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15+ Must-have SaaS Tools for Startups in 2022

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15+ Must-have SaaS Tools for Startups in 2022

According to a recent McKinsey & Company report, the SaaS market is expected to grow to nearly $200 billion by 2024.

Time marches and technology evolves. Gone are the days when all business operations required manual intervention. Being a part of a technologically advanced business era, Automation is no more a buzzword, but a necessity for businesses to succeed.

And when we talk about the automation of business processes, ‘’Software as a service’’ SaaS needs no introduction. Any business that wants to make the most out of technology and favors cost-effective solutions for their IT needs, opts for SaaS tools to automate processes.

Like any SaaS consultant will tell you, Investing in the best-suited SaaS tools can not only remove any kind of friction from work and user flow but also give businesses a competitive edge. Thus, if you haven’t thought of a SaaS stack for your business, you are missing out on a lot of tech advancements that can take your business to the next level.

Now before we learn about the must-have SaaS tools to create your business SaaS stack, let’s look at some important insights about SaaS tools and their perks.

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An Introduction to SaaS Tools

Software as a service (SaaS) tool in simpler terms is a software distribution model in which a software provider hosts their software applications on the cloud and makes the copy of that software available to end-users over the internet while charging a fixed subscription fee. These tools are easily accessible on any device’s web browser with an active internet connection and don’t require any physical installation.

Moving on, let’s look at some key features and benefits of SaaS tools along with some key SaaS terms that you should know.

Benefits of using SaaS tools for Business

  • Easy to access, use and maintain
  • Lower cost associated
  • Continuous Functional Improvements
  • Highly Scalable & Flexible
  • No Hardware Investments
  • Enormous System compatibility

Key Features of SaaS Tools

  • Remote Access: The most useful feature of SaaS tools is that they are easily accessible on any device with just a few clicks and taps, the only requirement is an active internet connection.
  • Subscription-based Payment: SaaS tools are the most cost-effective way of automating business processes. As with most SaaS tools you only have to pay for what you use, billing is done on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis based on what feature you choose to utilize.
  • Easy to implement and use: SaaS tools don’t require any physical setup or much time to get started with the software. All it takes is easy signup, subscription, and you are all set to start leveraging the respective SaaS tool.
  • Highly Scalable: The best part of having a SaaS tool is that with the continuous functionality advancements the software keeps on improving. And as your business grows you’ll always have an upgrading option.
  • SecurityAny business irrespective of its size prioritizes the security of its data first, and with SaaS tools, security is ensured with encryption and restricted user access.

Common SaaS Terms you should know

  • Vertical SaaS: SaaS solutions render a target to a specific industry only. This software is created specifically for a particular industry catering to their needs, goals, and pain points. For example, Guidewire software, a SaaS tool that specifically caters to the Insurance business.
  • Horizontal SaaS: SaaS solutions that are intended to cater to the benefit of people across different industries with varied needs and end targets. For example, Slack – a communication software that can be used by anybody irrespective of their industry.
  • Packaged SaaS: SaaS product that is designed for certain business goals and processes. For example, Salesforce is an all-in-one CRM software.
  • Collaborative SaaS: SaaS tools that help teams collaboratively work together without hassle. For example, Basecamp is a renowned project management tool.

Now that you have a fair idea of SaaS tools, let’s get on to exploring the must-have SaaS tools for your business according to the business processes.

Must-have SaaS Tools in 2021

Project Management SaaS Tool

Businesses often juggle with multiple clients, projects, and tasks. Managing and catering to multiple clients and projects single-handedly at some point and time can lead to a lack of team collaboration, missed deadlines, chaos, and disorganization, which certainly is not acceptable for any business that aims to succeed.

Especially with the work from the home era setting its pace, working remotely, and collaborating with the team has become a hassle. Often due to lack of management and collaboration, deadlines are missed, work is hampered and all it leads to is a lost client and negative reputation.

Having an all-in-one project management tool that can streamline the management and collaboration processes for multiple projects can be an asset that yields commendable customer experience.

Benefits of Project Management Tool:

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  • Efficient Resource Planning
  • Project Planning and forecasting
  • Improved Team Collaboration
  • Enhanced Productivity
  • Improved Planning, scheduling, and risk mitigation

With that said, you might have an idea of what exactly is a project management tool and how it can benefit a business. Now moving forward let’s look into the best project management tools that you can utilize and streamline the management of multiple projects and tasks.

1. Basecamp

With 3.5 Million accounts and 22 years of service, Basecamp is a renowned project management tool. The reason behind Basecamp ruling the project management realm is that basecamp centralizes all the processes making it easy for every individual in the organization to look, understand and play their part in each project.

Having a centralized way of communicating, keeping files, handling project approvals, deadlines, feedback, and streamlining projects is all it takes to cater to multiple project clients while offering them a greater experience working with you.

Features:

  • Easy to manage
  • Responsive Interface – can be accessed on the Web, Android, or iOS
  • Effective team collaboration with employee tags
  • Centralized approvals and feedbacks
  • Easier project communication with group chats
  • Message boards, schedulers, To-do lists
  • Secure and effortless document sharing
  • Free 30-day trial

Pricing: $99/Month

2. Zoho Projects

Another well-known project management tool is Zoho Projects. Similar to basecamp, Zoho projects streamline business processes right from project planning up to the execution of the project.

Catering to all the needs of a business, Zoho projects play a major role in planning multiple project activities, assigning work, managing balanced resources, and collaborating with the team members.

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Features:

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  • Impressive UI
  • Task Automation & Management
  • Project Time Tracking
  • Effective Team Collaboration
  • Gantt Charts and Reports
  • Project Administration & Tracking
  • Responsive Online Software
  • Easier Integrations

Pricing: $10 per user/Month

3. Narrato Workspace

Narrato Workspace is a content creation and workflow management tool that helps streamline your content creation process. The software provides a powerful content editor that offers suggestions for improving content quality. Collaboration on content tasks is also very convenient, with the entire team coming together on the platform.

