What Should You Post on Social Media for Your Startup?

The best news about starting-up in today’s digital landscape is that you grow at practically no cost. All you need is the right idea, at the right time and to be at the right place at the right time. Today’s army of social media bloggers and micro-bloggers are constantly looking for exciting things to post, and you can be the subject of their social media conversations. But the first things you should think about are employing a social media management tool and building a smart social media marketing strategy. While building a social media strategy, here are the kinds of questions that you should ask yourself.
Who are you trying to reach?
What are the characteristics of these people? What drives them? What concerns them?
Where do they live?
What gender, economic level, education level do they belong to?
Are they homeowners or renters? Students or working professionals?
Do they play football? Are they bikers? Do they attend music concerts regularly?
Once you know exactly who you’re targeting, you will know exactly what to post. Here are 12 types of content that you should post on social media for your startup.

1. Humorous content

Funny always works. If you can make your audience laugh, they’ll want to know who you are and what you do. It’s natural to be curious about someone who surprises or entertains you. So make your audience laugh. You get extra brownie points for sharing humorous content that’s directly related to your brand, so your audience will both be entertained and made to think about your brand. Here’s an example of that strategy in play on Tinder’s vintage #Tinder post.

The reference to your brand could also be more subtle and playful, like how Birddogs does it. Look at how they’ve showcased their product (men’s shorts) in your face in such a bold yet charming manner.

Another alternative is one where you simply post a “joke of the day” or “meme of the day” by curating content from other sources. Remember to always provide necessary attribution when curating/sharing content.

2. Your product/service updates

What are the latest features on your product? What services have you restructured or added to your business? Both your customers and social media fans eagerly await new and exciting offerings that can make a difference to their lives. And that’s how you must portray your latest updates – as novel solutions to real problems. Your feature/service update in itself could be a powerful social media marketing strategy when designed and timed right. Consider, for instance, Slack’s latest emoji tweaks in the spirit of the FIFA World Cup.

How you present products and features matters. Getting presentation right requires a certain seamless coordination between your product development and social media marketing teams. Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, has stressed the importance of interdepartmental collaboration in his book “Hit Refresh”, supporting the suggestion with his own examples and experiments. In 2015, Satya Nadella was spotted using an iPhone at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference, where he introduced his audience to the iPhone Pro – an iPhone that supports all Microsoft applications. This partnership was unexpected by welcome by the press and customers, making Nadella’s bold presentation an instant hit. Try and plan all your business activities with marketing in mind. You’ll see that it will pay off, big time.
No update is too small to share. Even design changes can make for great social media posts if you design them to be so.

3. Success stories

Just landed a well-known client? Get them onboard with your marketing. Request their permission to construct a case-study or success story using their experience with you. More often than not, clients are excited about such an opportunity considering it free press, but they usually have concerns about the safety of their confidential information. Address their worries by disclosing your marketing plan in detail, leaving no room for ambiguity. When designing your client success stories, try and get creative. Do a video case-study or success story. Conduct an interview. Keep in mind what your social media audience would want to see.

Even if you’re not B2B, you can have customer success stories of sorts. Look at clothing retailer ModCloth’s #MarriedinModCloth social media initiative. It features a brilliant collection of photographs of customers who picked ModCloth for their wedding boutique. Few strategies work as well as social proof does on social media. Enable social media fans to envision working with you or using your products.
Success stories could also entail your company’s success stories. Just got featured on a predominant publication? Share your pride and happiness with your social media audience. Just employed new interns? Introduce them to your social media audience. People love seeing the faces and minds behind any brand.

4. Customers’ opinions

People are more likely to trust the words of other people, much like themselves. And trust is an important factor for startups, especially those that are new in the market or selling novel concepts or products. For instance, Tesla, despite the overwhelmingly positive press, has always faced issues in actually selling their vehicles. This amusing review that they retweeted could be influential in convincing other potential buyers.

Sharing the opinions of happy clients emphasizes on the fact that you’re capable of taking care of clients and fulfil their needs. But it’s also equally important to find and respond to negative experiences from clients. Every negative comment that you leave unattended is a sign of your brand’s indifference to customer feedback. The great news is that negative feedback can be an opportunity to build trust with your existing and future customers.

Observe how SizzorS salon has responded to one of their customers. It’s important to be respectful while addressing your customer’s queries in the most detailed and specific way possible.

