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The 11 Most Common & How to Find Your Style [Quiz]

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The 11 Most Common & How to Find Your Style [Quiz]

Imagine the leaders that inspire you. Each leader is unique, with different leadership styles that they use to meet goals, motivate, and inspire.

To help you understand the impact each type of leader has on a company, this post will explain what a leadership style is. We’ll cover the most common types of leadership and how they can impact the business and the team.

Then you’ll get some tools to help you figure out what styles are best for you. Start reading, or jump to the section you’re looking for:

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Why It’s Important to Know Your Leadership Style

Knowing your leadership style is critical because it can help you determine how you affect those who are under your direct influence. How do your direct reports see you? Do they feel you’re an effective leader?

It’s always important to ask for feedback to understand how you’re doing, but knowing your leadership style prior to asking for feedback can be a helpful starting point. That way, when you receive junior employees’ thoughts, you can automatically decide which leadership style would be best and adopt the style’s characteristics in your day-to-day management duties.

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Knowing your leadership styles may help you improve with limited feedback. Each leadership style has its pitfalls, allowing you to proactively address areas of improvement. This is critical because some employees might hesitate to speak up, even in an anonymous survey.

Ready to find out your leadership styles? Check out the most common styles below.

Types of leadership styles infographic

1. Democratic Leadership

Also called: Participative or Facilitative Leadership

Democratic leadership is exactly what it sounds like — the leader makes decisions based on the input of each team member. Although the leader makes the final call, each employee has an equal say in a project’s direction.

Why this leadership style works for businesses:

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It resembles how leaders often make decisions in company board meetings.

For example, a democratic leader might give the team a few decision-related options in a company board meeting. They could then open a discussion about each option. After a discussion, this leader might take the board’s thoughts and feedback into consideration, or they might open this decision up to a vote.

Why this leadership style is good for the team:

Democratic leadership is one of the most effective leadership styles. This is because it allows lower-level employees to exercise the authority they’ll need to use wisely in future positions.

Potential challenges for leaders with a Democratic style:

The process of reaching a consensus takes considerable time, resources, and communication. It can also impact decision-making because some team members may not have the right expertise to make critical decisions.

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Featured resources:

2. Autocratic Leadership

Also called: Authoritarian, Coercive, or Commanding Leadership

Autocratic leadership is the inverse of democratic leadership. In this leadership style, the leader makes decisions without taking input from anyone who reports to them.

This style is most useful when a business needs to control specific situations, not as a standalone leadership style.

Why this leadership style works for businesses:

Autocratic leaders carry out strategies and directives with absolute focus. This drive and clarity can lead to better performance.

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It’s efficient because employees aren’t consulted before a change in direction. Instead, they’re expected to adhere to the decision at a time and pace stipulated by the leader.

Why this leadership style is good for the team:

This type of leadership is most effective when a company is making difficult decisions. This leadership style gives employees a clear sense of direction. It can also make up for a lack of experience on a team.

Potential challenges for leaders with an Autocratic style:

Most organizations today can’t sustain such a hegemonic culture without losing employees. It can lower morale and creative problem-solving.

An example of this could be when a manager changes the hours of work shifts for employees without consulting anyone.

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Other challenges with autocratic leaders include:

  • Intimidation
  • Micromanagement
  • Over-reliance on a single leader

Different leadership styles favor different traits, with the most popular shown in this employee survey graphic.

3. Laissez-Faire Leadership

Also called: Delegative or Hands-off Leadership

If you remember your high-school French, you’ll accurately assume that laissez-faire leadership is the least intrusive form of leadership. The French term “laissez-faire” literally translates to “let them do.” Leaders who embrace it give nearly all authority to their employees.

Why this leadership style works for businesses:

Laissez-faire leaders make employees accountable for their work. This gives many employees an incentive to do their best work.

This type of leader often creates a more relaxed company culture. This makes it a good model for creative businesses like ad agencies or product design. It’s also a good fit for a business with a highly-skilled team.

Why this leadership style is good for the team:

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In a young startup, for example, you might see a laissez-faire company founder who makes no major office policies around work hours or deadlines. They might put full trust into their employees while they focus on the overall workings of running the company.

Because of this high level of trust, employees working for laissez-faire leaders feel valued. They get the information they need and use their resources and experience to meet business goals.

