September, EMEA deal flow surpassed the benchmark for the first time since March and is now 20% above pre-COVID levels.

Construction, Manufacturing, and Computer Software have all been trending above the benchmark since the start of September. Construction is the top-performing industry and has been trending roughly 20% above pre-COVID levels since May. This is expected though, as these industries haven’t been as structurally impacted as others. Industries like Travel, Entertainment, and Human Resources are still working their way back towards pre-COVID levels. While they’re not exactly at the benchmark, deal creation for these industries has been significantly better than it was at the start of the pandemic.

Takeaways

Online Conversion Isn’t New and It’s Not Going Anywhere.

Businesses didn’t suddenly discover ecommerce and live chat when COVID-19 forced them to adapt their operations. Brands and consumers were already moving online before the pandemic, but COVID accelerated their timeline and pressured them to embrace a digital transformation at a rapid pace. What were once novelty features and services — like live chat — are now vital to day-to-day operations. Without these tools, businesses can’t engage or prospect customers like they could before the pandemic.

Now that many companies have pivoted online and are discovering the benefits that come with it, there’s no returning to the way things were before. Companies will continue to invest in digital channels as these are proving to be highly-effective options for engagement, prospecting, and support. And, consumers are getting more familiar with these channels as well. As they continue to interact with brands through a digital landscape, they’ll come to expect this environment as the standard for businesses moving forward.

Resources to Help:

• Learn how chat should and shouldn’t work in this blog post
• Get up to speed with this beginner’s guide to conversational marketing
• Get your sales team started by learning how to add live chat to your website

Free Software to Get Started:

• Free conversational marketing tools are included in HubSpot CRM
• Facebook Messenger integration with HubSpot

Inbound and Buyer Interest Aren’t Optional.

With businesses operating in a digital world, buyer interest has turned into an on-demand experience. More consumers are working from home and spending more time online, which means they’re interacting with brands when and where they please. Buyers now have a variety of channels to choose from when they want to contact your brand and they also have the luxury of switching between these channels as they see fit. So, if you want to successfully engage your digital audience, your brand needs to be available on all of the platforms your customers are using. That will also help you maintain a noticeable digital presence as more companies follow suit and go online.

You’ll also need to focus more on your inbound methodology since consumers now have more power to interact with brands at their preferred pace. If you prioritize quantity over quality when it comes to messaging — like what we’ve seen with sales emails — you won’t get far with engaging your audience and you may end up damaging the customer experience in the process. Instead, try focusing on sending high-quality content to your “good-fit” prospects. You may have to reassess what “good-fit” means since COVID has significantly impacted buyer profiles, but this should get you on track in terms of engaging buyers that are an ideal match for your sales team.

Resources to Help:

• Use these prospecting strategies to find new channels to engage your prospects
• Watch the replay of our Adapt 2020 webinar on selling through uncertainty
• Refresh your email outreach with these sales templates
• Start using video in your sales outreach to engage more prospects
• Use this guide to increase your sales close rates
• Streamline your sales process with this guide to frictionless selling (and this course)

Free Software to Get Started:

• HubSpot CRM is free and comes with included advertising and sales acceleration tools, including free 1:1 video, meetings, and chatbot tools
• Gmail and Google Calendar integrations with HubSpot
• Zoom integration with HubSpot
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator integration with HubSpot
• Check out what HubSpot’s app partners are offering at this time with this list of relief initiatives

Businesses Have to Adapt.

Compared to where we were in March, global sales outcomes look a lot better. But, for many businesses — especially those in structurally-impacted industries — we’re nowhere near where we were prior to the pandemic. Businesses have had to adapt their approach to operate under very different circumstances and some have done this successfully while others are still working to come up with an effective plan. The good news is it seems like most businesses understand they need to adapt their strategies in some way if they want to continue to operate in a post-COVID world.

Resources to Help:

• Create an effective SEO strategy using this helpful guide and template
• Prevent traffic loss altogether using this guide to predictive SEO
• Use this editorial calendar template to plan educational content
• Get started writing with these blog post templates
• Optimize content and get found online with our guide to SEO

Free Software to Get Started:

• HubSpot for WordPress integration
• Google Search Console integration with HubSpot

Blogging is an attractive activity because it can be a creative outlet for sharing your unique perspective with the world. Best of all, the opportunities are endless.