5. Tips & news for your industry

People generally appreciate updates related to their industry, because they want to stay up to date. By providing them with such news, you can become the go-to source for news and tips in the industry. Many startups invest a lot of money in having content marketers create high-quality industry related content so it can help them get search engine and social media traffic. Instead of creating 100% of your content, you can curate top-class content that has already been created. For instance MYXYTY, an internet security solutions company, often shares news and updates related to internet security in a way that appeals to their social media followers.

If you can’t spend enough time manually curating this type of content, you could curate it using a content curation app such as DrumUp. Curate relevant content on DrumUp by setting-up keywords and RSS feeds of your favorite content sources. The content you share can be anything – useful tips, major discoveries, changes in an important law – you know your industry best. Share whatever your audience would like to follow.
When sharing, if you are the first to share and attribute the source using @mentions and #tags, you are likely to benefit from the resulting exposure. DrumUp helps you execute all of this.

6. Data & insights

Data and insights are another great form of social media content to consider sharing. Data and insights are particularly nice when shared in a visual format – as graphs or infographics. They’re not very hard to create either. With the graphics editing apps available in the market today, you can easily turn research and surveys into graphical offerings for your social media audience. Even if you don’t turn it into a graph, you could use the stat to create a compelling headliner connected to your brand.

Check out, for instance, this post that Uber shared in May this year. It gives Uber users in those cities a powerful reason to consider using the service permanently instead of buying a car. Uber’s popular for sharing really interesting stats collected vis Uber rides with their social media fans.
Explore different areas in which you collect data and can turn them into interesting and engaging social media posts. Then, use them wisely.
Alternatively, you could conduct research on areas that interest your target audience and create graphs and insights that can assist them.

7. Brand mentions in media, articles etc.

“Trust is a key enabler for economic value creation,” says Philipp Kristian Diekhoner, a German entrepreneur from Singapore. And to build trust, you need to carefully design social media content that can support those goals. Brand mentions in trusted media and publications are an excellent way to build trust with the cross-section of your target audience and readers of that publication. You may also share interviews that your company’s executives participate in to establish the knowledge and expertise of your leadership and management.

It pays to mention the publication and author when they mention you, just to build relationships with journalists and publications in your industry. When creating your own blog and social media posts, you could feature these journalists and their work in turn. You could also make room for top industry websites, magazines and news agencies in your content to catch their attention.
Finally, you could design and promote PR stunts to get covered by various publications. However, ensure that it’s genuine and in tune with your brand. To celebrate Pride month, Tinder turned their office multicolored to support the Pride movement.

8. Behind the scenes content

With people as the face of your brand, your target audience is likely to connect with you more. Your target groups are also more likely to trust you when you transparently share the process or functioning of your business with them. That’s why it’s important for you to share behind the scenes content with your social media fans. So, what qualifies as behind the scenes content? A photo of you or your team at work, preparation for an event, preprocessing of your product, a photograph of your company at an offsite event are all great examples of behind the scenes content.

Here’s a particularly cute photograph of a company’s latest recruit, Piki, the so called VP of motivation. The best part about behind the scenes content is that it allows you room to share yours and your brand’s personality. So you can share whatever’s on your mind, unless it’s offensive to someone’s sentiments.
The more transparent and free-flowing your content is, the more likely your audience is to connect with it.
Note: This post will be updated to include more types of social media content for you to post for your startup. Please watch this space for more.

Feature image via Freepik.com 



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15 Social Media Tools that Will Help You Survive the Fake News Phase & Its Repercussions

Fake news is a serious social media problem that could affect the relationship you share with your social media audience. How?

• People are starting to question the information that they receive via social media.
• People have always been wary about the information shared by brands on social media. In fact, people consider information shared by people like themselves more credible than the information shared by brands (Edelman 2018).

Note: To overcome this hurdle, you could explore employee advocacy as a social media marketing solution.

• Social media platforms such as Twitter have begun their battle against fake news, placing stringent rules to avoid the circulation of factually incorrect information. And they are doing that by making serious algorithm changes that could affect your social media marketing efforts.

So, how can you as a social media manager or small business owner ensure that your business survives the fake news phase and its repercussions? Here are 15 social media tools that can help you strengthen your relationship with social media fans.

1. DrumUp for fresh content & employee advocacy

Instead of sharing your own content, you could share content useful to your social media audience – content from sources that are universally trusted. That’s a great way to show that you’re neutral and trustworthy.

