Yearly Archives: 2022

You need an email account — whether it’s for networking, job recruitment, downloading resources, transferring files, setting reminders, meeting with colleagues, or something else.

Even with the rise of office chat platforms, you still depend on email for a surprising number of things. But unfortunately, not every email service is completely free. And even the free ones might not be the easiest to use or have all the features you need.

It can be a challenge to find an email service provider at no cost that balances the right features with usability. To help make your search easier, we put together a list of the different types of email accounts you can set up, followed by the best email service providers you can host your account on right now for free.

Types of Email Accounts

There are two main types of email service providers to choose from: Email clients and webmail.

Let’s briefly go over these different types of providers.

What are email clients?

Email clients are software applications you install onto your computer to manage the email you send and receive. To access this email, the client interacts with a remote email server.

Email clients you’ve likely heard of include Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, and Apple Mail.

What is a webmail?

Webmail is a form of email you access exclusively from the internet and therefore exists primarily on the cloud rather than your computer. Instead of an installed application fetching your email, you manage your inbox right from your internet browser.

Examples of webmail providers include Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Hotmail.

Now, take a look at the best free email service providers (and the best email accounts for privacy) you can get your hands on today — both webmail and email clients included. For each email service provider, we’ve highlighted a unique feature to help you find the best fit.

1. Gmail: Best for Offline Accessibility

Unique Feature: Native File Collaboration

Sign up here.

Type of email: Webmail

Who should use it: Anyone who already uses and loves the rest of Google’s products.

It might seem like an obvious top pick, but Gmail is just too versatile not to get our first slot. According to Litmus Labs, Gmail has the second-highest email provider market share (behind Apple iPhone’s native email app).

Ironically, one of the reasons Gmail has become so popular is because of all the communication options in your inbox that don’t involve email.

Gmail is a regular email inbox tool you can access once you have a Google account. Since it’s built into Google Workspace (formerly G Suite), you can also access a group of free apps that allow you to chat, video conference, and share files with the people in your contact list.

Google Hangouts, available from your inbox’s left sidebar (or the right — you can customize how your inbox is displayed), lets you text and video chat with other Gmail users for the things that might not warrant an email message.

Like most other email accounts today, Gmail also has an intuitive calendar where you can set meetings and reminders.

Pro Tip: You can also use a free product like HubSpot Meetings to easily schedule meetings without back-and-forth emails.

Unlike other email accounts, you can use your Gmail address to log into and manage your YouTube account, as well as collaborate on shared documents and spreadsheets right from a cloud-based Google Drive.

Offering a generous 15 GB of free email storage, Gmail does everything it can to make your inbox less chaotic, including providing advanced filters that automatically push emails into separate folders as they arrive. And none of these functions costs a dime.

Notable Features:

Allows you to un-send emails. Within seconds of sending an email you didn’t mean to send, a handy “Undo” button will pop up in the bottom-right hand corner of your screen.
15GB free email storage. You can store thousands upon thousands of emails without worrying that you’ll soon reach an upper limit.
Accessible from any internet-connected device. And on any browser, too. Whereas email clients vary in terms of compatibility with operating systems and devices, Gmail is available on whatever device you have on hand.
99.9% protection from suspicious/spam emails. Some might argue that Gmail’s spam filter is oversensitive — I myself have had perfectly legitimate emails routed to my spam folder!
Texts suggestions that help you write emails faster. Gmail’s Smart Compose feature uses machine learning technology to predict what you’re writing with high accuracy. Whether you use the suggestions is up to you, of course.

2. AOL: Best for Interface Organization

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Unique Feature: Unlimited Storage

Sign up here.

Type of email: Webmail

Who should use it: Anyone who uses email for most of their communication.

America Online (I feel nostalgic just typing those words) has quietly kept up with today’s standards for a good user experience and is now once again one of the best free email accounts available to you.

Purchased by Verizon in 2015, AOL delivers your email from its classic news-driven homepage and comes with the contemporary spam filters and virus protection you’d expect from your email provider. You can also send text and instant messages from specific windows in your email inbox.

AOL does have something over Gmail, though: unlimited storage. Additionally, you can import email contacts from a CSV, TXT, or LDIF file, so you’re not creating your “buddy list” (get it?) from scratch.

Notable Features:

Unlimited storage. This major perk ensures you never have to create another email account, ever, due to storage limits. What a win — especially if you sell and receive numerous emails per day!
Ability to import contacts in any format. If you’ve kept your list of contacts in a file on your laptop or phone, you can easily import it into AOL with the click of a button.
Offers a spellchecker to reduce errors. There’s no need to install a separate spellchecker — AOL provides one within its composer.
Protection from suspicious/spam emails. No one wants to sift through emails from dubious senders. AOL will filter them for you.
Accessible from any internet-connected device. And on any browser, too. Whereas email clients vary in terms of compatibility with operating systems and devices, AOL is available on whatever device you have on hand.

3. Outlook: Best for Multiple App Integrations

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Unique Feature: Multiple App Integrations

Sign up here.

Type of email: Email client

Who should use it: Anyone who uses many different platforms to connect with others.

If you ever cringed at the sight of a “Hotmail.com” email address, you can thank Outlook for this outdated domain name.

But there’s good news: Microsoft has reinvented its longstanding email service, and your free Outlook.com email address has many advanced features waiting for you.

While it touts a calendar and message filter similar to Gmail, Outlook also integrates with several other popular communication apps.

For example, you can connect Skype, Facebook, PowerPoint, PayPal, and even task management software such as Trello — making it very easy to reach and work with non-Outlook users without leaving your inbox.

Outlook offers 15 GB of free storage for each user, along with a super-clean interface.

Notable Features:

15GB free email storage. You can store thousands upon thousands of emails without worrying that you’ll soon reach an upper limit.
Like with Microsoft Excel or Word, you can use Add-ins with Outlook. This is an excellent benefit for avid Microsoft product users who know which apps they need to connect with their email.
Easy access to other Microsoft apps like Skype. Outlook seamlessly links with other tools in the Microsoft suite of products.
Provides aliases that add anonymity to your email. Whether you’re sending emails for work or personal matters, an alias can be helpful for protecting your identity and your inbox from malicious spam.
Excellent email organization. Easily find whatever you need with Outlook’s sidebar, which provides advanced organizations folders to group your most important emails.