At the same time, you want to add value for your readers (and maybe even turn your passion into income). 

In this post, we lay out how to monetize a blog and provide examples of the most popular (and lucrative) types of blogs, all with the goal of helping you find inspiration as you get started with your own blog.

How Do Blogs Make Money?

Line any labor of love, blogging is still labor. Good news is that there are a number of ways to make money from that labor, including: 

• Advertising – Advertising networks such as Google AdSense will pay to show ads to your visitors. You get paid a commission for the clicks you earn. 
• Affiliate Marketing – You can get paid to promote products to your audience by joining an affiliate program such as Amazon Associates. You earn a commission from sales generated by your blog. 
• Lead/Demand Generation – You can always use your blog to promote your own business whether you provide a service, run an ecommerce store, sell digital products such as online courses, or run a subscription/ content model for exclusive content. 

Keep in mind, though, that none of these can work if you don’t first create valuable content that attracts an audience. The last thing you need is to make your blog a billboard in the middle of a desert. 

With that said, there are some popular niches that do really well with blog monetization when implemented effectively.

1. Fashion

In this category, readers can find posts like fashion obsessions, back to school looks, makeup tutorials, and more. A common practice is to include sponsorships, like the one shown below with Vooray. The two brands collaborated on a gym bag in 2017, releasing it on the LSF blog and website:

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With brand partnerships, companies usually seek out heavy hitters in their industry and offer the brand the ability to design a product exclusively for base pay and a percentage of the profits. And, while this happens a lot in the beauty industry, it’s definitely not an industry-specific idea.

2. Food

As a self-proclaimed foodie, food blogs are my favorite types of blog. They usually follow a similar content format of categorically-organized recipes. Some have videos to pair with those recipes, as well as social media channels that all connect to the blog in some way.

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Above is an example of one of my favorite food blogs, Minimalist Baker. Note how the title of the post contains information that might pull a foodie in — “5 minutes,” and “plant-based”. This recipe will appeal to anyone who searches for easy, no-fuss cooking.

Minimalist Baker provides this value to attract readers, and they use affiliate links to monetize their blog.

3. Sports

Sports blogs exist for every type of sport imaginable — even squash. If you have a passion for athletics and love writing, this may be the perfect intersection for you. From covering games to giving player insights, sports blogs are an important source for fans to catch up on what they missed.

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Like this screengrab from ESPN, sports blogs also report on news going on in the industry — these two stories are about the Super Bowl. So if you’re thinking about doing a sports blog, you have options. You can either focus on a specific sport, or take a more holistic approach, like ESPN.

ESPN uses their website and blog as a companion for their media presence, to attract and retain viewers, but other sports blogs use banner advertising to monetize the traffic they earn.

4. Travel

If you love to go on trips and capture the moments, a travel blog might be right up your alley. There’s something about travel blogs that are so relaxing, in my opinion — seeing pictures of gorgeous destinations is always a treat. That’s why, if you’re thinking of launching a travel blog, you might want to invest in a nice camera.

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For instance, look at this vibrant, colorful photo of the Charles River. (I’m probably a little biased, considering I live in Boston and commute over this river daily). To rank highly on the SERPs, you’ll want to have high-quality images so travel enthusiasts are compelled to view your posts.

Travel blogs can use a number of avenues to generate income. Most commonly seen are banner ads, native ads, sponsored posts, and affiliate links for products such as suitcases or airline tickets.

5. Lifestyle

Lifestyle blogs are probably the most versatile of blog types. Aptly named, lifestyle blogs are about a person’s life. What they like to do, where they like to eat and shop … think of a lifestyle blog as a website for influencers. Check out this lifestyle blog, Love Taza, as an example:

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A number of influencers use blogs as a way to market themselves and build a more solid following. Oftentimes, businesses will look for an influencers’ blog or website to find out more information on them (as well as contact information) if they’re interested in cultivating a partnership. If you’re interested in becoming an influencer or simply want to share more of your life with friends and family, this might be the right blog for you.

You can monetize a lifestyle blog with affiliate links, native ads, and sponsored posts. Banner ads for ad networks also work well here.

6. Parenting

This is another guilty pleasure blog type of mine, mostly because parenting blogs have incredible interior decorating going on (another blog type, FYI). Parenting blogs usually give advice and share relatable stories to other parents, or those expecting.