You could also have your brand’s content shared by employees, through whom you can effectively impact your target audience on social media.

DrumUp is a social media management tool that fulfils both these functions. You can use the tool to curate fresh content (using keyword streams and/or RSS feeds) and schedule them on social media accounts. You can also use the tool’s employee advocacy platform to enable employees to share your content effortlessly.

2. Canva for visual communication

Visuals are great way to drive a message home because they get processed by the human mind quicker than text does. Visuals are also offer you the opportunity to build trust with your social media audience. For instance, visual testimonials (such as a customer’s raving video review) can improve your credibility.

You can also use visuals such as graphs and screenshots to make your communication more transparent and effective by showing customers how your products and pricing work.

Canva is a graphic design tool that you can use to design most of the visuals that you can use on social media. The tool stocks canvases and templates optimized for most use cases on social media. The tool’s drag and drop feature and its flexibility make it a great choice for graphic design.

3. Brand24 for real & personal conversations

Successful social media managers see social media platforms as channels not only for publishing but also for conversations. You can use social media channels to connect with current and future customers, potential partners and co-marketers, influencers and brand ambassadors. You can also use social media channels to enable employee conversations and employee advocacy.

For social media to count, you have to show customers that you care. And you can’t do that at scale. You have to focus on one-on-one conversations.

Brand24 is a social media monitoring tool that you can use to identify mentions, important keywords – any indicator of important conversations. The tool’s alerts will give you opportunity to create real and personal conversations.

4. FAQFox for customer-centric content research

It’s not enough to just be in contact with current customers. You should also be in touch with prospect customers and know their wants, concerns and challenges. That involves assessing the temperament of different target groups of people. And doing this can be tricky.

The objective of understanding prospect customers is to be able to connect with them by creating/sharing content that’s most relevant to them.

FAQFox is an unorthodox content research tool which you can use to find questions that certain groups of people are asking. You can do this by running keyword searches across commonly used discussion forums such as Quora and those relevant to your niche.

5. FollowerWonk for influencer and ambassador hunting

Twitter is an excellent social media platform for influencer and ambassador outreach because it’s open and allows you to communicate with anyone from your friend to the POTUS.

When searching for influencers/ambassadors on Twitter, you need to analyze profiles to see who makes the best fit. This is easier done with the assistance of a tool than done manually.

FollowerWonk is a Twitter analytics tool that you can use to analyze profiles and filter them by matching keywords to Twitter bios. Using the tool, you can also identify influencers within your social circles and reach out to them with relevant content.

6. GIPHY for GIF based communication

GIFs are videos on caffeine. They are easy to consume as they take barely any space when compared with full-fledged videos and are much shorter in length. They are also more appealing, effective and affordable than full-fledged videos.

While curating videos is hard (videos are usually covered by copyrights because they’re expensive), curating GIFs is easy and inexpensive.

GIPHY is a copyright free extensive source of GIFs that you can use to spice-up your conversations on social media. The repository also has an API that we’ve used to enable GIF curation within DrumUp.

7. RelayThat for branded image creation

Branding is an important part of building trust on social media. The consistency that your messaging has affects how social media users see and interact with your brands. However, it’s difficult to keep track of colors and fonts when you are creating content on a large scale, everyday.

Many brands choose their colors, fonts and image creation styles in advance and stick to them perpetually, without deviating from them on any channel.

RelayThat is a graphic design tool that allows you to choose and maintain brand parameters that you can easily add to all of your social media images. RelayThat also allows you to add your logo and original images to standard templates effortlessly.

8. Rocketium for video content creation

Video is an indispensable part of social media marketing. An overwhelmingly large segment of social media users are beginning to consume video on a daily basis. Video has become everyone’s preferred format of content for consumption.

There’s a lot that you can do with video for social media, from creating How-to videos to conducting expert interviews and doing live QnAs.

Rocketium is a video builder that you can use to quickly put together videos for social media use. The tool has video templates that you can use to put together professional looking social media videos to make an impact on your target audience.

9. Pocket for niche content curation

Content curation is a smart way to build a relationship with your audience without spending too much on content creation. By curating content, you can the best content in the industry with your target users without to create it yourself on a daily basis.

However, it can be really hard curating content manually. Imagine having to visit multiple websites to find the content that you want to share, every single day.