4. Yahoo! Mail: Best for Lots of Storage

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Unique Feature: Media and Attachment History

Sign up here.

Type of email: Webmail

Who should use it: Creatives and anyone who sends and receives attachments frequently via email.

Yahoo! Mail, another well-known platform, sits just behind AOL in storage space with a whopping 1 TB (that’s a terabyte) for free, along with a few key social media integrations.

You can have custom background themes and search for key information from your inbox with Yahoo! Mail.

Yahoo! Mail makes it easy to find every photo, video, and document you’ve ever attached or received via email in their tabs on your inbox’s sidebar. This makes the platform especially appealing to those who share documents regularly or simply want an album made of every photo they’ve ever had shared.

Notable Features:

1TB free email storage. Wow! Talk about a mammoth level of storage. You can store thousands upon thousands of emails without worrying that you’ll soon reach an upper limit.
Connects seamlessly with Yahoo Calendar. If you’re a current Yahoo Calendar user, you’ll be pleased to know that Yahoo Mail syncs with your events (and allows you to create new ones from your inbox).
Accessible from any internet-connected device. And on any browser, too. Whereas email clients vary in terms of compatibility with operating systems and devices, Yahoo Mail is available on whatever device you have on hand.
Outstanding media and document organization. If you send and receive many emails with media attachments, Yahoo Mail is an excellent choice due to its advanced sorting and organization features for attached files.
Instant notifications for new emails. Never miss a message with Yahoo Mail’s instant notification feature.

5. iCloud Mail: Best for Data Encryption

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Unique Feature: Labels Senders as VIPs

Sign up here.

Type of email: Webmail

Who should use it: People who use Mac and want everything on one system.

If you’re a Mac user, you may want to consider using iCloud Mail as your email provider. Their free email account comes with 5GB of storage that you can use to sync your photos, files, or email.

However, it’s important to note that storage is shared between all of your apps and devices — so if you take a lot of photos on your iPhone, you may eat into your email storage allowance for the month. Upgraded plans start at $0.99/month and go up to $9.99/month.

One of the most significant advantages of using iCloud over other email providers on this list is the ease of integration. Apple builds its desktop and iPhone mail apps with all email clients in mind, but it pays special attention to making the experience delightful for iCloud users.

Notable Features:

Compatible with Apple products and services. If you’re an Apple user, iCloud Mail is an excellent choice that gives you seamless syncing across all of your devices.
5GB free email storage. Though lower than other providers, 5GB is plenty of storage for the casual email user.
Search functionality. Easily find anything and everything you need with iCloud Mail’s powerful search feature.
VIP flagging. iCloud Mail gives you the ability to label senders as VIP to automatically filter important messages and save time.
One-click “Unsubscribe” feature. Have you ever had to scroll and scroll to find the unsubscribe button on an unwanted email? iCloud Mail includes a one-click feature to help you save time.

6. Mozilla Thunderbird: Best for Managing Multiple Accounts

Unique Feature: Ability to Open Multiple Emails in Tabs

Sign up here.

Type of email: Email client

Who should use it: Anyone looking for a simple but customizable email inbox.

Thunderbird, a free email application from Mozilla (known primarily for Firefox), offers a quick email inbox setup and a simple, easy-to-use user interface.

The app offers customizable features, such as theme settings and app extensions to improve your email experience. The email app also allows you to open multiple emails in tabs, similar to how you would open various web pages in Firefox browsers.

Notable Features:

Large extension library. Easily customize your Thunderbird experience with a wide range of apps and services.
Google Calendar integration. Thunderbird integrates with Google Calendar to make task management and meeting scheduling easier.
Smart email organization. Thunderbird reduces clutter by giving you numerous folders and sorting options for all of your messages.
Browser-like tabs. Have you ever found email difficult to manage because you can only see one message at a time? Thunderbird solves this issue by giving you the ability to open messages in different tabs, like in a web browser.

7. Zoho

Unique Feature: 25 Business Addresses

Sign up here.

Type of email: Webmail

Who should use it: Startups and small businesses.

This is the first of the free email accounts for privacy to make our list, but it holds a ton of potential for businesses.

The first thing you’ll notice about Zoho is its user-friendliness. From integrating with Google Drive, Box, and other cloud-based file managers, to its built-in task manager, this email service offers a simple way to accomplish all of your daily tasks.

The real difference-maker, though, is the ability to customize the domain name for up to 25 connected email addresses. Want to replace “@zoho.com” with the name of your business’s website? You can do so under Zoho Lite, which gives you 5 GB for free — all under username@yourdomainname.com.

Notable Features:

Privacy from advertisers. Zoho doesn’t scan your inbox for advertisement purposes, so your information won’t be sold to third-party buyers.
Emails are in an encrypted format. This is specially important if you regularly send and receive sensitive information.
Customizable domain name. Zoho gives you the ability to customize the domain name of your email, a useful perk for small businesses.
Integrates easily with Zoho CRM. If you already use Zoho CRM, Zoho is an excellent and natural choice that offers business email essentials for free or at a low price.

8. Proton Mail

Unique Feature: Encrypted Email

Sign up here.

Type of email: Webmail

Who should use it: Anyone who sends and receives sensitive information.

Proton Mail offers just 500 MB of free space, but for the worthy trade of encrypted email, allowing you to send messages that nobody else can see and disappear after a month.

What’s the catch? Is the service hard to use? Proton Mail is easy to use on any device without any software needed to encrypt your emails, as with most webmail platforms. Its inbox interface is as easy to understand at a glance as the other email services on this list.

And the tool offers quick color-coded labels to help you further organize which emails deserve the most care and protection.

Notable Features:

100% privacy. No personal information is required to open an account, making it useful for situations where you need to email someone anonymously.
Compatible with external email clients. Whether you use Apple Mail, Outlook, or Thunderbird, Proton Mail seamlessly integrates for off-browser email management.
Optimized inbox to boost productivity. Easily sort your inbox and group messages into folders with Proton Mail’s organization features.
End-to-end data encryption. No third-party provider gets access to your email, ever, making this one of the most private options on the market.

