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15 of the Best Free Website Builders to Check Out in 2023

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15 of the Best Free Website Builders to Check Out in 2023

In today’s digital world, having a business website isn’t an option. It’s a must.

An online presence is the digital equivalent of a calling card or listing on a phone book’s yellow pages. It increases brand awareness and allows you to display products and services online.

Unfortunately, not all businesses see the benefit of having a website. A survey commissioned by Top Design Firms found that 27% of small businesses don’t have one — and the top reasons holding them back from getting one are cost and lack of technical know-how.

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But here’s the good news: there are plenty of high-quality options for free website builders, many of which require little to no coding knowledge. 

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If you don’t know where to look, don’t worry. We’ve compiled 14 of the best free website builders. They offer robust functionality like SEO benefits, embedded analytics systems, mobile optimization, and professional-looking templates. 

These builders are the next best thing if you’re on a tight budget. Better yet? Most of the free website builders we’ll show you have paid options if you need additional features as your business grows.

1. HubSpot Drag-and-Drop Website Builder

HubSpot’s free website builder homepage.Designing a beautifully branded website doesn’t have to be complicated. If you’re taking the DIY-route to create your own website and don’t have coding experience, consider trying HubSpot’s drag-and-drop website builder.

It comes with everything you need to build a website, including content management system (CMS) tools, themes and templates, security features, and a built-in content delivery network (CDN) to ensure pages load quickly.

It also connects easily with HubSpot CRM. That lets you integrate contact forms, live chat requests, and more, making it ideal for businesses already using HubSpot’s CRM tool.

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Features:

Advantages:  

  • Personalization (thanks to HubSpot CRM)
  • Security
  • Responsive themes and templates

Disadvantages:

  • Multi-language blog functionality is still being implemented
  • No built-in e-commerce functionality
  • You’ll need to learn HuBL (HubSpot’s templating language) to build custom modules and coded templates.

Pricing: Limited free plan available. The premium CMS plans with additional features start at $23/month when billed annually.

Brands using HubSpot:

2. Wix

Wix’s free website builder homepage.

With over 200 million users, Wix is one of the most popular free website builders. The easy-to-use, fully-hosted platform offers an easy drag-and-drop editor, an extensive collection of apps, and professional-looking templates. Wix can even propose a design for your site using its Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) software, Editor X.

Features:

  • Drag-and-drop editor
  • Large collection of apps and templates
  • Analytics and reporting

Advantages:

  • Easy to use
  • Large collection of apps and templates
  • Optimized for mobile

Disadvantages:

  • The free version displays ads.
  • The premium plans are pricey when compared to others on this list.
  • Unable to switch templates when the site goes live. The only way to change templates is by creating a new site and transferring your premium plan to it. 

Pricing: Limited free plan available. Premium plans start at $16/month when billed annually.

Brands using Wix:

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3. WordPress.com

WordPress’s free website builder homepage.

WordPress is the world’s most popular free website builder, with a 43% market share in the content management space. When building websites with WordPress, you have two options: WordPress.org and WordPress.com. 

WordPress.org lets you download WordPress’s open-source software so you can build and customize a website to fit your needs. However, there are a few caveats. Not only will you need a domain name and hosting before you get the website going (which comes at a cost), but you’ll also need to learn how to maintain and keep the website secure on your own.

In contrast, WordPress.com is much more beginner-friendly. It’s a fully-hosted free website building service offered by Automattic that uses the WordPress framework to provide a smooth website creation experience.

The only downside is that the free version is far less customizable than WordPress.org. For instance, you can’t customize plugins, and domain names are limited to [yourname].wordpress.com.

Still, WordPress.com’s free version empowers you to create visually stunning websites, blogs, and landing pages using the Classic Editor or the powerful new Gutenberg block-based editor. Below is an example of one of its pre-designed block-based templates:

Besides that, you can add assets like contact forms, videos, and embedded content to WordPress pages using plugins, an add-on feature compatible with WordPress but usually managed by another company. 

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For example, HubSpot offers a WordPress marketing plugin that lets you capture contacts through WordPress and track them in HubSpot’s free CRM.