Pocket is a content collection app that helps curate content for you, based on your preferences. The tool is smart and adapts to the posts you choose to read, eventually omitting all the content that you wouldn’t want to read.

10. TweetChat for Twitter networking & conversations

Yet another way to network with the right people is through Twitter chats. The people who participate in Twitter chats are usually very interested in specific niches and in meeting the right people.

Typically the format of Twitter chats allow you to exchange knowledge in areas within an industry and find others who are also doing the same.

TweetChat is a Twitter chat tool that you can use to follow hashtag specific conversations and participate in them real-time, which can otherwise be a nightmare. Within the tool, you can experience Twitter chats at your pace and never miss a tweet.

11. Socedo for social media lead generation

While social media conversations and content publishing are great for audience engagement, your social media efforts only affect your business when conversations turn into queries and eventually sales.

There’s plenty of opportunities on social media for you to turn conversations into business, but these opportunities usually take time to manifest.

Socedo is a social media lead generation tool which automatically assesses social media profiles and identifies the people who are most likely to be interested in your business and the products/services that you have to offer.

12. PitchBox for blogger outreach and off-social PR

Blogs are still relevant in many industries. If your company’s referrals are majorly driven through blogs and bloggers, building strategic relationships with them can be beneficial. And you don’t have to focus only on your niche. General blogs whose audience matches your target audience also count.

When building relationships with bloggers, it counts to make it as organic as possible. Identify individuals you admire and want to work with and let them know the same.

PitchBox is an influencer marketing tool that can be used to search for influencers and bloggers in your niche using keywords that you provide. The tool’s extensive search leverages integrations with major SEO tools such as Moz, SEMRush and Majestic.

13. BuzzSumo for targeted content promotion

One of the secrets of being successful on social media is building a network of loyal followers who engage with your content. However, building that network is a slow and time-consuming process.

The network of followers you build need not be restricted to just influencers. You can also work with micro-influencers or employees, customers and brand ambassadors.

BuzzSumo is a content research tool that you can use to identify people and blogs belonging to a certain niche, so you can reach out to the right people. Using the tool, you can breakdown the source of any article on the internet and access backlink and share data.

14. Twitter lists and Google Drive/Email for relationship building

Twitter lists are great for relationship building because you can create a context for every relationship that you build by adding people to certain lists. However, even Twitter lists can get messy once you have added too many people to too many lists. To ensure that the lists you create make sense, create small groups of people and limit your lists to only as many as you can handle.

One way to ensure that the Twitter lists you create have value, is by following up with Twitter list members away from the social media platform.

IFTTT is a cross-action app that has a few interesting recipes that you can consider using. One of them allows to store mentions in Drive or on email, after which you can personally make contact with the people who mention you.

15. SumoMe for social media referral based list building

Social media referrals are probably one of the top three or four sources of traffic to your website. So, what do you do with the traffic that comes to your website from social media? If you’re not converting it at the moment, you should probably consider focusing on that.

There are tons of ways to convert the traffic that lands on your website. Most of it involves connecting the right content on social media to the right landing pages on your website.

SumoMe is a website traffic analytics tool and traffic conversion tool that you can use to optimize website traffic and conversion. The tool even has customizable email signup forms that you can instal on your website to convert incoming referrals.

Wrap

With social media platforms undergoing major changes to battle fake news and survive its repercussions, it’s critical to invest in social media tools and strategies that are likely to survive the fallout. This list includes a collection of some of the smartest investments that you can make to ensure that your brand isn’t affected by drastic algorithm changes. Over to you.

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The Top 25 Tools Every Successful Blogger Needs

If you’re trying to make money by blogging, you need to promote and drive traffic to your website through an online marketing strategy. Add these 25 tools to your blogging arsenal to create quality content and accomplish your marketing goals.

Blogging Tools

First and foremost, you need to craft content your audience will enjoy and share. These tools will help you create, edit, and analyze your content.

Google Drive

As a blogger, you’ll have several files, drafts, and ideas floating around your computer. Keep all of your media, documents, and content in one place with Google Drive. If you work with other bloggers or colleagues, this is an excellent tool for collaborating and organizing campaigns, as well.

Grammarly

No one is perfect, not even top bloggers. We all make mistakes, but we don’t want to publish our errors online. Before you hit the looming “Publish” button, run your content through Grammarly. This free grammar checker will catch glaring spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistakes and also offer suggestions to improve your work.