9. GMX Mail

Unique Feature: Alias Email Addresses

Sign up here.

Type of email: Webmail

Who should use it: Anyone who needs multiple emails with one central inbox.

While you may not have heard of GMX Mail, it’s been around for quite a while (since 1997) — and it has a bunch of features that make it worth considering.

First off, GMX offers 65 GB of storage. That’s a lot of storage for a free email service. In fact, they claim that it allows you to keep nearly half a million messages in your inbox!

Another feature worth noting is the ability to send large attachments. While many services have low caps for your email attachments, GMX Mail allows you to send files up to 50MB. That’s great if you share a ton of photos, presentations, or other large files from your account.

But the feature of GMX Mail that really sets it apart is the ability to set up to 10 alias email addresses, all from within one account. This can be useful in many situations — both personally and professionally.

For instance, you could use one alias for all of your online purchases and logins — to keep marketing emails separate from your private messages. From a business perspective, multiple email addresses can help manage role-based emails such as support@yourdomain.com or sales@yourdomain.com.

Notable Features:

Protection from suspicious/spam emails. GMX offers a strong spam filter to protect your inbox from suspicious messages.
65GB free email storage. You can store thousands upon thousands of emails without worrying that you’ll soon reach an upper limit.
Easy-to-use email filter templates. Have you ever found creating email filters a hassle? GMX offers premade filters for you to use.
External email account integration. GMX allows you to use a mail collector for keeping and managing all your emails (even from other service providers) in a single place.

10. Trustifi

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Unique Feature: Data Loss Prevention

Sign up here.

Type of email: Webmail

Who should use it: Anyone who doesn’t want to choose between having a secure and functional inbox.

Trustifi combines the best of a productive and secure email provider in one place.

With available whitelisting and blacklisting options, you can easily choose whom you allow to send you messages. Trustifi is also compliant with HIPAA/HITECH, PII, GDPR, FSA, FINRA, LGPD, CCPA, and more, so you don’t have to worry about losing your account overnight.

You can even use the Trustifi add-on to add an extra security layer to your Gmail or Outlook inbox.

Notable Features:

Ransomware and fraud detection. With Trustifi’s fraud detection feature, you can trust that the emails you receive are from legitimate senders.
Ability to set expiry dates on sent emails. This is a highly helpful feature for businesses that regularly send time-bound contracts and documents.
External email account integration. Trustifi seamlessly integrates with other email systems or service providers, making it easy to manage all your emails in one place.
End-to-end data encryption. No third-party provider gets access to your email, ever, making this one of the most private options on the market.

11. Mailfence

Unique Feature: Legal Protection

Sign up here.

Type of email: Webmail

Who should use it: Anyone looking for a secure email account that integrates with other tools.

Mailfence is a secure browser-based email service provider based in Belgium. Given the strict privacy laws in Belgium, all your data is locked away from any third-party access.

Their free plan gives you 500 MB of email space. But to truly enjoy the best of Mailfence, you’ll have to hop on a paid plan that starts at €2.50/month.

You’d be able to create up to 10 aliases on the paid plan and have 5GB of email space, among many other features.

With Mailfence, it’s easy to organize your day and business because you’d be able to easily integrate your email account with your contacts, calendar, and documents.

Notable Features:

500MB free email storage. Though lower than other providers, 500MB is sufficient storage for the casual email user.
Legal protection. Because of strict Belgian privacy laws, Mailfence offers an unparalleled level of legal protection.
End-to-end data encryption. With Mailfence’s True OpenPGP end-to-end encryption, no third-party provider gets access to your email, ever, making this one of the most private options on the market.

How to Make an Email Account

No matter which provider you choose, creating an email is a simple process. But, it’s still important to know best practices so you can have one that fits your needs the best. The purpose of an email is to provide a space for you to have easy, secure communications. Follow the steps below to create an email:

1. Choose An Email Provider

Select an email provider based on your needs as a user. Think about which features, such as top-tier security, email scheduling capabilities, or integrations, are the most important to you. Also, consider how much storage you will need and what type of provider works best.

2. Choose a Username

Select a username based on the purpose of the account. If it is a professional account, then your name with a significant number will do. The name of your business will do if it’s a business account. You might also consider your name@businessname.com for professional accounts.

3. Create a Password

Email providers generally have minimum requirements for how secure your password must be. These often include a number or a special character. Follow these guidelines and choose a password that is very unique and has a variety of letters, numbers, and characters to make it very secure.

4. Secure Your Account

Many email providers include ways to add extra security to your account. Take advantage of these features to keep your account and data safe. Setting up two-factor authentication is a great place to start.

5. Write a Signature

Set up an email signature for your account. This saves a lot of time as you are writing emails and helps keep your closing consistent. Include information like your name, your title, and your contact information.

Making the Most of Your Email

And with that, you have some of the best options for free email accounts this year. But who knows? Your next email address could be entirely different while giving you just what you need to succeed.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in March 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

What do you use spreadsheets for? If you’re anything like me, you likely use them to collect data, track campaign or blog post analytics, or keep track of weekly assignments.

But have you ever thought about using spreadsheets to make a calendar? If not, let me tell you why Google Sheets is the perfect tool for your content calendar.

If you often work on campaigns for a few different clients, creating individual calendars in Google Sheets could be uniquely useful for ensuring the client understands when certain content will go live. Alternatively, perhaps you need to create an internal Google Sheet calendar for your team to keep track of upcoming projects.

Making a calendar in a tool that’s commonly used for spreadsheets sounds a little intimidating, but don’t worry, the process is actually pretty intuitive. And with the help of some tips, you can easily make a functional calendar that you can sync your schedule with.

Below, we’ll go over how to make a calendar in Google Sheets and include some tips that’ll help you elevate the design. At the end, your calendar will look something like this:

Open up Google Sheets and get ready to create your very own calendar. 📅

1. Open a new spreadsheet and choose your month.

First, open a new spreadsheet.