Assigning tasks, organizing content projects under folders, tracking task status and delivering projects to clients on the platform are simple too. The “Client” user role on the platform lets you share work with clients and gather feedback, which can be quite useful for content and web design agencies.

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Features:

  • Grammar and readability suggestions + AI assisted writing
  • Customizable content templates
  • Guidelines repository for reusable project guidelines
  • Folders, content calendar and Kanban boards for organizing/ tracking projects
  • Customized roles and access for managing team members, freelancers and other stakeholders
  • In-line comments on tasks and messaging on platform for easy collaboration
  • Publicly shareable links and WordPress publishing for easy content delivery

Pricing: Presently, you can create a free account and try out the platform at no cost for 6 months.

4. ProofHub

ProofHub is an all-in-one project management and team communication solution for teams of all sizes in a variety of industries. It assists project managers in breaking down complicated projects into small, achievable tasks and subtasks. You can create and assign tasks, set estimated time, track progress, and work with other team members easily in one location.

15 Must have SaaS Tools for Startups in 2022

Create custom fields, check your workflow in multiple views, chat with individuals or groups, conduct real-time discussions, save and proof digital files using the proofing tool, review project reports, and much more. ProofHub is a simple, cost-efficient, and effective project management tool.

Features

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  • Effective task management with start and due dates
  • Efficient team collaboration features like discussion boards and notes
  • Easy to use Custom fields to sort and manage information
  • Robust Time tracker
  • Online proofing to streamline reviewal process
  • In-built chat application
  • Kanban boards and Gantt charts
  • Detailed Project reports
  • White labeling

Pricing: $89 per month (Flat price)

CRM – Sales Automation SaaS Tool

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a system intended to streamline and improve the relationship and coordination with businesses’ existing customers, help find new prospects, and retain the former customers.

A CRM SaaS tool in simpler words encompasses all the activities, strategies, and technologies to cater, communicate and manage both the existing as well as the potential customers.

Benefits of CRM SaaS Tool:

  • Improved Customer Relations
  • Increased Customer Revenues
  • Maximized Productivity and organizational performance
  • Better Informational Communication
  • Efficient Analytical Documentation and reporting

Now that you have an idea of what a CRM is and how helpful it can be for your business, let’s move on to explore the best CRM SaaS Tools available for businesses to leverage.

1. Salesforce

When it comes to CRM, salesforce is a renowned name. It offers a centralized platform to streamline, organize and manage marketing, sales and customer support.

Salesforce enables businesses to target different audiences, with the help of smart automation intended to cater to every lead and customer activity, while also helping internal teams work collaboratively while delivering consistent results in the best interest of customers.

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Features:

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  • Intuitive UI/UX
  • Robust and flexible security architecture
  • AI-augmented analytics
  • Enterprise-level collaboration
  • Intelligent search feature
  • Metadata Architecture

Pricing: $25 per user/month to $300 per user/month

2. Zendesk Sell

Another well-known CRM SaaS tool is Zendesk. Similar to Salesforce, Zendesk also offers an intuitive centralized platform to manage and nurture every lead prospect that you want to cater to.

Zendesk Sell is well-equipped with robust sales prospecting functionality that intends to leverage an untapped market of over 200 million professionals. Businesses irrespective of their sizes prefer Zendesk Sell to identify prospects and nurture the lead until it becomes a customer.

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Features:

  • Email tracking and automation
  • Sales dashboard and reporting
  • Responsive CRM with Intuitive UI
  • Automatic dialer with text capability
  • Out-of-the-box integrations and analytics
  • Contact and Lead management, discovery, and verification

Pricing: $99 per user/month (Billed Annually)

Marketing Automation SaaS Tool

Now that we have done learning about sales automation tools, the next important automation tool that needs consideration is the Marketing Automation tool.

Marketing Automation Tool primarily is intended to centralize the various marketing activities including emails, blogs, social media, web pages, etc, and deliver the right content, at the right time, to the right customers, in turn nurturing their trust for the brand. Investing in a competent marketing automation tool can help businesses focus on what matters, i.e., an overall marketing plan and lead generation.

Benefits of Marketing Automation Tool:

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  • Balanced Resource Allocation
  • Save Time & Effort
  • Improved Customer experience
  • Increased Productivity
  • Multi-channel campaign management
  • Increase ROI
  • Automated Detailed Reports
  • Improved customer retention

Moving forward, let’s look at the best marketing automation tools that you can leverage for your business.

1. Marketo

Marketo is the best-in-class automation software available for businesses to generate, nurture and grow leads.

Owned by Adobe, Marketo is a renowned SaaS tool built to help businesses automate and manage their marketing engagements and workflows.

Marketo empowers businesses to engage the right customer by leveraging rich behavioral data of potential customers, build and scale the best-suited brand marketing campaign and finally paving way for business opportunities and an uplifting customer experience.

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Features:

  • Identifying, Nurturing & Managing Leads
  • Bi-directional CRM Integration
  • Email & Consumer Marketing
  • Web Activity tracking
  • Marketing Calendar
  • Campaign Dashboards and Reporting
  • Save Time, Costs, & Efforts
  • Increased Productivity

Pricing: starts at $1,195/month

2. Eloqua

Known as Oracle Eloqua Marketing Automation Tool, this is another renowned name when Marketing automation is concerned. Primarily Eloqua helps in strategizing and implementing closed-loop marketing and sales activities while managing cross-channel B2B marketing campaigns.

This centralized platform leads to seamless nurturing of leads across each stage of the buying process with competent campaign design, advanced lead scoring, real-time analytical data, and integrated sales tools.