Features:

  • Large collection of themes and plugins
  • Mobile-friendly and optimized for SEO
  • Managed website hosting and security

Advantages:

  • Customizable
  • Flexible
  • Mobile and desktop apps available

Disadvantages:

  • The free version displays ads.
  • More limitations compared to WordPress.org
  • Although intuitive, it’s more difficult to learn than other drag-and-drop builders.

Pricing: Limited free plan available. Premium plans start at $16/month when billed annually.

Brands using WordPress.com:

4. Elementor Website Builder

Elementor’s free website builder homepage.

While WordPress makes site building beginner-friendly, WordPress page builders make refining your website and achieving your dream design easier.

Trusted by over 5,000,000 users, Elementor is a no-code drag-and-drop page builder that’s a great option for getting a customized WordPress site off the ground quickly. Choose from hundreds of mobile-optimized page templates without worrying about the underlying code.

Features:

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  • Drag-and-drop builder
  • Live editing
  • Large library of mobile-responsive templates
  • Multiple partners building templates and add-ons for Elementor (e.g., Astra)

Advantages: 

  • Beginner-friendly
  • Live editing
  • Third-party integrations

Disadvantages:

Pricing: Limited free plan available. Premium plans start at $49/year (without hosting).

Brands using Elementor:

5. Webnode

Webnode’s free website builder homepage.

With over 40 million users, Webnode is one of the more popular website builder tools for a good reason. It’s affordable, easy to use, and supports multilingual websites — up to 20 different languages.

Webnode is perfect for personal, professional, and small business websites, as it supports e-commerce stores.

Features:

  • Pre-designed templates
  • Ecommerce support
  • Mobile-ready

Advantages: 

  • Multilingual support
  • Mobile-responsive pages
  • Backup and restore features

Disadvantages:

  • Webnode doesn’t come with a built-in app store, making it more complicated to add extra functionality to the website
  • Limited customization options
  • Limited blog and e-commerce functionality

Pricing:Limited free plan available. Premium plans start at $3.90/month when billed annually.

Brands using Webnode:

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6. Jimdo

Jimdo’s free website builder homepage.Founded in 2007, Jimdo is a German-based company that provides AI-powered website builder tools for independent small businesses. The builder, Dolphin, asks users questions and suggests designs based on their answers. If you’re curious about what these AI-powered designs look like, Jimdo showcases a few examples on its page.

With 500 MB of space, you’ll likely have more than enough space to build your site, and it even provides HTTPS/SSL encryption, meaning your visitor’s information will be kept safe. Plus, you can integrate your site seamlessly with social media accounts. 

Jimdo is also an excellent option for international companies because it lets you create mobile-optimized websites in over nine languages. 

Features:

  • AI-powered website builder
  • SSL encryption
  • GDPR-compliant
  • Mobile app available

Advantages:

  • Easy to use
  • Mobile-responsive
  • Fast load speeds

Disadvantages:

  • Limited range of available features
  • Few design options

Pricing: Limited free plan available. Premium plans start at $9/month when billed annually.

Brands using Jimdo:

7. Mozello

Mozello’s free website builder homepage.

Mozello has all the basic features you need to build a website: a drag-and-drop editor, template library, and even supports ecommerce functionality. One of the biggest selling points for Mozello is that the builder allows you to create a multilingual site for free.

You can check samples of websites built on Mozello on its portfolio page.

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Features:

  • Drag-and-drop website builder
  • Template library

Advantages: 

  • Easy to use
  • Support for multilingual websites
  • Ecommerce functionality

Disadvantages:

  • The drag-and-drop builder isn’t as intuitive as some others on this list.
  • Limited design customization
  • The free version displays ads

Pricing: Limited free plan available. Premium plans start at $8/month when billed annually.

Brands using Mozello:

8. Yola

Yola’s free website builder homepage.

Founded in 2007, Yola is a free website builder built to eliminate the hassle of creating a website. 

It comes with a drag-and-drop builder, hundreds of customizable and mobile-optimized templates, and pre-designed blocks that allow you to create all kinds of websites — even online shops. 

Features:

  • Drag-and-drop website builder
  • Free customizable templates
  • Support for multilingual websites

Advantages: 

  • Ecommerce features available
  • Social selling features
  • Mobile-optimized

Disadvantages:

  • No blogging feature
  • The free version displays ads
  • Navigation and design limitations

Pricing: Limited free plan available. Premium plans start at $4/month when billed annually.