Then, choose your month. For this example, I did January [YYYY], so I filled that into the first cell. What’s great about Google Sheets is that it automatically recognizes dates, so typing in a month, followed by the year in YYYY format will tell Google that you’re going to be working with dates.

2. Begin to format your calendar.

Next, format your calendar. I selected the text, January [YYYY], in Column A, Row 1. I highlighted seven columns (A-G), and clicked Merge to make that cell span across the entire column. You can find this button to the right of the Fill tool.

Here, I also center-aligned my text using the tool next to Merge. Later on, I’ll increase the font size and bold the month.

3. Use a formula to fill in the days of the week.

Next, fill in the days of the week in each column (A-G). You can do this manually but I decided to use a formula. Sheets has a function that lets you type in formulas to complete certain actions at once.

To fill in days of the week, in the cell where you want your first weekday to be, type: =TEXT(1, “DDDD”). What this tells Google is that your number will be replaced by a date or time and the format you’re using is weekdays.

Highlight the number 1 in the formula and replace it with: COLUMN(). Then, press enter and select your first day. You’re going to copy the formula in Sunday’s cell by dragging the selector to the end of your row, (A-G), and pressing enter again.

Pressing enter should automatically fill in the rest of the week. Remember, if this doesn’t work for you, you can always fill in the days manually.

4. Fill in the numbers.

Excellent! You have your days of the week. Now we’re going to fill in the numerical values. Before this step, I took the time to add color to the days row and changed the font to one I liked a little more.

For the numerical values, we’ll simply identify the first day of the month and click and drag to fill in the rest.

How?

Place the number 1 on the box right underneath the first day of the month, then click and drag horizontally. Depending on the day of the week, you may need to follow this process using the second day of the month so you can click and drag horizontally.

For this example, we’ll use Sunday as the first day of the month, but remember that the first day will vary from year to year.

5. Fill in the rest of the numbers.

Note: In this step, I filled in the calendar numbers every other row to help with my formatting later.

Now that you’ve filled out your first row, it’s time to fill in the rest. Manually insert the next number, then click and drag horizontally to fill in the rest.

Repeat the process for the next rows. You’ll insert the first number manually, then click and drag down the row. Here’s what that looks like for the next row in January.

Note: Make sure to end the month on the right number! For January, that would be the 31st.

6. Reformat your calendar if necessary.

Everything is starting to look like a calendar, right? At this stage, I reformatted things to clean up the look of my calendar a little.

Remember those extra rows in between the numbered rows? I expanded those rows to create boxes underneath the numbers. To do this, I simply dragged the rows down to make those cells bigger.

Here are some additional formatting tips:

Select the empty rows underneath your numbers and center them using the center text alignment tool.
Select your entire calendar and vertically align all elements so that they’re in the center of their cells. To do this, use the vertical alignment tool.
Bold your day numbers.
If desired, lightly shade your numbered rows.
If desired, gray out the Saturday and Sunday columns so that your workdays stand out.

7. Add design elements to professionalize the look.

Finally, you can add in some fun design elements to personalize the look and feel of your calendar. If it’s for a client or upcoming project, you’ll want to incorporate the necessary launch days here.

For this step, I added in a few fun images, included a few hypothetical calendar events, and played with font sizes.

8. Repeat the process from February to December.

It’s time to repeat for the month of February to December. Simply duplicate your January calendar once you’ve designed it how you want it to look. To do this, right-click the sheet’s tab and select Duplicate from the menu.

To fill in the numbers, you’ll only need to know the beginning day, then click and drag to fill in the rest of the rows. Here are the first days for every month for the year 2023:

January: Sunday
February: Wednesday
March: Wednesday
April: Saturday
May: Monday
June: Thursday
July: Saturday
August: Tuesday
September: Friday
October: Sunday
November: Wednesday
December: Friday

Next, you’ll want to know how many days you’ll need to fill in. Here are the number of days you’ll need for each month:

January: 31
February: 28 or 29
March: 31
April: 30
May: 31
June: 30
July: 31
August: 31
September: 30
October: 31
November: 30
December: 31

And then, you’re done!

It’s handy to use Sheets because you can open your calendar right on your browser. You can also keep track of your schedule in a place that’s separate from your phone.

If you don’t have the time or the patience to create a calendar from scratch, below are two additional methods.

How to Make a Calendar Using a Google Sheets Template

Google Sheets provides a built-in template for calendar-making. The only downside is that customization options are limited — you can only use Google Sheets’ themes. That said, this is an excellent option if you’re in a hurry.

1. Go to sheets.google.com.

Ensure you’re logged into your Google account, or log in when prompted. This will take you directly to the Sheets home page, where you can access the templates.

Alternatively, go to drive.google.com, tap New, click the right-hand arrow next to Google Sheets, and tap From a template.

2. Access the template gallery.

If you accessed the Google Sheets templates via Google Drive, you won’t need to take this step.

Otherwise, in the top banner titled Start a new spreadsheet, tap Template gallery.

3. Find the annual calendar template.

Templates are divided by categories such as “Work” and “Project management.” Scroll down until you reach the Personal section, then tap Annual Calendar.

4. Change the formatting as needed.

All done! Your calendar has been created. Next, it’s time to change the formatting using Google Sheets’ available themes. You can also change the fonts as you’d prefer.

An alternative option to using Google Sheets’ built-in template is using third-party templates, which would allow you to create important business documents such as social and editorial calendars. Below, I share several templates that are perfect for the task.

Google Sheets Calendar Templates

Good news: You’re not just limited to Google Sheets’ single built-in template. If you need a more functional annual calendar, I’ve got you covered with the options below.

1. Free Editorial Calendar Template for Google Sheets

Download the Free Template

This editorial calendar template is designed for Google Sheets and covers all of your editorial planning needs. With this template, you can lay out a strong editorial strategy on a daily and monthly basis in one accessible, scannable sheet.

Designed for utmost usability and readability, it includes a vertical layout for the dates, as well as columns where you can add details such as the Author, Topic, Content Details, and Keywords.

A vertical, year-long design like this one can also be used for other efforts, such as professional and personal goals. You can change the columns as need be to fit your and your team’s objectives for the upcoming year.