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Features:

  • Dynamic Campaigns
  • Real-time activity tracking
  • Increased productivity
  • AI-enabled Lead management
  • Seamless Revenue analysis
  • Compatible workflow

Pricing: starts at $2000/month

Business Communication SaaS Tool

When we talk about business communication, numerous aspects come into consideration. First of all, business communication can be vertical and horizontal. When we say vertical, it means internal lateral communication between the employees and superiors. Whereas horizontal communication is the communication between employees and teams.

Transparent communication in an organization can lead to a much-streamlined workflow and collaboration between teams as well as individuals. Especially in the work from home era, organizations must maintain an effective channel of communication to continue business functioning without any hassle. And this is why business communication tools have seen an increase in demand.

Benefits of Business Communication Tool:

  • Real-time communication
  • Productive meetings and conversations
  • Improved employee engagement
  • Easy data sharing
  • Effortless task Management
  • Increased productivity

In today’s time, business communication tools need no introduction. So, let’s get to explore the best business communication tools that are available for businesses.

1. Slack

It is a renowned business communication SaaS tool with more than 12 million daily active users and around 7,50,000 organizations leveraging this enormous communication tool.

The primary aim of Slack is to cut down the hustle of communicating through longer mail trails by offering a synchronized platform for the entire organization to communicate, share files, plan projects, have discussions, and maintain a track record of tasks and strategies.

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Features:

  • Messaging, Voice & Video calls
  • Organized channels for specific conversations
  • Can Pin messages and links to channels
  • Easy Access, Management, and tracking of documents
  • Advanced search options
  • To-do list and notes facility
  • Streamlining your sidebar
  • Subscribing to RSS feeds
  • Robust reminders and navigations

Pricing: Free to $12.50per active user, per month (billed annually)

2. Flock

Flock is one of the best business communication tools that enable seamless communication between superiors and associates.

Flock offers a robust online platform that works on all devices and OS, and acts as a virtual workplace enabling direct messaging, group messaging using smart channels, voice, and video calls, screen sharing, file sharing, etc.

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Features:

  • Direct messaging & Video conferencing
  • Integrated search & Guest Users
  • File sharing & To-dos
  • Reminders, Text & Voice Notes
  • Light & Dark mode theme
  • Multiple App integrations

Pricing: Free to $4 per licensed user/month

SaaS-based Workforce  Management Platform

HR departments often find themselves overloaded with a huge set of employee-related responsibilities, which increases with employee strength. Moreover, in this highly competitive era, it is crucial to effectively administer all the workforce activities to give them the best experience.

Handling it alone with manual practices becomes more time-consuming and tedious work to perform, which proved to be more mind-numbing in the remote working environment. This approach brings nothing more than chaos, inefficiency, unproductivity, high cost, data manipulation, data inaccuracy, and burden to HR managers.  

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A unified human resource management tool streamlines all the daily tasks and gives freedom from the spreadsheet-based workflow to all the companies. Also, this automated solution is preferable for the tech-savvy workforce to perform their work in this digitally evolving era.    

Benefits of Human Resource Management Software:

  • Reduces paperwork
  • Improvises employee management
  • Boosts communication
  • Streamlines administrative tasks
  • Centralizes all the critical data
  • Generates error-free results

Let’s now move forward and look at the highly used Human Resource management tools to adopt in your business to build a more empowering and effective workplace.

1. factoHR

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factoHR is a famed identity in providing cloud-based human resource management solutions to small, medium, and large-sized companies for automating their daily HR operations with its simplified solutions.  

It is a perfect plug-n-play, mobile-first solution for every company seeking assistance in handling the overall HR tasks. Beginning from recruitment to FnF (Full and Final) settlement, every stage is handled well and more effectively with this solution. Companies can better administrate talent management, enhance employee engagement and productivity, ensure compliance management, and many more with this SaaS tool.  

Its easy and quick implementation functionality in a budget-effective manner makes this solution usable for 1500+ companies with 1.5 million employees onboard.    

Features:

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  • Simplified dashboard functionality
  • Hierarchical & configurable approval workflow
  • Assisted by separate mobile application
  • ESS portal for employees
  • Performs mood analysis to keep employees engaged
  • A single source of truth for your data
  • Detailed report generation capabilities
  • Provides analytical insights

Pricing: Starting at $40.80/month

2. Keka

Keka is an employee centric SaaS platform that combines HR, payroll, ATS and performance management in a single suite of tools. With Keka’s robust platform companies can seamlessly manage human resources processes.

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Features:

  • Payroll Management
  • Performance Management
  • Project Management
  • Recruitment Management
  • Reimbursement Management
  • Shift Management
  • Attendance management
  • Bonus, Loan & Advances Management
  • Document Management
  • Email Integration

Pricing – Starting at $ 94/ month

Social Media Automation SaaS Tool

Now that we’ve looked into the SaaS solutions for 4 main pillars of the business i.e. Project Management, Sales, Marketing, and Communication, it’s time to explore SaaS solutions for the fifth most important aspect of a business – Social Media.

It is no news that Social Media Marketing is one of the most important parts of any business’s marketing strategy. And being time-consuming, Social Media Automation has become one of the integral parts of business processes. No marketer prefers to spare time every day to post content on different social media channels, and that is when they choose to opt for social media automation tools that make their content creation and sharing a seamless experience.

Benefits of Social Media Automation Tool:

  • Saves Time & effort
  • Improved Engagement
  • Increased online presence
  • Real-time Analytics
  • Increased brand reputation

The best social media automation tools that you can leverage are:

1. HootSuite

The most renowned social media automation tool is HootSuite. Being an incredibly useful social media tool, Hootsuite enables marketers to syndicate as much content as they wish to share with their audience.

With advanced scheduling features, businesses and marketers can leverage this platform to share content, read responses, schedule messages, view statistics, and a lot more.

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Features:

  • Content Scheduling
  • Content sharing across all major social platforms
  • Insightful Analytics
  • Social Media Listening
  • Team collaboration

Pricing: $17 per user/Month to $610/Month

2. SocialPilot

SocialPilot is one of the best websites like Hootsuite that any business can leverage. SocialPilot offers businesses a seamless social media marketing journey that results in a greater ROI and brand recognition by empowering them with competent features that help them plan and implement their marketing strategy without hassle.