Hemingway App

In the world of blogging, you want your writing to stand out from the crowd. The Hemingway App helps you fine-tune your content and cut out the fluff. Those who want to improve their writing chops derive a great deal of value from using Hemingway.

CoSchedule Headline Analyzer

Arguably one of the hardest parts of blogging is finding the perfect headline. A headline must be catchy, SEO-friendly, and intriguing enough to drive traffic to your blog. Rely on CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer to discover headlines that work for your audience and search engines alike.

BuzzSumo

Understanding what topics and types of content generate top social media engagement is vital information for bloggers. BuzzSumo is an in-depth blogging tool designed to help writers discover relevant topics, top influencers, and other key data including social media insights. Bloggers also use this tool for content inspiration by researching competitors and trends.

Canva

Everyone knows blog content must also be intriguing to the eye. Canva allows bloggers to easily create stunning visuals for blog posts, social media, and other content. The tool also provides simple tutorials for those who need help along the way.

SEO Tools

Once you’ve created your content, you must optimize it to rank well on search engines. These SEO toolsare used by blogging professionals to increase website traffic, improve search rankings, and analyze their content’s performance.

Google Analytics

Every blogger must have a Google Analytics account. This versatile tool offers insight into your website’s performance, traffic acquisition, and audience. Bloggers use Google Analytics to discover what channels their traffic is coming from, how long people stay on their website, and where their readers are located.

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a popular WordPress plugin used to optimize a website and blog content for search engines. Everything from the technical aspects of SEO to improving the readability of a page can be accomplished using this handy plugin.

Google Keyword Planner

If you want to rank on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo, you need to know what your audience is searching for. Google Keyword Planner provides expansive information about keywords, search trends, and more to amplify your content marketing efforts.

Keywordtool.io

Another popular keyword research tool is Keywordtool.io. Using Google’s autocomplete feature, this tool assists bloggers in identifying potential keywords for their blog content. Best of all, this tool is completely free!

Moz Open Site Explorer

To generate a wealth of traffic to a blog, you must have quality backlinks directing people to your website. However, some of these links may also be malicious or damaging. Moz Open Site Explorer shows bloggers what links are pointing to their website along with other crucial link information.  

SEMRush

Bloggers looking to advance their search engine optimization efforts should subscribe to SEMRush. As one of the leading SEO tools, SEMRush provides in-depth analytics, competitor research, display advertising information, and so much more. Bloggers will have an abundance of search marketing information at their disposal with this tool.

Social Media Tools

Bloggers are especially active on social media platforms such as Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. To maximize their audience engagement and content distribution on these platforms, bloggers rely on these tools:

Social Sharing Bars

With the goal of offering readers a simple way to share content, the majority of blogs use a social sharing bar or buttons embedded in or near their content. If you look to the left of this article, you’ll notice a social sharing toolbar on our blog. These widgets entice readers to share the content with their friends and followers online.

To add this capability to your blog, use one of these social sharing tools and WordPress plugins:

• AddtoAny
• Social Warfare
• SumoShare
• Easy Social Share Buttons for WordPress

Once you install any of these social sharing tools on your blog, remind readers to use it!

Social Media Scheduling Tools

Bloggers are also responsible for distributing their own blog content and engaging with fans on various social media platforms. As you might imagine, this can be quite cumbersome. To speed up the process, bloggers schedule their social media posts in advance using a variety of tools. These social media scheduling tools allow you to create posts for specific platforms and assign when you’d like it to publish.

Top social media scheduling tools include:

• Buffer
• Hootsuite
• SproutSocial
• Everypost
• Crowdfire
• Tailwind

Take advantage of these tools by scheduling as much content in advance as possible. This leaves you with ample time to create more content and interact with your followers.

Email Marketing Tools

Another way to drive readers to your blog content is through email marketing. From regular newsletters to announcements, email marketing keeps your audience informed and engaged.

To start your email marketing campaigns, you must collect email addresses from interested readers. WP Subscribe and Optin Forms are both excellent choices for creating subscriber forms for your blog. These forms should be strategically placed throughout your website to entice readers to sign-up.

Once you’ve collected enough subscribers, you can create and send emails through tools like Constant Contact. Remember to only send your subscribers top quality content—never spam!

Bonus Tool: WordPress

We recommend that all bloggers use WordPress to create and manage their blog. WordPress is a versatile content management system that gives bloggers complete control over their content, tools, and website design.