2. Free Spreadsheet Social Media Content Calendar Template

Download the Free Template

This Excel-based social media calendar template is ideal for marketers who’d like to build a strong social strategy for the upcoming year. The best part? It comes bundled with a user guide for those who are new to social media strategy planning.

If you already have a social plan, you can also use this calendar for any multi-channel effort, such as content marketing across multiple platforms and guest blogging on different publishers’ websites. Simply change the titles on the tabs to fit your goals.

This template can easily be converted into a Google Sheets document. To upload it into Google Drive, simply head to drive.google.com and drag the file from your file explorer into your list of Google Drive documents.

Alternatively, head to sheets.new to create a new Google Sheets spreadsheet. Then, click File > Import > Upload. There, you’ll be able to import the Excel file with no loss in quality.

3. General Calendar Templates for Google Sheets

In need of a general Google Sheets calendar template? Check out these resources:

Spreadsheet Class: Provides a premade, easy-to-use template that’s similar to the one we created from scratch. You’ll need to change the colors and fonts to your liking.
Smartsheet: Provides several premade Google Sheets calendar templates with a more corporate color scheme.

Use a Google Sheets Calendar to Organize Your Tasks

If you’re handy with Sheets and want to give it a shot, create a Google Sheets calendar. It’s a great option if you need to create a clean calendar to track an internal marketing campaign, organize a client’s upcoming projects, or share an event calendar with key stakeholders. But if you don’t want to create one from scratch, use our editorial calendar template to jumpstart your planning and organization efforts immediately.

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

Post Content

What do cross-country road trips, wedding speeches, and social media marketing have in common? Planning. I can’t help you with your road trip or wedding speech, but I have a solution for planning your next social media marketing campaign — using a social media calendar!

Most marketers now recognize that social media is integral to an effective inbound marketing strategy. With so many social networks available to us, it’s crucial to stay organized and plan for when and what you will share on these platforms.

Before we dive into our list of top tools to stay organized, here’s what you need to know about social media calendars and why they’re essential.

What is a social media calendar?

How to Create a Social Media Calendar

Social Media Content Calendar Tools to Plan Your Messaging

Social Media Templates

The Benefits of Using a Social Media Content Calendar

Social Media Calendar Examples

How To Create a Social Media Posting Schedule for Your Business

How To Create a Content Calendar

What is the best social media calendar?

What is a social media calendar?

A social media calendar is a rundown of your upcoming posts organized by date and time. A social media calendar can be a spreadsheet, digital calendar, or interactive dashboard. 

To get the most value out of your social media calendar, it may include the following: 

The date and time a post will go live
The social media account or network will go live on
Materials that will be included, such as copy, hashtags, links, and graphics

How to Create a Social Media Calendar

To create an effective social media calendar, you should:

1. Conduct a social media audit.

A social media audit assesses your social media presence, accounts, and engagement so you can see what’s working, what’s not, and where improvements need to be made. To learn how to conduct a social media audit, click here.

2. Choose your social media channels and the content you’ll post.

After conducting a social media audit, you should comprehensively understand which channels your audience uses and the kind of content they prefer. You should use your findings to determine which social media channels you’ll leverage and the content you’ll post. 

For example, you may notice your audience prefers your behind-the-scenes content on Instagram but goes to Twitter to ask questions and learn more about your product. In that case, you can post fun behind-the-scenes photos and Reels on Instagram, then use Twitter to share information about your product and answer consumer questions.

3. Decide what your calendar should include.

Your social media calendar should be tailored to your business and goals, so you’ll need to include information in our calendar that will make your desired results. 

To start, your calendar should include the following:

The platforms you’re using 
The day and the time your posts will be published
Links, graphics, videos, and copy

As you become more adept with your calendar, you may want to expand it to include the following:

Platform-specific materials include Reels, TikTok LIVE, polls, shoppable posts, etc.
Geo-targeting 
The associated or vertical campaigns, such as product launches and contests

4. Get feedback.

Once your calendar is complete, share it with your team and stakeholders to get their feedback to ensure it meets everyone’s needs. As you use the calendar, you may find ways to improve or expand upon it; you’ll need to be open to ongoing feedback.

Social Media Content Calendar Tools to Plan Your Messaging

1. HubSpot’s Downloadable Template for Excel

Content Calendar

Price: Free

Download This Template

Marketers might already use Excel for different types of reports and data analysis, but this multifaceted tool is also perfect for social media content calendar organization. Excel can be customized according to the priorities and metrics your team is focused on, so it’s a great option for planning.

The good news? We’ve already done the heavy lifting by creating a free, downloadable social media content calendar template using Microsoft Excel. Marketers can easily use this template to plan individual social media posts— monthly or annually — while keeping an eye on more significant picture events, holidays, publications, and partnerships.

Use the Monthly Planning Calendar Tab above to get a bird’s-eye view of what’s coming down the content pipeline in a given month.
In the Content Repository tab, you can add the content you’ll be publishing on this tab to keep track of which pieces have been promoted already and to recall older content that can be re-promoted easily.
You can draft and plan out social media posts in advance on the Social Network Update tabs. These tabs are for organizational purposes. After planning out your social media posts, you’ll manually upload the content of the posts to a social media publisher.

For more on how to use the templates, check out this in-depth guide from my colleague Basha Coleman.

This free resource can draft social media posts or bulk-upload them into a publishing app to maximize efficiency. (HubSpot customers: You can use this spreadsheet to organize content and upload it directly into Social Inbox. For instructions on this, check out the template’s cover sheet here.)

Why we like this social media tool:

Marketers with small teams and heavy workloads will love this intuitive template. It acts as a social media content planner, tracker, and archive, making it perfect for sharing your social plan with stakeholders and referring to it when you need to repurpose old content.

2. Google Drive

Content Calendar and Asset Organization

Price: Free for personal use. Google Workspace plans for businesses start at $6 per month.

Google Drive has several helpful features that make it easy for social media marketers to build an effective content calendar.

Here’s an example of how a team might use Google Calendar to track their editorial and social media calendars to ensure posts align with new blog content. Multiple teams can easily share these calendars to avoid scheduling conflicts and align campaigns.