Along with social media automation and social media calendar, SocialPilot offers two unparalleled features: the in-built content curation tool and the White label solution. SocialPilot’s content curation tool helps you maintain the constant flow of relevant yet engaging content while with their White label solution, a business can personalize the experience they want to offer to their client. They can also market SocialPilot as their own social media software creating a flow of extra income.

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Features:

  • Content Curation
  • Social Media Scheduling across all major social media channels
  • Social Media calendar
  • Bulk Scheduling
  • RSS Feed
  • Real-time Analytics
  • Detailed Quantification of Social Media initiatives
  • Personalized dashboards and emails
  • Team & Client Collaboration

Pricing: $30/Month to $130/Month

Accounting SaaS Tool

Accounting is a crucial aspect of every business irrespective of its size or industry. Every business requires accurate data analysis. Investing in having a centralized SaaS tool that will help manage finances has become a common practice.

These accounting tools can range from being simple single-entry programs used for storing individual records, to more advanced accounting systems that enable business owners to effectively track finances, have detailed reports, and mitigate risks.

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Benefits of Accounting SaaS Tool:

  • Cost Saving
  • Optimized business financial operations
  • Easy to use
  • Secured Database
  • Automated record-keeping
  • Simplified tax compliance
  • Seamless expense management

Moving forward, let’s look at the best accounting SaaS tools you can utilize for the benefit of your business.

1. QuickBooks

With more than 7 million active users across the globe, Quickbooks is the #1 accounting software for businesses. A centralized platform where all of the business accounting data can be organized, sales can be tracked, invoices can be created and shared, finances can be tracked and planned. What else does a business need?

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Features:

  • Cloud Accounting
  • Invoicing
  • Online Banking
  • Accounting Reports
  • Cash Flow Management
  • Time Tracking
  • Accounting Reports
  • Data Security
  • Automatic Backups

Pricing: $12/Month to $90/Month

2. FreshBooks

Another efficient accounting software is FreshBooks with over 24 million users across the globe. Enabling businesses to experience seamless billing and tracking expenses this software is one of the most preferred account Saas tools.

One of the best features of FreshBooks is payment schedule time tracking. This one-of-a-kind platform enables businesses to set reminders for the unpaid invoices and keep a track of all the missed payments along with a detailed account of specifics.

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Features:

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  • Invoices
  • Payment Reminders
  • Personalized invoicing
  • Multi-currency billing
  • Automatic Tax calculations
  • Expense Tracking

Pricing: $7/Month to $25/Month

SEO SaaS Tool

Search engine optimization is no more a buzzword. Businesses today invest in SEO aiming to increase brand visibility and to attract new customers. Utilizing a SaaS Tool to automate business’s SEO is one of the smartest ways to pave the way for results and ROI.

Benefits of using SEO SaaS Tool

  • Attract quality traffic to your website.
  • Enhance conversion rate.
  • Generate quality backlinks.
  • Establish brand awareness.
  • Drive traffic to website
  • Improves website loading speed.

One of the best SEO SaaS Tool that you can leverage is:

Sitechecker

It is an all-in-one SEO platform. Get a full SEO analysis report on your website to develop the best SEO strategy and, as a result, improve your search engine visibility. You can easily analyze and fix SEO mistakes with Sitechecker’s practical tips. Site validation gives you a complete picture of all the SEO flaws of your site. Once you recognize them and fix them, you will have a chance to improve and increase your site’s ranking in search engines.

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Features:

  • Site Audit
  • Site Monitoring
  • Rank Tracker
  • Backlink Tracker
  • SEO Chrome Extension  

Pricing: $23/Month to $79/Month

Bottom Line

We are a part of an extremely competitive business era, where a business can become big overnight and hit a rough patch the other day.

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Staying well-versed with the advancements, trends, and updates is a necessity and time is the most precious commodity. Businesses are trying their best to level up with the industry leaders and among such cut-throat competition, if you are still investing time and resources in business operations that can be automated, then you’re certainly losing the pace.

Do not overthink, now that you know what all business processes can be automated. Upgrade yourself to a SaaS stack and see how your business thrives through the competition.


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MARKETING

Unlocking Hidden Revenue: The Inbox Retargeting Methodology

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Unlocking Hidden Revenue: The Inbox Retargeting Methodology

Page conversion rates have ALWAYS been a problem. The simple fact is most people don’t convert even on the most optimized pages. 

What’s why traditional retargeting on ad networks has been so dang powerful. While retargeted leads come cheap, they still aren’t free. Worse, you’re back competing against your competition in the ol’ ad auction system.

For the last 6 years, I’ve been using a tactic called Inbox Retargeting to identify who lands on my key pages and directly reach out to them in their inbox.

No more ads. No more auctions. Just a targeted contact that showed they were interested, but didn’t quite take the leap yet.

Before I dive into the “What’s” and “How’s”, this tactic can only be used in the good ol’ US of A. If you aren’t in the states or don’t have clients in the states, you’re out of luck. Sorry!

How It Works

Inbox retargeting doesn’t take a lot of heavy lifting. I’ll share the strategy next but I wanted to start with some of the logistics.

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DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer or coder, so keep that in mind if technical or legal questions pop up.

If you have a website, you have tracking scripts, e.g.,  GA4, the Facebook Pixel, Heatmap software, etc…

To get started with Inbox retargeting, you just need to be able to copy and paste two scripts on your site:

  • A collection script: This fires and tries to identify the visitor

A suppression script: You’d fire this on your conversion confirmation pages, you don’t want people who converted to land in your Inbox Retargeting campaigns.

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The tech works off of a database of contacts in the United States that are eligible for emails, so it’s completely above board with your ESP. However, you’ll want to do a few things before you start treating them like a regular member of your email list.