Over to you! What blogging tools do you use? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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16 Email Marketing Tools You’ll Want for 2018

As the New Year rolls around, it's a good time to start incorporating new email marketing tools into your routine. But, who has time to try and test a bunch of marketing tools? Not to worry. Pinpointe has you covered.
We've created a list of 16 email marketing tools that we've vetted and believe are essential to your email campaign success this year. The tools are designed to save you time, help you create stronger emails, grow your list and give your response rates the boost they need in the New Year.

Images

Tool #1: Pixabay

Free image library

Every email needs a quality image (or two) to draw subscribers in, but they're often hard to find and expensive. Unless you've started creating your own image library by taking pictures of your employees and clients, you're probably turning to stock photo sites. And stock photo sites are pricey. Not to mention the images are sometimes cheesy, to put it politely.
Pixabay is a great solution. It's a FREE photo library that looks and acts just like the pricey stock photo sites. You can search the database and get dozens of great options with every search. You should add the photographer's name to your post, but other than that, the images are yours to use.

Tool #2: IM FREE

Free image library

IM FREE is another photo website you can lean on. The photos in this collection are professionally done and provide quality images for business concepts that are harder to visualize, like education or technology.
The database is searchable, but it's easiest to search via categories like Nature, Transportation or Lifestyle.
This photo library doesn't have the wealth of images that Pixaby does, but it's always growing. It's a good one to bookmark and keep an eye on, especially if you're looking for a more obscure photo.

Tool #3: Pinpointe's image library

Free image library

Pinpointe customers don't have to get photos from a third-party site, they can access an image library from their account.
As you're creating an email, all you have to do is click on the Image Library and you'll have hundreds of pictures to choose from. Forget searching, downloading, resizing and importing a photo. Simply pick the images you want and drop them into your email template. Done.

Tool #4: Rszr

Image resizer

How many times do you need to resize an image? Too many to count, right? Whether you're adding an image to your email or changing out the cover art on your Facebook page, marketers need an easy-to-use photo-resizing tool. You could use well-known, feature-heavy software like Photoshop, but if you just want a basic resizing tool, try Rszr.
Not only can you resize and save an image in a few clicks, but you can also do some basic editing like cropping or erasing part of a photo. It's the perfect tool for on-the-go marketers.

Tool #5: JPEGMini

Image compression

As you're creating an email campaign, file size might not be a top priority, but it should be. Image files are notoriously large and they can slow download times. If you're sending an email with a large JPEG, it could take additional time to load on a subscriber's phone or laptop. It's a pet peeve for subscriber's who want to view emails quickly.
Before you add an image to your email, or to any digital platform, use JPEGMini first. You simply upload the picture and it compresses the file for you. No quality is lost. The picture looks the same; the file size is just smaller.

Tool #6: Awesome Screenshot

Editable screen-grab tool

Need a screenshot? Whether you're showing customers how to do something online or want a snapshot of your own website for marketing purposes, use Awesome Screenshot.
This tool lets you capture the entire page, including the content that's "below the fold." In other words, if you need a snapshot of a website that you have to scroll through, this tool can do it. It captures it all. And, you can even edit the image afterward.
You can access the tool through its website or you can download it as a Google Chrome extension, so it's always on your toolbar.

Email brainstorming

Tool #7: Answer The Public

Brainstorming tool

Do you ever run out of ideas for email campaigns? It happens to everyone. You can only send so many coupons, right? When you're stumped for ideas, turn to Answer the Public. This website can help you brainstorm ideas.
Simply enter a keyword into the search bar and Answer the Public shows you what kind of questions people have surrounding your topic.
For instance, if an animal shelter is looking for ideas for their next email campaign, they can enter the words, "adopt a dog" into the search bar. Answer the Public provides a visual wheel of questions that people typically look up when they're planning to get a new four-legged friend.
Here's the "wheel of questions" that Answer the Public provides pertaining to the keywords.

You can use these questions to inspire email content. For instance, one of the questions is, "Why does it take so long to adopt a dog?" Create a blog post that answers this very question and send it to a segment of your list that's shown interest in pet adoption.