Marketers can also use shared Google Sheets to schedule posts on social media, track the status of different pieces of content, and assign tasks to team members without switching between platforms.

With the help of Google Docs, users can keep comments in one place and collaborate on different projects without emailing back and forth or scheduling a meeting. This is a handy feature when editing content for social media, which may need to be drafted and approved quickly.

Why we like this social media tool:

Google has several products that can be used together to create quick, seamless workflows. So you’ll find value in the Google Drive system if you publish dozens of daily posts across multiple platforms or ramp up one channel for your freelance business. The best part is that HubSpot customers can easily link their Google Drive accounts to the HubSpot portal to upload files from Drive into the HubSpot software.

3. Loomly

Content Planning, Creation, Publishing, and Calendar

Price: 15-day free trial. The Base plan is $26 per month for two users and 10 accounts when you choose the annual agreement.

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If you want more mileage from your content calendar, you can turn to an all-in-one content planning and publishing platform such as Loomly.

Loomly offers tools beyond content scheduling and management. This tool provides inspiration and direction to help you create content. It also allows you to manage your content assets, schedule posts, view them as a list or a calendar, and analyze what posts are working versus which ones need work.

Loomly’s most robust feature set includes a collaboration and approval environment so teams can submit mockups, provide comments, see version logs, and flag for approval. This can help you streamline processes for efficiency when there are “too many cooks in the kitchen” on a particular project.

Why we like this social media tool:

This tool can do both if your team is responsible for organic and paid social. And your team who wants to avoid using their personal account for social media duties can respond to comments and replies directly in Loomly — that means they won’t need to log in to each native platform to engage with followers.

4. Trello

Task Management and Content Calendar

Price: Free for individual use. The Standard plan starts at $5 per user per month, billed annually.

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They are looking for an organizational tool that’s highly effective for team collaboration. Try Trello. This platform offers a full calendar view, making it easy to visualize what content is going out and when. More specifically, social media managers can use Trello’s flexible assignment “cards” and customizable “boards” and “lists” to map out to-do lists, manage a content calendar, plan a campaign, and store brainstorming ideas.

You’re not limited to just one structure, however. Users can customize boards according to their needs. For example, a team could create a board to organize social media posts for a given week on a specific platform or post ideas around a topic, such as a campaign or awareness day.

Why we like this social media tool:

Trello cards can be assigned to different team members, marked with due dates, and commented on. Users can even customize labels with varying statuses of publication so the entire team can see the progress of their social media posts and when they’re due on the calendar. The labels could also indicate different social networks where content is being published.

5. SproutSocial

Social Publishing and Content Calendar

Price: The Standard plan starts at $249 monthly for five social profiles, billed annually.

Sprout Social’s social media calendar and publishing tool make it easy for teams or individuals to plan and schedule their social posts. You can schedule content to automatically post to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and more.

You can also tag each social post and add notes to track and report your posting strategy and campaigns. Additionally, their publishing suite includes Optimal Send Times, which analyzes your social media data and automatically publishes when your audience is most engaged.

Why we like this social media tool:

Coming up with social media content ideas can take time and effort. Sprout Social’s social listening tool lets marketers like you uncover niche conversations that your audience is interested in. From there, you can join the conversation for brand awareness or start your discussion on the topic to grow your following.

6. Evernote

Content Calendar, Task Management, and Asset Organization

Price: The Basic plan is free. Create a custom template using the Personal program for $8.99 per month.

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Evernote is a note-taking app that marketers can use to keep track of all the moving parts of a social media campaign.

The tool also features yearly, monthly, weekly, and hourly logs, making it easy to track when you’re publishing content on social media when you’re producing blog content and other team-wide priorities. (Evernote offers customizable templates for each of these that can be downloaded into the app.)

Another helpful feature is Evernote’s Web Clipper extension for Chrome. Marketers can use this tool to easily save links to their Evernote Notebook for sharing later on.

Why we like this social media tool:

The Evernote mobile app also boasts interesting features to help marketers keep their social content ideas straight. For example, you can easily snap a photo and save it to your Evernote files for review later. This feature is of particular value for social content creators looking to maintain a backlog of photos to publish on Instagram.

7. Hootsuite

Social Publishing and Content Calendar

Price: The Professional plan starts at $49 per month and begins with a free 30-day trial.

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Hootsuite offers a built-in Planner tool to help you create campaigns, identify publishing gaps, and collaborate with your content creation team. Its primary features are in social publishing so that you can release content to your networks in advance, but it also has rich features for collaboration and post approvals.

You can even curate content from other sources without logging into your account. Once your content is created, you can preview it with the Composer tool, which displays it according to each social network’s unique format.

Why we like this social media tool:

Cross-collaboration is a big deal on any marketing team, and Hootsuite has a way of making this even more accessible. The social publishing platform has a built-in content library serving as the single truth point for your entire organization. Does your sales team need a product feature cheat sheet? Customer service looking for details on the latest product feature? All that and more can be found in your team’s Hootsuite content library.

8. Agorapulse

Social Publishing and Content Calendar

Price: The individual plan is free, or you can use the Pro plan for small teams starting at $79 per month.

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Like Hootsuite, Agorapulse offers social publishing tools and a content calendar to manage your social media accounts easily. This includes scheduling (or rescheduling), queuing, and bulk uploading posts, which is incredibly helpful for teams who use quarterly or monthly content plans.

Why we like this social media tool:

What makes Agorapulse different is its social inbox, which allows you to manage all the interactions from various platforms in a single place. After all, content isn’t just a one-and-done activity; it’s about building awareness and engagement with your readers.

9. StoryChief

Content Planning and Distribution

Price: Team pricing starts at $100 per month, billed annually.

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If you want more from your content calendar than knowing when posts go live, StoryChief is your option. With StoryChief’s smart calendar, you can better strategize and plan your content strategy across channels.

It displays much more than your timetable — it also allows you to assign collaborators to tasks and filter them by the campaign. StoryChief self-describes its tool as a “content distribution platform” that unifies analytics and publishing across multiple channels for a more simplified approach to content creation. Best of all, it syncs with HubSpot and your favorite calendar apps.