We initially tested this on one of our paid media campaigns. We already had a really strong campaign that we wanted to squeeze more leads out of…and boy did we.

We were driving traffic from Meta (Facebook for the OGs) to this landing page:

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This page converts at 58%. Yeah, that’s a humble brag…deal with it.

Even with a 58% conversion rate, we’re still missing out on 42% of the traffic we’ve already paid for. That’s kind of a bummer.

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After we added the collection script to the page, they were able to capture a lot more leads. The conversion rate jumped from 58% to a very sweet 87% – that’s a 50% increase!

That was the impact on a single page, that’s when we knew it was time to go bigger.

The Strategy

Most of the tools out there, whether it’s Retention.com or Customers.ai, are going to charge based on the number of contacts. So it can get pretty easy to burn through contact credits if you run the script on every page you manage, your site and your clients’ sites included.

That’s why you’ll want to make sure to select pages that capture intent versus targeting all of your traffic.

ID Key Pages

Here are some of the pages you should consider adding the collection script:

  1. Campaign Landing Pages – If you’re paying to send someone to a page, the referring source piqued their interest. If they didn’t convert, you’d definitely want to follow up.
  2. Product Pages – If someone is viewing this page they’re evaluating a particular product they were interested in.
  3. High Intent/Value Content Pages – This could be your pillar content on your blog pages, podcast pages, or your top level service pages.
  4. Registration Pages – This is a subset of a landing page, but if someone got all the way to a registration or sigh up page, they’re a prime candidate for outreach.
  5. Cart Pages – People abandon carts all the time. If you weren’t able to catch their details during checkout, this is an ideal opportunity.

Effectively it’s any page where you’re pushing a specific action. While the above pages are the pages to choose from, a homepage is acceptable but will require a little more finesse when you follow up.

Map to Email Campaigns

Now that you’ve identified where you’re going to identify leads, you’ll need to map it to your automation tool.

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Unlocking Hidden Revenue The Inbox Retargeting MethodologyUnlocking Hidden Revenue The Inbox Retargeting Methodology

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Most tools have a direct integration with your email service provider, but worst case scenario you may have to pass the data through a no code integration tool like Zapier.

Once you’ve worked out the digital plumbing, you’ll want to follow up based on the page the contact was collected on. Here’s how you should approach follow up:

  1. For Campaign Landing Pages – Give them the specific asset. They were interested in it, you’ve got their contact information, just hand over the goods. This builds good will at the start of the relationship.
  2. Product Pages – Send over the details of the product or product category they were viewing. This could be as simple as a reminder or you could build goodwill with a special offer or coupon.
  3. High Intent/Value Content Pages – Send over some of your best content or freebies that move people to the next phase of the Customer Value Journey.
  4. Registration Pages – Treat these like an “abandoned cart” type of email and get them to take that next step.
  5. Cart Pages – Same as “Registration Pages” but it’s, you know, an actual abandoned cart reminder. Similar to the product pages you could entice them to come back with a deal or coupon.
  6. Homepages – If you do run these on the homepage, you’ll need to do more of a reintroduction then transition to showcasing your best stuff.

Email Structure

The initial message you send needs to have a very specific flow. There are four critical things that need to happen when they open up your Inbox Retargeting message.

First, remind them about who you are and how they know you. This can be as simple as a, “Hey, thanks for stopping by…” message. Have some fun with it.

Next, you need to provide highly specific value based on their browsing intent. If you get this wrong, they’re just going to file your message under SPAM.

After that, you’ve got to set expectations with what they’re getting and now you’ll be communicating with them moving forward.

And Finally, you need to give them an EASY OUT. These campaigns have our highest unsubscribe rate, but that’s because we outright ask people to unsubscribe if they don’t want any additional contact.

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Once you’e gone through this, you treat them like one of your regular subscribers with all your fancy ascension automations, content emails, and promotional emails.

Here are the email stats from one of our PPC Campaigns:

1710795439 568 Unlocking Hidden Revenue The Inbox Retargeting Methodology

With an average open rate of 53.87%, we know there’s a base line interest in the deliverable. The click rate is DANG good for messaging visitors who didn’t convert.

Sure the unsubscribe rate is a little high for this campaign, but that is intentional. We push them to opt-out in the first email so we don’t get dinged later with complaints.

The Payoff: An Additional 109k Last Year

I mean, who doesn’t want another cool 100 grand for adding a script to your website and writing a couple of emails? Here’s how the numbers work out:

Last year, we identified 3,714 leads using this method. IMPORTANT: When I was pulling these numbers, I realized we installed the code wrong on some pages and missed out on about another 2k leads…oops!

Our average lead cost was ~$7, so the leads themself were a $26,000 additional value. This alone would be a reason to use the tech.

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BUT JUSTIN, did they convert?!

Yes!

We closed $36,000 in IPPC business from this lead source. For what we spent on those leads we’re looking at a 750% ROAS. Not too shabby.

The rest of the money we made was by selling this service to our clients. Since we run paid ads for clients, this method is a complete no brainer. We ran a pilot program and only offered this to a handful of clients last year, we averaged about 4k/month in sales.

We sold clients the leads at ~$2/lead for some of the niches we work in, that’s a steal. 

If you decide to sell this you need to make sure the client knows these are lower intent leads and will require longer term nurtures. If you follow the email strategy I shared above, you’ll be good to go!

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Protip: Charge for building the follow up sequence! 

So that’s it! If you’re running your own business or are an agency owner, you’ve got to consider Inbox Retargeting. Though, I do have some bad news…

Not to be “Chicken Little” but this is starting to get way more attention, there are services popping out of the woodwork so this will become a table stakes method. So get ahead of this today.

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MARKETING

What’s Media Mix Modeling? [Marketer’s Guide with Examples]

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What’s Media Mix Modeling? [Marketer’s Guide with Examples]

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By Emily Sullivan

Have you ever felt in the dark when it comes to understanding the real impact your marketing dollars are having across multiple channels? 