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Parenting blogs can be a great resource to new parents, as well as a way to branch out into other outlets. Plenty of parenting blogs have added a YouTube channel to keep content fresh, more engaging, and expand into new target markets For instance, Happily Eva After, the parenting blog shown above, now has a thriving YouTube channel.

Parenting comes with a lot of opportunity for product purchases, so the opportunities for monetization are limitless.

7. Gaming

Gaming has turned into an industry that now typically happens online. Between downloadable content (DLCs) and games that depend on an internet connection, it’s hard to be a gamer if you’re not online. Because of that, gaming blogs are extremely popular.

From game announcements to corporate sponsorships, gaming blogs can go a couple of different ways. They can include game reviews, walkthroughs, cheat codes, or content codes. Since gaming YouTube channels attract a lot of fans, this type of blog can also grow into a YouTube channel all its own. Additionally, it’s a good space for gamers to connect with each other, especially if you create opportunities for your readers to engage (like in the comments section of your blog).

You can monetize the blog with banner ads, or you can use the blog to drive demand for streaming channel where more views mean more money.

8. B2B/Marketing

You’ve probably guessed — this blog that you’re currently reading is an example of the B2B/Marketing category. Because we offer marketing products as part of our CRM platform, we use our blog to help millions grow better, whether they use our products or not. 

By creating content for marketers, a marketing blog can attract marketers, and that’s the target audience for a marketing software company. By providing value, you can increase your trust and authority in the industry, which can help the positioning of your goods or services with that demographic.

I want to make it clear that marketing isn’t the only industry represented by B2B blogs. Instead, it’s more of an example of the type of B2B blogs you can find out there.

If you’re in a different industry, you can definitely use that as a cross-section for a B2B blog. For more information about B2B marketing and how a blog would look in that industry, check out our ultimate guide here.

9. Heath and Fitness

You may have heard of “Fitstagrams” (Instagram accounts dedicated to fitness journeys), but fitness blogs are also a dime and a dozen. These blogs recommend workout tips, healthy recipes, and sometimes offer full workout plans in a “How-to” format, like this post from Nerd Fitness.

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Fitness blogs can be a great companion to those looking to embark on their fitness journey. They’re usually geared towards a holistic view on healthy living in general, not just working out. Readers might be interested on perfecting their fitness routine, finding new ways to make healthy eating exciting, or looking for motivation to stick to their fitness lifestyle.

This is not an expansive list. If you have an idea, see what can come of it. The good thing about blogs is that you can take it wherever you want, and if the content is compelling for a certain readership, money and notoriety comes after.

Here are some examples of high-grossing blogs and the categories they’re in.

1. Love Sweat Fitness

Fitness blog Love Sweat Fitness, started by Katie Dunlap, is an expansive fitness blog offering content ranging from workouts, healthy recipes, and more. The blog pulls in over 7,000 organic (search) visits per month, and she uses her content to also promote the products in her ecommerce store.

2. Grammarly

Grammarly is a niche blog that offers writing tips, articles on grammar, and even advice for writing projects such as resumes, professional communication, and thesis papers. Their mission is “To improve lives by improving communication,” and their helpful content generates over 14 million organic visits per month. They use the brand awareness generated by this visibility to promote their grammar app and extension, which has a free version and a premium (paid) version.

3. PC Gamer

PC Gamer is a blog that provides reviews, demos, and news updates on gaming and gamer tech. Their content generates over 13 million organic visits per month, and they monetize this traffic with affiliate links.

For example, this is a post about the best personal computers to buy for gaming, updated for 2020. The post brings readers suggestions about which computers are best for PC gaming, and nearly every product has an Amazon link.

Every time a user clicks on the Amazon link, the website earns a profit, as well as Amazon, which is one way the website can fund its expansive listicles.

4. Apartment Therapy

Apartment Therapy is a lifestyle blog that highlights interior design and home living topics, covering everything from trendy furniture to cleaning hacks and even money matters. It generates more than 1.6 million organic visits per month. It monetizes this traffic with sponsored posts (like the one below), banner ads, and affiliate links.

5. PS I’m on my way

PS I’m on my way is a travel blog run by Trisha Velarmino and as she travels the world and learns about other cultures. Her content earns over 1,400 organic visits per month (and more from social media), and she’s been featured on a number of publications from Cosmo to Tripadvisor. She monetizes her blog by offering travel coaching services and digital courses. In addition, the sidebar on her blog includes banner ads.