Brands using Yola:

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9. Weebly

Weebly’s free website builder homepage.

Weebly is an open-source software-as-a-service (SaaS) that offers web hosting, domain registration, web design, and e-commerce functions, making it suitable for businesses and startups. For a free website builder, Weebly’s particularly flexible — it’s compatible with every device and platform and easy to use.

Like Wix, Weebly has drag-and-drop functionality, an integrated CMS solution, and hand-coded HTML files. The in-house editor comes with SEO tools and Google Analytics. 

Features:

  • Drag-and-drop editor
  • Integrated CMS solution
  • Free SSL certificate
  • SEO tools
  • Analytics and reporting

Advantages: 

  • Helpful SEO resource tools
  • Good selection of paid and free apps in the app center
  • The free plan has e-commerce functionality

Disadvantages:

Pricing: Limited free plan available. Premium plans start at $6/month when billed annually.

Brands using Weebly:

10. Webflow

Webflow’s free website builder homepage.

While most of the other builders in this list are for people without a ton of coding knowledge, Webflow specifically targets advanced users, designers, and agencies that require a solution that gives them more design freedom than traditional website builder tools.

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Although it’s a complex tool, Webflow tries to make it as easy as possible to get your business online. Webflow has a robust set of resources to help you — blog posts, forums, FAQ sections, and a library of websites built on Webflow that you can check for reference.

Features:

  • Drag-and-drop website builder
  • Widgets to add features like maps and media
  • Third-party integrations

Advantages:

  • Offers complete control over your site’s design
  • Drag-and-drop what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) builder
  • Responsive interface

Disadvantages:

  • Purely a website builder. After building a website on Webflow, you need to transfer it to a content management system.
  • Requires some knowledge of HTML and CSS to access full features
  • It has a complex free and paid plan structure. You need to sign up for both a Site and Workspace plan.

Pricing: Limited free plan available. Premium plans start at $12/month when billed annually.

Brands using Webflow:

11. Ucraft

Ucraft’s free website builder homepage.

Ucraft is one of the more advanced and generous website builders on the list. Like the others, it’s got a drag-and-drop editor, a good selection of templates, and supports e-commerce functionality. 

However, Ucraft stands out because it lets you connect an existing custom domain name with its free plan. It also comes with an SSL certificate and unlimited storage. Ucraft’s portfolio page shows sample websites built by its clients.

Features:

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  • Drag-and-drop editor
  • Free hosting
  • Ecommerce functionality

Advantages: 

  • Allows you to connect an existing domain name for free
  • Decent selection of free templates
  • Includes SSL and unlimited storage on free plans

Disadvantages:

  • Sporadic loading issues and bugs. 
  • It has a steeper learning curve than most website builders on this list. 

Pricing: Limited free plan available. Premium plans start at $10/month when billed annually.

Brands using Ucraft:

12. SITE123

SITE123’s free website builder homepage.

True to its name, SITE123 lets you build a website in as easy as one, two, and three steps. After setting it up with a one-click installation wizard, you can customize your SITE123 website with a free library of images, graphics, and templates.

Moreover, SITE123 offers web hosting, domain registration, and 250 MB of storage space, so you won’t feel pressured to switch to a paid plan.

Features:

  • Free hosting and domain
  • Mobile-responsive design
  • Free image and icons library

Advantages: 

  • Easy to use
  • Multilingual support
  • 24/7 tech support

Disadvantages:

  • No drag-and-drop function
  • Limited storage on the free plan
  • Lacks advanced customization features

Pricing: Limited free plan available. Premium plans start at $5.80/month when billed annually.

Brands using SITE123:

13. Strikingly

Strikingly’s website builder tool homepage.

Launched in 2012, Strikingly is one of the newer website builder tools on the list. It helps users build websites with no programming skills required and sets itself apart from competitors by specializing in single-page websites such as portfolios, event pages, or landing pages.

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The free plan includes unlimited free sites, a modest 5 GB monthly bandwidth, 500MB storage, and a branded domain.