Determining where and how conversions are occurring is crucial in optimizing your budget to drive the most impact with your marketing budget. Media mix modeling (MMM) is an analytical approach used to gauge the effectiveness of various marketing channels in driving sales and conversions. This method allows us to decipher the true influence of advertising spend across diverse platforms by accounting for a myriad of factors, both within their control (like media channel spend, promotional strategies) and outside their control (such as economic conditions, competitor actions, and seasonal influences).

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One of the key strengths of media mix modeling is its ability to incorporate long-term brand building effects alongside immediate sales impacts, offering a comprehensive view of marketing effectiveness. It helps in identifying which channels are most efficient, how different channels influence each other, and how external factors affect marketing performance.

Media mix modeling is a powerful tool for marketers seeking to optimize their marketing investments. By providing a holistic view of how various factors contribute to sales and conversions, MMM enables data-driven decisions that enhance marketing efficiency and business growth.

In this article, we explore how media mix modeling works, and how businesses can use analytics to drive smarter ad spend decisions.

What Is Media Mix Modeling?

Media mix modeling (MMM) is a type of analysis that measures the impact of media buys across multiple channels, showing the role various elements play in achieving a desired outcome—often a conversion or revenue KPI. With this information, marketing stakeholders are able to make specific adjustments to campaign spend to improve their progress toward reaching a given goal.

Media mix modeling can be used to address common brand marketing questions and pain points, including:

  • Which of our marketing efforts are having the biggest impact on reaching our goals—or, more simply—what’s working?
  • How big of an impact does seasonality have on our marketing performance?
  • How closely is our performance tied to promotional efforts? 
  • Are shifting consumer trends negatively or positively impacting outcomes?
  • Which specific mix of spend allocation drives the highest ROI?
  • How will these channels likely perform in the future based on their optimized spend allocation?

“Media mix modeling is a top-down , privacy resilient approach that evaluates how historical media activity, promotions, pricing, seasonality, and uncontrollable factors—such as economic activity—impact key business outcomes such as sales revenue. MMM is a scientific approach to attribution in the sense that it applies statistical methods to analyze and interpret marketing data, providing a systematic understanding of how different marketing channels contribute to overall business goals in the broader context of the market. The quality of insights derived from MMM heavily depends on the quality and granularity of the data used.”

— Annica Nesty, Group Director of Marketing Science at Tinuiti

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MMM leverages aggregate data, and can measure both online (digital) and offline (traditional) advertising channel performance, including (but not limited to): paid media channels such as social media channels, traditional print advertising, linear TV advertising, and other performance marketing efforts, organic media, operational factors like promotions, external factors like seasonality, economic conditions, outcome KPIs such as sales revenue, new customers, and conversions. 

How Does Media Mix Modeling Work?

The MMM framework is a type of statistical analysis that uses statistical methods and econometric models such as a regression analysis. This econometric model helps analysts determine the strength of relationships between a single dependent variable and an array of independent variables.

Media mix modeling analysis measures the impact of your media spend today, and is also helpful in predicting the future outcome of your marketing investments on a given variable.

Example:

Let’s assume a scenario where our target metric, or dependent variable, is revenue, a critical indicator of business success. We aim to dissect the influence of various marketing initiatives on this revenue. These initiatives, our independent variables, encompass a diverse array of digital advertising campaigns, including those run on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, as well as broader Display and Streaming platforms.

The number of independent variables under scrutiny does not dilute our core objective. The mission is to measure the relationship between the marketing endeavors and the revenue they generate. This involves not only identifying the direct contributions of each campaign to revenue but also understanding the nuanced interplay between them by observing how changing aspects of those independent variables impacts the chosen business outcome

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What can MMM Measure?

When using MMM to assess campaign success, marketers should leverage statistical methods and econometric models to get the most accurate picture possible. Data quality is essential in achieving an accurate media mix analysis, so take any needed time to clean your data before using it in your analysis. 

Key elements an MMM equation can measure include:

  • Base and incremental sales volume impact
  • Channel effectiveness and return on investment
  • Marketing spend saturation

Media Mix Modeling vs. Data-Driven Attribution Modeling

Like media mix modeling, attribution modeling also studies the efficiency of marketing strategies — but there are important differences.

Attribution modeling is a general term that refers to tracking engagement to better understand how specific tactics drive action at the user level. This modeling works well for analyzing specific customer touchpoints, focusing on elements like how a consumer converted, which creative on which channel led to that conversion, and what the expected ROI could be if more ad budget were shifted to that channel. 

Media mix modeling takes a higher-level, more comprehensive picture. This modeling isn’t designed to measure user-level engagement like impressions and clicks, rather its primary function is measuring the impact of an entire touchpoint on specific marketing objectives. 

Data-driven attribution modeling and MMM each have their own set of strengths. It’s not a matter of one being better than the other, rather one being better-suited to different types of marketing analysis. 

For example:

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  • The precision of the data-driven attribution: Let’s assume you want to invest more spend in a social ad campaign during the holiday season. While MMM is an option for determining where to allocate those dollars, data-driven attribution excels in dissecting the intricate customer journey, offering a microscopic view of user interactions. For instance, if you’re keen on understanding the exact value of a single click from your social media campaign, Data-Driven Attribution can illuminate the path. 
  • The holistic perspective of the media mix modeling:  Media mix modeling, can consider the impact of offline actions and initiatives. Unlike the more narrowly focused attribution models, which might overemphasize the first or last touchpoint, MMM assesses the collective impact of all channels over time. This makes it an indispensable tool for strategic planning and long-term investment decisions in your marketing portfolio.

“Attribution modeling is based on a bottom-up approach while media mix modeling takes a top-down approach. Media mix modeling provides a long-term view of the marketing ROI of media activity, while attribution modeling evaluates individual-level activity to provide a short term view of marketing ROI.” 