6. Lauren Conrad

Lauren Conrad’s blog is a lifestyle and fashion blog, and primarily reports on trends and product launches, bringing in more than 57,000 organic visits per month. Lauren Conrad is considered an influencer, and this status helps her earn partnerships to monetize her content.

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This piece highlights another fashion influencer, Jessi Burrone, the model for the photos in this post. LC and Burrone partner together on numerous shoots for the website.

 If seen sporting a brand’s fashion, like Burrone is (she’s wearing LC clothes in the photos), some followers might see that and say to themselves, “Well, now I need this sweater if Jessi has it.”

7. Nerdwallet

Nerdwallet is an app for comparing credit cards and making smart money moves. Pretty much their whole business model revolves around their content, which drives over 11 million organic visits per month to their website. Their app is free, but they make money from affiliate partnerships with lending institutions and credit card companies.

8. Rookie Moms

Rookie Moms is a blog championing #MomLife and discussing all topics/issues related to parenting. Their blog is a powerhouse that brings in over 22,000 organic visits per month and generates income from banner ads and affiliate product links.

If you have passion to share and an audience ready to receive your insight, monetizing is definitely on the table once you start generating real interest. The hard part is getting started and creating the value that will get people to come. With a content management system and some elbow grease, you’ll be well on your way.

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

“You’ve got mail.”

At least, that’s what you’re hoping as a digital marketer — to show up in your audience’s inbox.

That’s because capturing emails is an important tactic marketers use to gather leads. To do so, you’ve probably created a lead magnet or content offer.

It’s a tale as old as time for those in online marketing. And that’s because it works.

By the end of 2020, the number of email users will grow to be 3 billion worldwide. Additionally, email has an average ROI of $38 for every $1 spent.

The fact is, email marketing is still an effective channel in digital marketing.

So, how do you capture emails? One tactic is a squeeze page.

Below, let’s review what a squeeze page is, some examples, and how to build one.

While squeeze pages are a type of landing page, it’s important to note that not all landing pages are a squeeze page.

Some landing pages have multiple conversion goals, such as offering a free trial. On the other hand, the only goal of a squeeze page is to get an email address.

After a user has entered their email address on your squeeze page, you should:

• Deliver your content offer immediately.
• Show users a thank you page that answers any questions and lets them know what the next steps are.
• Send an automated message reminding users why they gave you their email address. Something that says thank you, gives users the content offer and lets them know what types of emails to expect from you and how often.
• Follow up with a drip-email campaign that will move them down the funnel and closer to a purchase.

How to Create a Squeeze Page

So, what should a squeeze page look like? Usually, squeeze pages are short-form landing pages with only a small amount of text to persuade users to enter their email address.

But, how can you create a squeeze page that will generate leads? Here are a few tips:

1. Include one CTA: There should only be one CTA on a squeeze page: to enter an email address. Your CTA button should clearly state the action and end result for the user. For example, “Claim My Spot” is actionable and lets the user know that they’ll be signed up for a course or webinar.

2. Write crisp, compelling copy: The supporting text should be concise and interesting. It should be easy to read and provide important information that makes users want to enter their email address.

3. Implement social proof: You might consider including one or two short testimonials below your form fields. People like to see that your content offer has helped others before.

4. Add excellent graphics: The imagery on your squeeze page should be clean and captivating.

5. Produce an enticing content offer: Your content offer should have high-value for your audience. It can be something like an email course, templates, a webinar, or an e-book.

Creating a successful squeeze page won’t always happen on the first try, though. To improve conversions, try A/B testing to see what variations your audience likes best. You can test headlines, CTA buttons, form positions, background images, or copy.

Squeeze Page Examples

One of the easiest ways to guide you in your squeeze page creation is to look at a few examples. These examples can inspire your squeeze page design:

1. Copyblogger

Copyblogger is a blog that offers content marketing resources and training. With this model in mind, email marketing is crucial for building an audience (of subscribers) and retaining relationships over the long-term.

Their squeeze page does this effectively by gating their free training offer and compelling website visitors to give over their email address in order to access it.