Why we like this social media tool:

Believe it or not, there are quite a few similarities between social media marketing and SEO marketing— StoryChief bridges this gap with its SEO Copywriting tool. By highlighting the areas you can improve your copy for the reader (and subsequently the search engines), you can write more precise, more engaging content that works on social media and your website or blog.

10. ClearVoice

Content Creation and Management

Price: Prices for Level 1 users start at $510 per month.

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So what about content planning and creation? ClearVoice offers content creation tools to fit into your workflow. Their big claim to fame is their Talent Network Search which allows you to find and connect to content creators to work on your projects. Yet, ClearVoice also has features for task management for internal and external collaborators.

You can create, edit, and approve projects in an interface that makes editorial management easy. It also includes a dashboard and dynamic editorial calendar with plenty of interactive functionality and integrations with other popular software.

Why we like this social media tool:

Not every social team is working for a big agency or client. For freelance content teams who want to stay organized and on time with their social media publishing, ClearVoice offers some of the same great features at a price customized to your team.

11. Zerys

Content Creation and Management

Price: Use Zerys’ pricing calculator for an estimate.

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Zerys is another platform that matches you with your ideal content creation freelancers. However, it markets itself as a platform dedicated to content success, offering content planning, production, publishing, promotion, conversion, and analytics features.

Why we like this social media tool:

You can manage unlimited content projects, plan keywords and titles for blog content, hire writers, and view deadlines on an integrated calendar. With the project management features that Zerys offers, in-house writers can use the platform to produce quality work on time every time. It also integrates with HubSpot, so publishing is a breeze.

Social Media Templates

HubSpot’s Social Media Calendar Template

If you’re new to setting up social media calendars, HubSpot offers a free, pre-made downloadable template that you can use to schedule out full weeks of posts.

Download Now

HubSpot’s Social Media Content Calendar Template for Startups

This template is very similar to the one seen above, but it includes tabs that work as a repository for content ideas. The template also includes helpful tips for posting on specific social media networks.

If you’re aiming to get all your ideas down to develop a big-picture plan for your social assets, we recommend starting with this template.

The Benefits of Using a Social Media Content Calendar

We’re all busy, and inevitably, tasks slip through the cracks. Social media content is no exception.

Like with blogging, a successful social media strategy requires regular publishing and engaging with followers to see positive results — whether blogging, a successful social media strategy requires traditional publishing and engaging with followers to see positive results — whether that’s in terms of SEO, brand recognition, lead generation, or all three.

So, if you’re not already using a social media content calendar, here are three facts to pique your interest:

You can pivot flawlessly when plans change by using a content calendar. With a social media content calendar, marketers can plan out posts for entire weeks or months in advance, which frees up working hours to strategize for the future.

The best part is that you can always leave space for breaking news or current events in your industry. Otherwise, you’ll spend valuable time searching the internet daily for content to share, a known productivity killer.
Grow your audience on each platform by curating content specifically for them. Social media marketers should take the time to craft custom messages for each network because the audience expects to see something different on each one.

For example, your Instagram followers want to see Reels and Videos, while your Twitter followers like quick sound bites and shareable quotes. Planning this content using a social media calendar will save you time throughout the week and ensure you’re thoughtful and intentional when posting on each site.
Optimize your social strategy by tracking the performance of your content each month. Without a calendar, social media marketers are publishing content into the void. They cannot track big-picture and past performance.

With a calendar, marketers can look back and analyze which content performed best so they can adjust their strategy accordingly. If a particular type of post received a significant amount of views, you could recreate it for a different topic and see the same success.
Take advantage of social media holidays to reach a new but relevant audience. With the help of a calendar, marketers can plan for holidays and observance days, such as National Cat Day, when they can tailor their content and engage with a broader audience.

Social Media Calendar Examples

1. JotForm Social Media Calendar

JotForm’s social media calendar isn’t just visually appealing and functional. The tabs at the top reveal your social plan for every channel you execute your strategy on, including in-person or virtual events.

If you’re modeling your social calendar after this one, remember to include a tab for content details and who on your team will be responsible for creating the content. You might also have a separate tab for each month to keep things organized.

2. Firefly Marketing Social Media Content Calendar

Going a more traditional route with your social media calendar? Try a Google Sheets template like the one created by Firefly Marketing. Each tab is dedicated to a different month, while the worksheet includes every channel you might need across the top.

The rows are separated by a week, so you can quickly identify the date and time a post is scheduled for publishing. Our favorite part of this template is the pre-populated social media holiday column with fun dates that your audience will love.

How To Create a Social Media Posting Schedule for Your Business

Scheduling your business’s social posts can keep you organized and help you consistently deliver content to your followers without worrying about looming deadlines. Content posting strategies can differ depending on the social media platform, and you should consider not only what you’re posting but also​​​​​​​ when and how often.

By creating a social posting schedule and adjusting the schedule to fit each platform, you can increase the chances that your posts will reach your audience.

Facebook

Facebook’s Meta Business Suite makes scheduling posts and stories for your business easy.

Scheduling a Facebook Post on Desktop

Step 1: To schedule a post using the Meta Business Suite on your desktop, start by selecting your business’s Facebook Page from the dropdown menu in the top left of your sidebar.

Step 2: Next, click Posts & Stories or Calendar, then click Create Post.

Step 3: Click Facebook News Feed ​​​​​​​to schedule the post to your news feed.

Step 4: Enter the details of your post, including text, media, and a link or location. If you add a photo to your post, you won’t be able to add a link preview. Click Call to Action or Feeling/Activity to add an optional call to action or feeling/activity to your post. You cannot add both a call to action and a feeling/activity.

Step 5: A preview will appear on the right as you build your post. You can change the preview to see how your post will look on both desktop and mobile by using the dropdown menu at the top of the window.

Step 6: After building your post, click the arrow next to Publish and click Schedule Post. Select the date and time you want your post to be published, and click Schedule to schedule your post.