— Annica Nesty, Group Director of Marketing Science at Tinuiti

Why Does MMM Make Sense for a Post-cookie/Post-IDFA World?

In the post-cookie and post-IDFA landscape, where privacy concerns and regulatory changes limit access to individual user-level data, media mix modeling has become a pivotal analytical tool. MMM’s emphasis on overall marketing spend allocation and its proficiency in establishing cause-and-effect models, address the challenges posed by the diminishing availability of explicit conversion information, providing marketers with a privacy-respecting and insightful approach to navigate the evolving digital advertising ecosystem.

An Example of Media Mix Modeling

With the right media mix model, a business can measure their past marketing performance to improve future ROI by optimizing the allocation of the media budget by channel and/or tactic, including: traditional and digital media channels, promotions, pricing, competitor spend, economic conditions, weather, and more.

Example:

An international ecommerce brand wanted to forecast their second-half of the year and create an optimal media mix to make their marketing dollars work smarter. A combination of client data, marketing data, and machine learning were required to create a powerful, custom media mix model. 

To build the model, the business used 2+ years of digital marketing and revenue data, analyzing it by market, tactic, and day. The data was then used to create model to assess future spend showing how changes in investment across channels could impact revenue and sales.

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media mix modeling

The full digital media mix model gave the ecommerce brand a detailed analysis of where to optimize their spend across all digital marketing channels. 

One recommendation was to shift dollars away from social—which historically had been at or near 30%—to paid search. This recommendation came with another layer of insight: The brand realized they were overinvesting in awareness campaigns, and needed to invest more heavily in capturing current demand during the 2nd half of the year.

Results: Working with a robust media mix model, the brand was able to break down how much media spend was needed by each channel in order to achieve the 30% YoY revenue goal they targeted. 

The Benefits & Challenges of Media Mix Modeling

MMM helps you accurately connect all the dots, leveraging (ideally) a wealth of provided data, to understand how disparate aspects of marketing campaigns work together in helping you reach your business goals. 

Benefits of Media Mix Modeling

The benefits of MMM are multifaceted, offering marketers a strategic edge in navigating the intricacies of their advertising efforts. Let’s dive into each benefit in detail… 

Omnichannel Campaigns: MMM excels in providing insights for omnichannel campaigns, allowing marketers to understand and optimize the impact of their initiatives across various channels. This capability is crucial in today’s interconnected digital landscape, where consumers engage with brands through diverse platforms.

Improved Oversight Over Media Spend Impact: MMM provides a comprehensive view of the impact of media spend, enabling marketers to assess the effectiveness of their investments. This improved oversight ensures a clearer understanding of how each component of the media mix contributes to overall campaign success.

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Media Spend Optimization: With MMM, marketers can optimize their media spend by identifying the most impactful channels and touchpoints. This data-driven approach allows for strategic adjustments in budget allocation, ensuring that resources are directed towards the avenues that yield the highest return on ad spend.

Effective Targeting of Audiences: MMM’s analysis helps in refining audience targeting strategies. By understanding which elements of the marketing mix resonate most with specific demographics, marketers can tailor their campaigns to effectively reach and engage their target audience segments.

Forecasting with Certainty: One of MMM’s strengths lies in its ability to forecast results with a high degree of certainty. This forecasting capability empowers marketers to make informed decisions based on predictive analytics, aiding in long-term planning and goal setting.

Reduced Reliance on Personally Identifiable Information (PII): MMM minimizes the reliance on personally identifiable information for analysis. This is especially crucial in an era where privacy concerns are more important than ever. 

Media mix modeling is a comprehensive and powerful tool, offering a range of benefits that contribute to a more effective, data-driven, and privacy-conscious approach to marketing strategy and decision-making. While there are many benefits to MMM, there are challenges as well. Let’s look into common challenges of MMM in our next section.

Challenges of Media Mix Modeling

MMM grows increasingly complex as the media landscape becomes more fragmented, and the customer journey more personalized. Whereas in the past, advertisers may have wanted to measure something as simple as the impact of a print ad in a Cleveland newspaper, today’s consumers are exposed to brands in a wide variety of locations and formats, from a subway transit poster to a Sponsored post on Instagram.

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Working with high-quality data is important in any measurement initiative, but for MMM to work effectively, it also needs a lot of data to build a reliable model. For example, if you wanted your model to consider the performance impact of seasonality, it would ideally need at least three full seasons (three years) of data to consider in its analysis.

This makes media mix modeling a ‘long game’ initiative with infrequent reporting by its nature. Brands and advertisers who are more accustomed to daily or weekly updates may struggle with ‘waiting out’ the analysis.

Because it’s not designed to make considerations based on user-level data, instead providing aggregate insights, media mix modeling offers limited insights on brand impact, personalized targeting, and customer experience. However, advanced models are available that can provide highly granular insights, but traditional MMM provides aggregate insights.

Common Misconceptions About Media Mix Modeling

Media mix modeling, like many other analytics solutions, has also become a marketing buzzword that has generated its fair share of misconceptions.

Here are a few of the most common misconceptions around media mix modeling.

Media Mix Models Are Not Transparent

With large datasets and statistical analysis involved in media mix modeling, the methods behind the technique have been critiqued for their obscurity. If there is no perceived transparency in the process, how does a brand know if its media mix model is really accurate?

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Any organization specializing in media mix modeling should provide a transparent approach, with deliverables such as outlines, milestones, and performance reports. Additionally, you may want to consider partnering with an agency that truly understands how media mix modeling aligns with your needs and expectations. Every business is unique and each media mix model is based on multiple factors.

Media Mix Models Do Not Provide Real-time Data

Today, results are often measured by the timeliness of their delivery, with the current digital marketplace allowing for almost instantaneous real-time data. Media mix models do actually provide compelling real-time marketing insights, perfect for evaluating new campaigns, new competitors, and assessing pricing actions or changes in promotional strategies. 