Potential challenges for leaders with a Laissez-Faire style:

Although laissez-faire leadership can empower employees by trusting them to work however they’d like, there are downsides. This style of leadership can limit team development. It can also be an issue if employees are new or inexperienced.

This can lead to overlooking critical company growth opportunities. So, it’s important to keep this leadership style in check.

Featured resources:

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4. Strategic Leadership

Strategic leaders sit between a company’s main operations and its growth opportunities. This form of leadership requires vision, competitive awareness, and adaptability.

They accept the burden of executive interests. At the same time, they make sure that current working conditions are stable for everyone else.

Why this leadership style works for businesses:

Strategic leaders tie plans for growth and strategy to the way they manage a team. They ask questions, develop and execute strategies, and consider future growth. This approach supports popular business goals like:

  • Accountability
  • Productivity
  • Collaboration
  • Transparency

Why this leadership style is good for the team:

This is a desirable leadership style in many companies because strategic thinking supports many types of employees at once.

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It encourages visualization, planning, and making the most of existing resources. This approach can be motivating for employees.

Potential challenges for leaders with a strategic leadership style:

Leaders who work strategically can sometimes take on too much. They also risk thinking too far into the future while missing critical present-day issues.

Learning how to delegate is essential, as well as sharing the weight of decision-making. Compromise, communication skills, and consistent outreach are also important.

Featured resources:

5. Transformational Leadership

Transformational leadership is always “transforming” and improving upon the company’s conventions. Employees might have a basic set of tasks and goals that they complete every week or month, but the leader is constantly pushing them outside of their comfort zone.

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Why this leadership style works for businesses:

Transformational leaders can inspire their teams to think in new ways. This can help companies update business processes to improve productivity and profitability. It can also help with employee satisfaction, morale, and motivation.

Why this leadership style is good for the team:

When starting a job with this type of leader, all employees might get a list of goals to reach, as well as deadlines for reaching them.

The goals might seem simple at first. But this manager might pick up the pace of deadlines or give you more challenging goals as you grow with the company.

This is a highly encouraged form of leadership among growth-minded companies. It motivates employees to see what they’re capable of.

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Potential challenges for leaders with a Transformational style:

Transformational leaders can risk losing sight of everyone’s individual learning curves. It’s important to make sure that direct reports get the right coaching to guide them through new responsibilities. Employee burnout can also be an issue, so it’s important to work with your team to update benchmarks.

Featured resources:

6. Transactional Leadership

Transactional leaders are fairly common today. These managers reward their employees for the work they do.

For example, a marketing team receives a scheduled bonus for helping generate a certain number of leads per quarter.

This leadership style also assumes that teams need structure and monitoring to meet business goals.

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Why this leadership style works for businesses:

This style is popular in enterprise companies. It focuses on results, existing structures, and set systems of rewards or penalties. This leadership style also recognizes and rewards commitment.

Why this leadership style is good for the team:

Transactional leaders offer clarity and structure. Employees feel safe because they clearly understand their expectations. They also understand what they will get in return for meeting business goals.

Potential challenges for leaders with a transactional style:

This leadership style is less about relationships and more about using rewards to motivate. This makes it hard to keep a diverse team engaged. Using only this leadership style can lead to low creativity and fear of punishment.

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7. Coaching Leadership

Also called: Conscious Leadership

Like a sports team’s coach, this leader focuses on identifying and nurturing the individual strengths of each member of the team. They also focus on strategies that will enable their team to work better together. This style offers strong similarities to strategic and democratic leadership. But it puts more emphasis on the growth and success of individual employees.

A manager with this leadership style might help employees improve on their strengths by:

  • Giving them new tasks to try
  • Offering guidance
  • Meeting to discuss constructive feedback

They might also encourage one or more team members to expand on their strengths by learning new skills from other teammates.

Why this leadership style works for businesses:

Coaching leaders actively support skill development and independent problem-solving. They meet ambitious business goals by creating a strong company culture. They add to the long-term vision of a business as valuable mentors, often even after leaving a company.

Why this leadership style is good for the team:

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This style recognizes that each employee is unique. They build diverse and exciting teams where each employee offers something different.

This leader focuses on high performance, with employees that can communicate well and embrace unique skill sets to get work done.

Potential challenges for leaders with a coaching style:

It can take a lot of time to develop employees with a coaching style, and mentoring isn’t effective for every kind of employee. This leadership style takes time and patience, and it doesn’t work with every company culture.