Take note of ample white space with high contrast on the form. The copy is also fantastic:

• Want superior business results? (The goal)
• Start creating superior content. (The solution)

This creates a gap between where the reader is vs. where they want to go while positioning the training as an answer.

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2. Drip

The email automation platform Drip also creates a gap with their squeeze page, but instead of calling attention to the solution, they reverse the script and call attention to the goal:

• Send Better Emails (The solution)
• Make More Money (The goal)

By placing the goal at the end for emphasis, Drip is creating the dream. The line that follows introduces themselves and what they do in order to make that dream a reality.

The best part of this squeeze page, though, is how simply they’re able to set expectations for what happens next. The copy under the form is clear without over-explaining, and it even handles an objection someone would have with a 14-day trial:

“Am I gonna have to fork over my credit card and then go through a time-consuming process of cancelling once the trial is over? What if I forget and get charged even though I decided I didn’t want the product?”

In three simple words next to a checkmark, they remove this friction and make it more likely for the website visitor to convert.

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3. Backlinko

Some marketers choose to have a squeeze page act as their home page. That is what Brian Dean, founder of Backlinko does. Backlinko’s entire home page is a squeeze page attempting to get subscribers to Dean’s email list.

His content offer? Exclusive traffic and SEO tips directly to your inbox.

The squeeze page includes short, crisp copy, an interesting headline, great imagery, and only one form field. It’s a clean, simple page that utilizes all our tips above. If you scroll further, below-the-fold, you’ll find social proof and another content offer, if the first one doesn’t appeal to you.

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4. Marie Forleo

Marie Forleo, an online digital entrepreneur, has a squeeze page directly on her website. Instead of being her home page like Backlinko, Forleo uses a “Get Started” page right in the navigation as one of her squeeze pages.

This squeeze page offers a free audio training in exchange for a user’s email address. It has great imagery, copy, and a clear CTA.

Uniquely, below the form fields, Forleo tells users what they’ll get by giving their email address and already lets them know they can unsubscribe. This is a great touch when users are worried about spam pages.

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5. Ramit Sethi

Ramit Sethi, an author and expert in making money, has a squeeze page on his website, in the form of the “Free Tools” page.

This squeeze page uses scarcity and fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) to gather email addresses. The headline uses language including “Free Insider’s Kit” to make users feel like they’re in the inner circle.

Additionally, this squeeze page also got rid of the top navigation bar when you click on it, getting rid of any distractions. The only goal of this page is to gather email leads.

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6. The Hustle

The Hustle is a subscription newsletter that delivers business and tech news via email daily.

Because they don’t provide any online content, their audience must subscribe in order to receive their content. This creates an air of exclusivity that drives action: Subscribe or leave. No lookie-loos.

The squeeze page is effective because it previous exactly what they’ll get with an image of one of their issues. It also conveys the value proposition: “business and tech in 5 minutes or less.” Plus, the red form field with red button is stark and calls attention to the outcome of receiving value for free.

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Best Squeeze Page Builders

Now that we’ve learned what a squeeze page is and what it looks like, you might be wondering, “How do I create one?”

Luckily, there are a lot of squeeze page builders you can use for help.

However, it’s important to make sure that whichever squeeze page builder you use, integrates with your email autoresponder service — whether that’s HubSpot, MailChimp, Constant Contact or other similar tools. 

Below are a few of the top squeeze page builder options:

1. HubSpot

With HubSpot, you can create beautiful landing pages in the same tool you use for email marketing, your CRM, and your CMS – for free.

There is a built-in library of mobile-optimized templates proven to convert, so you can add copy and insert images in minutes.

Additionally, you can create dynamic squeeze pages that show different content based on a user’s location, source, device, buying stage, or any other contact detail stored in your CRM.

2. Leadpages

Leadpages is an easy, DIY landing page builder. With this tool, you can drag-and-drop any elements you want, giving you the ability to quickly create professional landing pages. Plus, you can look through its top, mobile-responsive templates to get you started.

Additionally, you can easily A/B test your pages right in the tool, so you create landing pages that convert right away.

3. ClickFunnels

ClickFunnels is a quick, easy tool that can help you create an entire funnel. For example, you can create your squeeze page, thank you page, and email and Facebook marketing automation. You can even create up-sell pages as well.

However, most of ClickFunnels tools are best used for other types of landing pages where you’ll want more bells and whistles. But, if you need to create both squeeze pages and other landing pages, this is a great option.