Email design

Tool #8: Canva

Graphic designer

To spice up your email, add a graphic. Don't have graphics skills? Don't worry. Use Canva. This online platform makes it simple for anyone – even those with zero graphics knowledge – to create stunning graphics.
Create a cool graphic for an event, upcoming contest or holiday sale. The options are endless. Here's a quick graphic created for an event using Canva: 

Yes, creating a graphic takes a little more time than just typing up a quick message, but visuals have the ability to draw a subscriber in and help them digest information faster.
Research from 3M shows people process images 60,000 times faster than text, which is why taking a few extra minutes to create a visual is a worthy investment.

Tool #9: Bomb Bomb

Video email

Adding video to your email can add a personal touch. Bomb Bomb is a tool you can use to record a quick video for your customers and engage them in a way that text can't.
This tool is especially helpful for sales teams who work best face-to-face. Create a video to check in on your existing clients, or record a special welcome message for new clients. Remind clients about an upcoming appointment with a quick video or remind them about an approaching deadline.
Bomb Bomb makes it simple to record a video from your laptop and insert it into an email. Once subscribers open your email, the video starts moving instantly, which encourages customers to open it. 
Give it a try, and see how you can incorporate video into your email marketing strategy.

Spam detection

Tool #10: Mail Tester

Spam scoring tool

Even the most reputable companies can send an email that gets trapped in a spam folder.
Without knowing it, you may have made choices in your design or text that spam filters don't like. Adding too many images, using spam words or accidentally including broken links in your email can keep your email from inboxes.
Before you send your email, put it through a spam checker to make sure your email is delivered. You can send a copy of your email to Mail Tester and you'll get a spam report. The report shows you what to fix to pass through spam filters. It's a simple step that ensures your subscribers will see your email.
 

Tool #11: Pinpointe's spam checker

Spam scanning and scoring

Pinpointe users can run a spam test right from their account. Just create your email and run a test with just one click. You'll get a spam score and a report that shows you how to improve it. It might suggest eliminating spam words or changing your subject line from ALL CAPS to lower case. Once you make the suggested changes, run the test again to make sure spam filters won't flag it.
Having the spam checker accessible while you create an email is a big time saver. You don't have to leave the site to know if your email is "spammy."

Email automation

Tool #12: Pinpointe's triggered emails

Automate emails

If you're still sending emails manually, it's time to move into the modern area of email marketing and use automation.
With Pinpointe, you can pre-make emails and trigger them to send automatically based on a specific time or behavior. For instance, if a subscriber RSVPs for an event, that action can trigger a confirmation email that thanks him or her for signing up and reiterates all of the important information.
You can also schedule emails to arrive in a subscriber's inbox on a specific date.

Analytics

Tool #13: Google Analytics

Next-level metrics

As you create and send emails, you have to gauge your success by checking your analytics. Most email service providers give you access to data like, open, click-through and conversion rates.
That's a great start, but if you're ready to use grown-up metrics, turn to Google Analytics. With Google Analytics you get next-level data that gets down to the granular level.
If you're using a reputable email service provider like Pinpointe, you can link your campaigns right to Google Analytics for a streamlined switch.
Accessing in-depth data helps you make changes to your email campaigns that can dramatically improve your response rates.

Tool #14: Google URL Builder

Link builder for Google Analytics

When you add links to your emails, create the URL in Google's URL Builder. By doing so, you can help Google Analytics track the success of specific campaigns.
You'll be able to see which email drove the most traffic to your website, or how many subscribers signed up for your newsletter after receiving a special offer.
Basically, you get more detailed data by building individual links for each campaign.

List growth

Tool #15: Woobox

Contest tool

Hosting a contest is one of the easiest ways to collect new email addresses. However, hosting a contest can be time-consuming if you don't have the right tools.
To help manage the contest and the contacts that come in, try Woobox. You can create giveaways, photo submission contests, fun quizzes – you name it. 
You can also use Woobox to create a customized Facebook tab that features products, encourages fans to shop or direct them to your newsletter sign up form.

Tool #16: Hello Bar

Sign up banner

Sit back, relax, and collect email addresses from your website with a Hello Bar. The Hello Bar is a small bar that sits at the top of your website and encourages visitors to sign up for your email list.
It's a great alternative to a pop-up ad, which can sometimes turn visitors off. The Hello Bar isn't annoying or disruptive, it just sits at the top of your site. It's usually a bold color to draw visitors to it. The purple bar below is an example of a Hello Bar.

There you have it. With these 16 tools,  you'll get your year off to a great start.



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