Featured resources:

8. Bureaucratic Leadership

Bureaucratic leaders follow the rules. This style of leadership might listen and consider the input of employees — unlike autocratic leadership. But the leader tends to reject an employee’s input if it conflicts with company policy or past practices.

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Why this leadership style works for businesses:

You may run into a bureaucratic leader at a larger, older, or traditional company. They might reject ideas that seem new or non-traditional to maintain existing business models and processes.

Their resistance might be because the company is successful with current processes. It could also be because trying something new could waste time or resources if it doesn’t work.

Why this leadership style is good for the team:

This style of leadership can be challenging for some, but it also has many benefits. It lowers the risk of favoritism and replaces it with central duties, job security, and predictability.

This leadership style is clear and efficient, and can also lead to high levels of creativity for some employees.

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Potential challenges for leaders with a bureaucratic leadership style:

Employees under this leadership style might not feel as controlled as they would under autocratic leadership. There is sometimes a lack of freedom in how much people are able to do in their roles.

This approach to leadership can quickly shut down innovation. It may not be a right fit for companies that are chasing ambitious goals and quick growth.

Featured resources:

9. Visionary Leadership

Also called: Affiliative Leadership

Visionary leadership focuses on the future. This type of leader encourages collaboration, emotional intelligence, and teamwork.

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Why this leadership style works for businesses:

Visionary leaders create a clear plan for inspired employees to follow and execute. They are also powerful and persuasive communicators. This gives them the ability to energize teams toward impactful business growth.

Why this leadership style is good for the team:

Teams can do more and enjoy their work more if they have a vision to work toward. This type of leader offers vision statements and other tools to inspire and motivate teams to engage at work.

Potential challenges for leaders with a visionary style:

Inspiration can be difficult to structure, so this type of leader might miss crucial details. They can also skip over day-to-day issues to focus on long-term ideas. Another common challenge is hyper-focus on a single goal, when other goals may be just as valuable to the business.

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Featured resources:

10. Pacesetting Leadership

Pacesetting leaders set ambitious standards. They are often perfectionists, and this leader may also expect employees to exceed goals with limited guidance.

Why this leadership style works for businesses:

This type of leader motivates by working alongside their team and pushing performance. They expect to exceed expectations and often achieve ambitious goals with clear and focused effort.

For example, pacesetting sales leaders set and exceed ambitious quarterly sales cadences.

Why this leadership style is good for the team:

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Skilled and experienced teams often thrive under this kind of leader. They use the abilities of motivated and competent team members and make meeting goals feel urgent and exciting.

It can also be gratifying for team members to see their leader working hard alongside them.

Potential challenges for leaders with a pacesetting style:

Pacesetting leaders can sometimes create a high-stress workplace environment. If goals are not realistic it can overwhelm and demotivate the team. This combination can impact engagement and lead to burnout.

Featured resources:

11. Situational Leadership

Situational leaders change their management style to meet the needs of the situation or team. This leadership style is proactive and recognizes that change is the only constant.

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Why this leadership style works for businesses:

This approach to leadership can motivate employees. It helps them to be more proactive — anticipating business issues before they happen.

It’s also useful in startups or other businesses that make frequent changes and need flexible talent and support.

Why this leadership style is good for the team:

This type of leader is a great communicator and uses constant team feedback to make decisions. They quickly evaluate and update processes to enable success. It also creates strong relationships and helps employees see and feel their value to the business.

Potential challenges for leaders with a situational style:

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Leaders need a high level of expertise in all business processes and functions to make decisions. It can also be confusing and stressful for teams if a leader’s approach changes too often. It’s important to remember long-term goals as well as meet immediate needs, and not every leader can do this effectively.

Featured resources:

Deciding Between Different Leadership Styles

There’s no single “best” style of leadership. So, if you plan to lead, you’ll need to figure out what leadership styles are best for you and your environment.

How to Understand Your Instinctive Leadership Style

Leaders need good instincts, and many leaders focus on their own experiences and habits as they develop a leadership style. As you start your path toward leadership, you may want to start keeping notes. Write down how you would handle specific situations or problems.

This approach can help you be a confident and capable leader. But if you notice some interactions aren’t going the way you expect, you may want to reconsider your approach.