4. WordStream

WordStream offers a conversion toolkit, that helps users capture more leads using squeeze pages and landing page templates.

It has an intuitive drag-and-drop builder to help you build professional squeeze pages in minutes. You can sync your captured emails directly with Constant Contact or Salesforce to streamline your workflow.

Whether you’re new to landing pages or you’ve created them before, it’s important to understand how squeeze pages can generate leads for your company — they aren’t the same as every other landing page you’ve created. They need to be built with a specific audience in mind.

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

Dear Marketing ops professionals, what will your marketing team look like six months from now? Or a year from now? How many people will you add? What new tools, systems, and data will you need?

There are a lot of potential questions you can ponder about the future of your business but there is one certainty you’ll be dealing with: more. More data, more people, more process, more complex problems, and more questions around security and data privacy.

As your team and business scales, it’s important to incorporate marketing technology into your day to day processes. You’ll want to use tools that make your today processes easier, and will stay with you as you grow your business.

How is technology used in marketing?

Technology is used by marketers to execute their marketing campaigns. Marketers will use software that helps with task automation and data collection so they can get insights related to campaign activity and their impact on customers. 

For example, say that your team spends a significant amount of time emailing customers. The action feels repetitive, and it’s keeping people away from more pressing assignments. You may choose to utilize an email automation software, so less time is spent sending emails. You also want the software you use to track data related to those emails, so you gain an understanding of how your users interact with them. 

In brief, marketers use technology to make their jobs easier, and to understand their levels of success. The technology that marketers then choose to use to be successful in their marketing campaigns is known as their marketing tech stack.

What is a marketing tech stack?

As outlined above, a marketing tech stack is the tools that marketers use to execute elements of their marketing campaigns, from lead generation to customer satisfaction. There are hundreds of different tools to choose from when creating your marketing tech stack — 8,000 to be exact. 

At HubSpot, our Marketing Hub is an all-in-one platform that marketers can use to execute their campaigns. While this is not it’s only function, the software comes with a variety of tools to choose from, including Search Engine Optimization. The SEO tools bundle will assist you in optimizing your site for SEO rankings with keyword research tools, as well as as-you-type optimization advice while you’re creating content.

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Ultimately, the technology you choose is meant to help you execute your campaigns from start to finish. 

Your Marketing Technology Roadmap

The reality is that there is no out-of-the-box method that will help you prepare for more. Your company is unique, and your perfect marketing stack is not going to look exactly like anyone else’s. This is the time for choosing the right tech tools for your team, setting them up in a way that your future team can use and understand.

All of this, while ensuring a positive return on your marketing investment. (What could go wrong, right?)

We’ve been there, too. HubSpot’s marketing operations team is all too familiar with the challenge of more, having tripled the size of our marketing team in just three years.

We’ve learned a lot along the way — so we gathered six insights from HubSpot’s resident ops experts to ask what they wish they would have known when growing HubSpot’s own marketing tech stack.

1. Keep systems simple.

Have you heard of the “keep it simple, silly” (KISS) principle? The term, originally coined by an aeronautical engineer in the US Navy, states that simplicity guarantees the greatest levels of user acceptance and interaction.

The term is used often in software design, for example, where function and instruction creep can make products unmanageable over time.

How do you prevent this happening in your own company as it continues to grow? Put your current strategy down on paper, and review the value of every stage of your process with your leadership team. Consider what processes could be done more efficiently, and what could be eliminated altogether.

“The #1 driver of complex business systems is complex business rules,” says HubSpot Marketing Operations Manager Mark Metcoff. “If you can simplify your go-to-market strategy as much as possible, then regardless of how you structure your systems, you’ll be heading in the right direction.”

2. Aim for medium-term solutions.

In an ideal world, every decision you make about your tech stack today will work seamlessly for your team for years to come.

In reality, though, you are probably going to change systems a dozen times over the next few years if you continue to scale. You shouldn’t worry about picking your forever tech, but do not settle for a tool that will become obsolete in 6 months, either.

“Aim for the medium-term,” Metcoff suggests. “The costs of switching systems has never been lower, thanks to the emergence of more persistent datastores like customer data platforms that can under-lie front-office facing systems, and iPaaS solutions that allow you to integrate front-office providers for easy data transfer.”