Features:

  • Library of mobile-optimized templates
  • Ecommerce tools
  • Analytics

Advantages: 

  • An affordable option for those who want to create multiple sites
  • Best for creating single-page websites
  • Responsive support team

Disadvantages:

  • No drag-and-drop function
  • Limited SEO functionality

Pricing: Limited free plan available. Premium plans start at $8/month when billed annually. 

Brands using Strikingly:

14. GoDaddy

GoDaddy’s free website builder homepage.

While GoDaddy is a brand synonymous with affordable web hosting and domains, it’s expanded its offerings to include an all-in-one website builder tool for beginners and small business owners that have purchased hosting and domains. 

The website builder is basic, but it has everything you need to build a functional website, including a drag-and-drop editor, simple and clean templates, an SSL certificate, and social media tools.

Features:

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  • Drag-and-drop website builder
  • Marketing and analytics dashboard
  • 24/7 customer support

Advantages: 

  • All-in-one solution
  • Easy to use
  • Mobile-optimized
  • Fast page load speeds

Disadvantages: 

  • Limited SEO features
  • Limited app store features
  • Having your own web hosting and domain carries an initial cost

Pricing: Limited free plan — upgrade features at your own pace. Premium plans start at $9.99/month when billed annually.

Brands using GoDaddy:

15. Appy Pie Website

appy pie website builder

Appy Pie’s website builder has a drag-and-drop interface that allows you to create well-designed, highly functional, and professional websites without any coding skills or programming knowledge. With Appy Pie’s Website Builder, you can create many websites for any purpose, including social media, salons, or real estate. 

All the websites created using Appy Pie website builder are lightweight, fast, and secure to ensure a better user experience and complete customer satisfaction. And since they consume low data, all Appy Pie websites can deliver content without any internet connectivity. 

Appy Pie has a ton of ready-to-use templates, design themes, and a visual library to make it easy for users to develop websites at competitive prices. In addition, the Appy Pie Website Builder also provides a rich library of frequently asked questions and video tutorials so that you can easily tackle most of the issues without them having to call customer support.

Features:

  • No code website development tool
  • Thousands of pre-built templates and designs
  • Cross-platform accessibility

Advantages: 

  • Scalability
  • Reusability
  • Integrability

Disadvantages: 

  • No advanced settings for pro users
  • Dependence on external services
  • Closed development code

Pricing: Limited free plan. Premium plans start at $18/month

Brands using Appy Pie Website:

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Website Builder Features You Need

Choosing a website builder tool is easier when you know what you’re looking for. Here are 14 features to look out for:

1. Themes and Templates

Having an assortment of fully customizable website themes and templates on the website builder’s theme marketplaces makes it easier for users to change their site’s look.

In that sense, website builders should have theme options that cater to specific niches so users don’t waste time creating new templates from scratch. For example, the website builders on our list have options for blogs, portfolio websites, e-commerce websites, and more. 

Templates should be pre-structured and pre-populated with images, text, and other elements commonly found on pages like the Homepage, About page, or Contact page. All you need to do is pick one and replace the sample content with your own.

Themes and templates should be easy to customize — with multiple options for backgrounds, layouts, fonts, and colors.

2. Media (Video, Photo, Audio, Graphics)

Solely having text on your website can be monotonous, so including different forms of media helps break up text and can help information stick because not everyone learns the same way. A website with no visual content is like walking into a vacant restaurant. Fill out your website with highly engaging multimedia content and graphics to support vital information, engage users and drive traffic. 

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You can easily bring your website to life using visual aids and mediums like stock photos, vector images, background images, stock video footage, sound effects, and video editing templates. There are tons of websites that provide media resources that are free to use for content. Freepik is a well-known website that provides illustrations and images. Many sites also incorporate icons into their sites like within the call-to-actions and resources sections. Flaticon is a great source of icons. Using these resources will transform your website into something memorable and visually appealing while also providing a user-friendly experience.

Some website builders offer more robust media capabilities, with multiple gallery layouts, customization options, and editing features.

3. WYSIWYG Editor

Besides an assortment of themes and templates, the best website builder tools make it easy for users to customize their websites with drag-and-drop tools and what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) editors.

There’s no need to learn how to code when you can update your site in a few clicks. Simply drag-and-drop elements to the page and see the changes implemented to your website immediately.

4. Malware Scanning

Security is a top consideration when choosing a website builder.