A powerful partner in media mix modeling will provide sophisticated tools and real-time approaches to satisfy your business performance assessments. Your partner should also be able to provide forecasting, simulation, or AI- and machine-learning-integrated models to suggest future movements. 

Media Mix Modeling is Biased to Offline Channels

Though media mix strategies do integrate and consider offline channels in their approaches, media mix modeling also considers all digital channels — including display, email, paid search, social, and more. Remember—it’s considering your media mix. If that includes ten different channels and you provide enough high-quality data for each, they will all be considered in your marketing mix analysis. 

In fact, as customers have become more intertwined with digital channels, media marketing models have adapted to go even deeper into the analyses provided by those channels’ respective insights to support better budgeting choices and customer segmentation reports. 

Conclusion: MMM Closes the Loop on Marketing Performance

In an ever-evolving digital landscape, MMM’s adaptability to the post-cookie/post-IDFA world positions it as an essential tool for marketers. As businesses seek to connect the dots, leverage data, and make strategic decisions, MMM is a crucial ally in the dynamic realm of mixed media advertising.

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“At Tinuiti, we leverage measurement best practices such as MMM and incrementality to understand media effectiveness, predict future outcomes, create deeper insights, analyzing what-if scenarios to provide recommendations that optimize media performance. This helps brands understand what channels they should be investing in, how they should shift budgets (media mix), creating a high-level view of what channels are driving overall sales and ROI. Our goal here is to deliver growth for our clients by maximizing the return on investment through best in class measurement”

— Annica Nesty, Group Director of Marketing Science at Tinuiti

At Tinuiti, we know, embrace, and utilize MMM. Our Rapid Media Mix Modeling sets a new standard in the market with its exceptional speed, precision, and transparency. 

Our proprietary measurement technology, Bliss Point by Tinuiti, allows us to measure what marketers have previously struggled to measure – the optimal level of investment to maximize impact and efficiency.  But this measurement is not just to go back and validate that we’ve done the right things. This measurement is real-time informing what needs to happen next.

Curious about how we can tailor strategies to hit your unique marketing bliss point, including Rapid Media Mix Modeling? We’re eager to chat. Contact us today for details.

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Email Ready to Send? Make Sure to Tick These Things off First!

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Email Ready to Send? Make Sure to Tick These Things off First!

Designing and developing an email campaign is a complex mechanism; a few things will inevitably escape your attention during the process. So, before you hit that send button, you must draw up a foolproof checklist to ensure every single component in your campaign is in its rightful place. Wondering what an ideal pre-flight checklist looks like? We’ve carefully compiled everything necessary in this blog. Read on to find out!

Subject Line and Pre-header Text

A subject line can make or break your emails. It’s the first thing about your email that reaches the audience, and if it fails to hit the right notes, you’ll have a tough time convincing your subscribers to engage with your emails.

What makes a subject line tick, you ask? Let’s take a look!

  • Your subject line should prioritize an economy of words; this will help you on two accounts- firstly, a crisp and to-the-point subject line increases your probability of catching the reader’s attention. Secondly, longer subject lines run the risk of being clipped on mobile devices, thereby spoiling the subscriber’s user experience. By keeping your subject lines concise, you eliminate this possibility.
  • Ensure your subject line clearly explains what readers can expect upon opening the email. The more guesswork your subject line demands of readers, the less likely they are to open your email.
  • Steer clear of using words that might be considered spammy. With email filters becoming more and more sophisticated, usage of any sort of contentious term in your subject line will result in ISPs flagging your email as spam.
  • Personalize your subject line. In a climate of increasingly crowded email boxes, personalization is one technique you simply can’t afford to overlook.

Besides fine-tuning your subject line, you also need to pay attention to your pre-header text. Building upon the context provided by your subject line, pre-header texts give readers an additional nudge to open their emails. Two crucial things that you must keep in mind while curating your pre-header texts are:

  1. It must exist only as an extension of your subject line; it must not try to introduce any new ideas on its own.
  2. It must be mobile-optimized.

Broken Links

Given that the links embedded in your email eventually facilitate a conversion, it is imperative that you thoroughly evaluate their health prior to delivering your emails. Broken links aren’t just bad for business; they also spoil a subscriber’s user experience.

Here are a few things you must check after embedding a link in your email:

  • This might sound trivial, but do check if the link you have inserted is the one you intended to or not; the only thing perhaps worse than having a broken link is having an irrelevant one.
  • Check that the link is redirecting the user to the desirable destination.
  • If the download of a resource is supposed to be triggered by clicking the link, check if that’s functioning properly; you wouldn’t want subscribers clicking umpteen times on your link only for it to return nothing.

Accessibility

Apart from acing your content and design, you must also work towards making your email campaigns accessible; people making use of assistive technologies must be able to engage with and comprehend your emails in an absolutely hassle-free manner.

Given below are a few measures that will help you make your campaigns accessible to all:

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  • Organize your email content. Break down long paragraphs into small sections of 2-3 lines. Use bullets and subheadings wherever necessary. This will make it easy for assistive technologies such as screen readers to parse through your content.
  • Write descriptive alt texts for the images you’re including. Besides improving accessibility, alt texts also enable search engines to crawl your page more efficiently, thereby boosting your SEO.
  • Use semantic markup; this will help screen readers navigate your emails in a smooth fashion.
  • Try to stick to a single-column layout while designing your email template.

This email from AllTrails is an ideal example of an accessible template.

Inbox Preview

Different email clients render emails differently, even if only slightly. Hence, before sending out your emails, you must preview them across different environments and clients to check if they appear as desired. If you are designing your email for dark mode, too, it becomes that much more important to preview it before delivering.

Wrapping It Up

For your email campaigns to be able to drive maximum impact, they must be free of blemishes of all kinds. We hope the pre-flight checklist we shared above proves to be of help to you when you sit down to create your next campaign.

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