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Your instincts and habits will always impact the way you lead. But if you find yourself in situations that you’re not sure how to respond to, you may want to look at other leadership styles.

For example, if you’re an extrovert with a shy member on your team, you may want to work on active listening. If you’re an introvert leading a team of outgoing people, you may need to learn new ways to nurture, support, and inspire your team.

Can you change your leadership style?

You can change or expand your leadership style. It may take some time and effort, but anyone can make changes that can improve their leadership.

The first step is seeing the need for change. Next, you need to prepare yourself for that change.

For example, your leadership style may be effective with your team, but you might have a harder time connecting with stakeholders.

In this situation, you wouldn’t want to throw out your current leadership style. Instead, you’ll want to give yourself time to identify what is and isn’t working. Think about how this change might affect your ability to grow in your organization and other parts of your life. Then, get curious, and begin the work of adjusting the way you lead.

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How to Choose the Right Leadership Style for You

There are many different ways that you can find the right leadership style for you. Because of this, it can be tough to know where to begin. If you’re not sure what leadership styles will work for you, these steps can help.

1. Get to know yourself.

Different personalities need unique paths to self-discovery. For some, it’s a process of taking risks and trying new things. For others, quiet time, writing exercises, and listing strengths and weaknesses.

Another path to learning about yourself is through physical activity and spending time with other people. However you go about it, getting to know yourself is an important first step toward being a leader.

2. Outline your values and challenges.

As you get to know yourself, the process may help you better understand what’s important to you and where you struggle. Being a leader often means working at a fast pace and making decisions quickly. In these situations, it’s helpful to have your values mapped out.

As you write out your values, look at pivotal moments in your life to date. Then, look for trends, people you’re drawn to, and common themes.

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You might have a long list, so you’ll want to group similar ideas. This outline can help you see how you react, your strengths and weaknesses, and a base for your core values.

3. Watch leaders you respect.

Observing leaders you respect can also help you with leadership styles. As you watch these leaders in meetings, client conversations, and presentations, you may want to take notes.

Another approach is to view their actions with a specific leadership style in mind. This makes it easier to figure out their leadership style and whether it would work for you.

4. Try different leadership styles.

Another way to decide if a leadership style is right for you is to try it out. You might want to create an outline of each leadership style that interests you. Then, review your notes before your next meeting and see how you might incorporate this style into your interactions.

5. Find a business coach or mentor.

You can also hone your leadership style by working with a business coach. There are a few places to start your business coach search.

First, look around your workplace and see if there is someone at your company who’d like to mentor you. If there’s not a right fit, your colleagues can be great resources for respected business mentors.

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If that doesn’t bring you the coaching you need, check out this list of places to find a business coach.

6. Ask colleagues and leaders for feedback.

Another way that your team can help you find the best leadership styles is by asking them for feedback.

It’s smart to take some time with this strategy. Before you reach out, plan what you want to ask and why. Think about how your team member might respond and set clear guidelines and expectations.

When your colleagues are ready to share their insights with you, make a point to listen carefully. These sessions can be emotionally-charged, so you might want to take notes so that you can sit with the feedback before responding.

If you decide to share your action plan with your colleagues, be sure to commit and follow up. This process can build trust and engage your team, but it can also create issues if you don’t make good on your intentions.

7. Complete a leadership style assessment.

Leadership assessments are useful tools for leaders, both as individuals and to assess their teams.

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A leadership quiz can make it easier to understand your strengths and skills. It can surface habits and qualities you might not be aware of and can give you a clear direction for growth.

If this is something you want to try, the leadership assessment below is a great place to start.

Leadership Style Assessment

Leaders can carry a mix of the above leadership styles depending on their industry and the obstacles they face. At the root of these styles, according to leadership experts Bill Torbert and David Rooke, are what are called “action logics.”

These action logics assess “how [leaders] interpret their surroundings and react when their power or safety is challenged.”

That’s the idea behind a popular management survey tool called the Leadership Development Profile. Created by professor Torbert and psychologist Susanne Cook-Greuter — and featured in the book, Personal and Organizational Transformations — the survey relies on a set of 36 open-ended sentence completion tasks to help researchers better understand how leaders develop and grow.

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Below, we’ve outlined six action logics using open-ended sentences that help describe each one. See how much you agree with each sentence and, at the bottom, find out which leadership style you uphold based on the action logics you most align with.