Security features vary depending on the website builder tool you select, but consider it a keeper if it offers malware scanning. Automated malware scanning allows you to address threats before it progresses into something catastrophic proactively.

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5. Web Application Firewall (WAF)

A web application firewall (WAF) is another must-have security feature.

It often sits between your web server and the internet to protect your website from common attacks like SQL injections and cross-site scripting (XSS) by filtering, monitoring, and blocking malicious traffic from entering the network. 

WAFs can come in the form of software-as-a-service (SaaS), and you can customize them to meet your website’s unique needs. 

6. Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Besides site security, you should also consider optimizing for page speed. After all, it affects everything from customer experience to conversions and revenue.

According to Portent, a site that loads in one second has a conversion rate 5x higher than a site that loads in 10 seconds.

There are many ways to improve page speed, and a content delivery network (CDN) is one way to do it. CDNs store heavy and static content on distributed servers located worldwide and load the cached content from a location nearest to the user to speed up its delivery.

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7. Web Hosting

What good are website builders when they can’t get your website online?

Some solutions only offer website builder tools to build your site — you have to pay separately for web hosting services to get your site online.

The best website builders make it convenient to start websites by offering web hosting. Free website builders offer limited bandwidth and storage — just for personal use. You can upgrade to shared, dedicated, or managed hosting for an additional fee.

8. Storage

Web hosting works by providing two services: bandwidth and disk space (or storage).

Most free website builders offer ample (limited) storage for a beginner site but require you to purchase additional storage should you need it.

9. Blogs

People often confuse websites and blogs with each other — they’re similar but not the same. 

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A blog is a type of website that contains information about different topics. They’re often updated with new articles or posts, while websites only receive updates when needed. In a nutshell, all blogs are websites, but not all websites are or have blogs.

Organizations build websites for different reasons: to sell, showcase a portfolio, or inform — and for those reasons, a blog can be helpful.

Blogs can help your website by:

  • Increasing visibility through SEO
  • Generating new leads
  • Building trust and loyalty
  • Creating brand awareness

Most free website builders come with basic blogging tools and post creation and comment management features.

10. SEO Capabilities

According to BrightEdge, 53% of traffic comes from organic search.

If you want to bring in more traffic and views, your website needs to be search engine-optimized.

Most website builders help with technical SEO by offering free SSL certificates and supporting schema markup and XML sitemaps. They also support on-page SEO by allowing you to enter and modify URLs, meta tags, and image alt attributes. 

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11. Customer Support

While using website builder tools, you’ll likely run into a problem you can’t troubleshoot. That is where customer support comes in.

Customer support assists you with anything you need help with — technical, sales, billing, payments, or experiences. Depending on the website builder, assistance can come in any (or a mix) of the following channels:

The best website builders keep a mix of channels and answer inquiries promptly.

12. E-commerce Capabilities

Are you planning on selling physical or digital products in the future? Consider choosing a website builder tool with e-commerce capabilities.

There are dedicated e-commerce website builders, but these are often paid solutions with robust functionality such as apps for payment and shipping. 

Free website builders often integrate with a third-party e-commerce application or support a simple built-in store.

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13. Third-party Integrations

There’s nothing worse than realizing your existing tech stack doesn’t work with the website builder you chose. Thus, it’s crucial to consider whether a website builder allows third-party integrations.

Your website builder should integrate with external tools, such as email marketing, e-commerce, and social software.

14. Analytics and Reporting

Your website builder should also have an analytics and reporting function to measure important metrics like the site’s popular pages, bounce rate, average duration per visit, and more.

Alternatively, you can track your website metrics in an analytics and reporting tool. When you bring your web analytics together with other key funnel metrics like trials or activation rate onto a dashboard, you give everyone on your team the ability to explore your data and uncover insights.

Picking Your Website Builder

There you have it! Since most of these website builders are free, try out a couple if you’re unsure of the best fit. In particular, take note of what you really want to get out of your site to ensure your needs will be met by one of these builders.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in November 2018 but was updated in October 2019 for comprehensiveness.

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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.

1710795438 253 Unlocking Hidden Revenue The Inbox Retargeting Methodology

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:

1710795438 272 Unlocking Hidden Revenue The Inbox Retargeting Methodology

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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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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