3. Strategy first, technology second.

As companies grow, it can be tempting to rely on technology to support processes that are still evolving. Usually, this happens when a team adopts powerful tools that have a lot of potential, and they try to mold their systems around it.

HubSpot’s marketing operations team has made this mistake, too, and with an important takeaway: What sets apart truly powerful tech stacks isn’t just about the technology.

“The tools themselves won’t make you successful but rather how you use them,” explains Kerri Harrington, HubSpot Marketing Ops Analyst.

Harrington has worked closely with HubSpot Partners, consulting many who were in the midst of building their tech stacks. She taught them to think about their tech stack not as the powerhouse behind their systems, but a vehicle to efficiently and effectively execute their strategy.

If you are still developing your strategy, she says, try drawing out and visualizing your tech stack. This gives you an opportunity to think critically about each tool, the purpose it serves, and where there is any overlap or duplication in your tools. Check out the “Stackies” competition for inspiration.

4. Document everything, and document it well.

Imagine opening your spice cabinet, ready to cook up a chicken curry, to find that nothing in the cabinet is labeled. Every spice and herb is in the same colored jar, with no ingredient label or expiration date.

Barring a noteworthy sense of smell, this project would not be very easy or enjoyable.

This is what it’s like to step into a new role only to realize that over the years, your new team’s processes and database have not been properly documented. This is common among growing companies, because as your database grows and your systems evolve, it’s easy to end up with a lot of clutter, data integrity issues, and confusion.

Many will skip right over this — who likes to document? Who has the time to ‘waste’ a day of innovation to do seemingly admin work? We get it — But for the sake of your future team (and your future sanity), make sure you take the time to lay down the right foundation for data architecture.

“I can’t tell you how many times we have to review the history of a change or ‘walk through’ the last couple of years on a topic,” says Maggie Butler, Senior Marketing Enablement Manager. “It gets really, really hard if no one has documented anything.”

One incredibly valuable resource HubSpot had during one of its growth spurts, she says, was the documentation built by our engineers that detailed in simple language how the logic and code worked. Aim for this level of documentation to be comprehensive across all applications, and easily accessible for everyone on your team.

In terms of Marketing, our Lead Management tool embodies the ‘document everything’ mantra. The tool can be used to create a database of all customer information, where you can view chronological timelines of every interaction customers have had with you. 

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5. Point solutions serve a purpose.

A point solution is a product or service that addresses one very specific need in a marketing organization.Sometimes, you just need to a piece of software to do a specific thing really, really well. There’s no shame in it.

PieSync is a great example of this. If you use multiple different apps to execute your marketing strategy, keeping track of customer data from each app can be a tedious process. PieSync can be integrated with your CRM to streamline this process by syncing customer data from your favorite apps into one up-to-date database.

But keep in mind that every piece you do add to your infrastructure comes with its own compliance risks, technical challenges, maintenance and upkeep, and general administration.

“Also look closely at whether or not it needs to be integrated into your tech stack,” explains Metcoff. “Sometimes point solutions work just fine in a silo.”

If you have any point solutions in your current stack, think about how it fits into the bigger picture: how does it interact with the rest of your technologies, and what do you need to do to keep it running?

6. Aim for ease of use, but don’t sacrifice the necessities.

There are a lot of options out there — so don’t settle for less than what you need. At the end of the day, you need to choose a system that’s easy for your team to pick up and use, but still has the power and flexibility you need to get things done.

The challenge with today’s marketing automation tools is that they offer either enterprise-grade power or consumer-grade ease-of-use, but never both. As a result, many still go with the safe bet — overpriced, overly complicated, and under-utilized tools — which translates to spending more time on systems than on your customers.

With all of the tools available these days, there is no need to use clunky, complex, and time-consuming legacy software. We believe you shouldn’t have to sacrifice productivity to get power, because the best tools combine both power and ease-of-use. When you focus on delighting your customers and creating great experiences instead of managing your software, you will grow better.

More can be a good thing.

Adding more can be terrifying, but more, more means you’re growing. And it’s never been a better time to be a marketing ops professional. With the wealth of powerful technology now available, it’s easier than ever to grow your tech stack with a smart ops leader and the right strategy in place.

We believe this is paramount for any growing business, which is why you should expect more out of your marketing software and from the tech stack you build with it — your future team will thank you.