1. Individualist

The individualist, according to Rooke and Tolbert, is self-aware, creative, and primarily focused on their own actions and development as opposed to overall organizational performance. This action logic is exceptionally driven by the desire to exceed personal goals and constantly improve their skills.

Here are some things an individualist might say:

Individualist 1: “A good leader should always trust their own intuition over established organizational processes.”

Individualist 2: “It’s important to be able to relate to others so I can easily communicate complex ideas to them.”

Individualist 3: “I’m more comfortable with progress than sustained success.”

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2. Strategist

Strategists are acutely aware of the environments in which they operate. They have a deep understanding of the structures and processes that make their businesses tick, but they’re also able to consider these frameworks critically and evaluate what could be improved.

Here are some things a strategist might say:

Strategist 1: “A good leader should always be able to build a consensus in divided groups.”

Strategist 2: “It’s important to help develop the organization as a whole, as well as the growth and individual achievements of my direct reports.”

Strategist 3: “Conflict is inevitable, but I’m knowledgeable enough about my team’s personal and professional relationships to handle the friction.”

3. Alchemist

Rooke and Tolbert describe this charismatic action logic as the most highly evolved and effective at managing organizational change. What distinguishes alchemists from other action logics is their unique ability to see the big picture in everything, but also fully understand the need to take details seriously. Under an alchemist leader, no department or employee is overlooked.

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Here are some things an alchemist might say:

Alchemist 1: “A good leader helps their employees reach their highest potential, and possesses the necessary empathy and moral awareness to get there.”

Alchemist 2: “It’s important to make a profound and positive impact on whatever I’m working on.”

Alchemist 3: “I have a unique ability to balance short-term needs and long-term goals.”

4. Opportunist

Opportunists are guided by a certain level of mistrust of others, relying on a facade of control to keep their employees in line. “Opportunists tend to regard their bad behavior as legitimate in the cut and thrust of an eye-for-an-eye world,” Rooke and Tolbert write.

Here are some things an opportunist might say:

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Opportunist 1: “A good leader should always view others as potential competition to be bested, even if it’s at the expense of their professional development.”

Opportunist 2: “I reserve the right to reject the input of those who question or criticize my ideas.”

5. Diplomat

Unlike the opportunist, the diplomat isn’t concerned with competition or assuming control over situations. Instead, this action logic seeks to cause minimal impact on their organization by conforming to existing norms and completing their daily tasks with as little friction as possible.

Here are some things a diplomat might say:

Diplomat 1: “A good leader should always resist change since it risks causing instability among their direct reports.”

Diplomat 2: “It’s important to provide the ‘social glue’ in team situations, safely away from conflict.”

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Diplomat 3: “I tend to thrive in more team-oriented or supporting leadership roles.”

6. Expert

The expert is a pro in their given field, constantly striving to perfect their knowledge of a subject and perform to meet their own high expectations. Rooke and Tolbert describe the expert as a talented individual contributor and a source of knowledge for the team. But this action logic does lack something central to many good leaders: emotional intelligence.

Here are some things a diplomat might say:

Expert 1: “A good leader should prioritize their own pursuit of knowledge over the needs of the organization and their direct reports.”

Expert 2: “When problem-solving with others in the company, my opinion tends to be the correct one.”

Which Leader Are You?

So, which action logics above felt like you? Think about each sentence for a moment.

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Now, check out which of the seven leadership styles you embrace on the right based on the sentences you resonated with on the left.If you’re wondering “what are leadership styles?” or “what are different styles of leadership?” these assessment results can help.

The more action logics you agree with, the more likely you are to practice a mix of leadership styles.

For example, if you agreed with everything the strategist said, this would make you a 66% strategic leader and 33% democratic leader. If you agreed with just the third statement, but also everything the alchemist said, this would make you a 50% transformational, 25% strategic, and 25% democratic leader.

Keep in mind that these action logics are considered developmental stages, not fixed attributes — most leaders will progress through multiple types of leadership throughout their careers.

Learn Your Leadership Style to Become a Better Leader

Choosing leadership styles that work for you can make you a more effective leader. Whether you manage a big or small team, your style heavily impacts how your direct reports see you. It decides how effectively your team works together to achieve your company’s goals.

If you want to be a leader that makes a difference, you’ll need to keep growing and embrace change. Are you ready to get started?

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in August 2016 and has been updated 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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