Scheduling a Facebook Post on Mobile

Step 1: Using the Meta Business Suite mobile app, you can also schedule Facebook posts on mobileMeta Business Suite mobile app. Start by tapping Post to create a new post.

Step 2: Enter the details of your post, including text, media, links, a background color, and a feeling/activity. Then choose your business’s Facebook page to publish to Facebook.

Step 3: Tap Schedule for later and select the date and time you want your post to be published. Then tap Schedule to schedule your post.

Instagram

Like Facebook, Instagram also uses the Meta Business Suite to schedule posts.

Scheduling an Instagram Post on Desktop

Step 1: To schedule a post to Instagram using the Meta Business Suite on your desktop, start by connecting your Instagram account to the Meta Business Suite.

Step 2: Once your Instagram account is connected, click the dropdown menu in the top left of your sidebar​​​​​​​ and select your Instagram account.

Step 3: Click Posts & Stories or Calendar, then click Create Post. Click Instagram Feed ​​​​​​​to schedule the post to your Instagram feed.

Step 4: Enter the details of your post, including text, media, and an optional link or location. If you choose to add a link to your Instagram post, it will not show a photo preview.

Step 5: A preview will appear on the right as you build your post. You can change the preview to see how your post will look on both desktop and mobile by using the dropdown menu at the top of the window.

Step 6: After building your post, click the arrow next to Publish and click Schedule Post. Select the date and time you want your post to be published, and click Schedule to schedule your post.

Scheduling an Instagram Post on Mobile

Step 1: Like Facebook, you can schedule Instagram posts on mobile using the Meta Business Suite mobile app. Start by tapping Post to create a new post.

Step 2: Enter the details of your post, including text, media, and links. Then choose your business’s Instagram page to publish to Instagram.

Step 3: Tap Schedule for later and select the date and time you want your post to be published. Then tap Schedule to schedule your post.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn does not give users the ability to schedule posts. Still, by using third-party software such as Hubspot’s social media management tools that are included with HubSpot’s Marketing Hub Professional accounts, you can easily create and schedule LinkedIn posts.

Step 1: To schedule LinkedIn posts using HubSpot’s social media management tools, start by logging into your Marketing Hub Professional account.

Step 2: Next, navigate to Marketing > Social and click Create Social Post.

Step 3: In the right panel, click LinkedIn. Create your post in the text box, including emojis, hashtags, mentions, tags, and a content link. When using HubSpot’s social media management tools, you can only mention or tag LinkedIn company pages, not LinkedIn users.

A post preview will appear if you add a content link to your post. You can add up to four images to your post by clicking the image icon or add a video to your post by clicking the video icon.

Step 4: Click Preview to preview how your post will appear on LinkedIn.

Step 5: To schedule your post, click on the When dropdown menu, choose a date and time and click Schedule post.

Twitter

Step 1: You can schedule Tweets for your business by logging into your Twitter Ads account and navigating to the Creatives > Tweets tab. To access the Creatives tab in your Twitter Ads account, your account must have a credit card on file.

Step 2: Click on New Tweet in the top right corner and create your Tweet. If you would like your Tweet to only be seen by users you have targeted in a Promoted Ads campaign, click the Promoted Only checkbox. Leave this unchecked if you would like the tweet to be seen organically by your followers.

Step 3: Once you’ve written your tweet, click the down arrow next to Tweet, click Schedule, and select the date and time you would like the tweet to be posted.

Pinterest

Scheduling a Pinterest Post on Desktop

Pinterest allows you to schedule up to 100 Pins. You can schedule one Pin at a time, up to two weeks in advance.

Step 1: To schedule Pins for your business, log into your Pinterest Business account. Next, click Create at the left corner of your screen, then click Create Pin.

Step 2: Choose an image or video, and add a title, description, and link.

Step 3: Click Publish later and choose the day and time you’d like to publish your Pin.

Step 4: Choose a board from the drop-down menu, or create a new board by clicking Create board.

Step 5: Click Publish.

Scheduling a Pinterest Post on iOS

You can also schedule Pins using the Pinterest app on iOS.

Step 1: To start, log in to your Pinterest Business account.

Step 2: Tap the plus icon, then tap Pin.

Step 3: Take a photo for your Pin, select an image or video from your device, and tap Next.

Step 4: Add a title, description, and the destination website to your Pin.

Step 5: Below Schedule Date, tap the edit icon and select the date and time you would like to publish your Pin.

Step 6: Tap Done.

Step 7: Tap Next.

Step 8: Choose an existing board to save your Pin to or tap Create board to create a new board.

How To Create a Content Calendar

Download HubSpot’s content calendar template.

Draft your content goals.

Determine what types of content you want to publish.

You can choose which platforms you will post on.

Plan the most efficient posting schedule for your content.

Step 1: Download HubSpot’s content calendar template.

Download Now

Consistently posting content is key to making the most of your business’s social media accounts. HubSpot’s content calendar template makes it easy to set up a monthly posting schedule for your business’s social media accounts. The template can be opened in Excel or uploaded to Google Sheets, so you can easily plan content with your team from anywhere.

HubSpot’s content calendar template​​​​​​​ includes a monthly planning calendar, a content repository, and posting schedules for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest. With HubSpot’s content calendar template, your team can view and manage your business’s social media posting schedules and deadlines at a glance.

Step 2: Choose your content goals.

Americans spend around 2 hours on social media every day, making it a great way to reach out to your business’s current and potential customers. It’s not enough to know what you want to post; you must also understand why your business posts content.

Posting content to social media can help your business achieve many goals, including raising brand awareness, driving traffic to your website, introducing new products and services to your customers, and even launching rebranding campaigns, to name a few.

When choosing your business’s content goals, consider what your brand most needs to accomplish. Are you looking to reach out to a new demographic and generate leads? Do you want to increase your customers’ engagement with your business? Knowing your content goals can help to ensure that your business’s content reaches the right audience with the right message.

Step 3: Determine what types of content you want to publish.

Once you know your business’s goals, decide what types of content your business will post. Each type of social media content has advantages and disadvantages. For example, blog posts and articles can help your business build credibility, but they can be time-consuming to create. Meanwhile, Tweets can help your business gain consumer insight and hone its brand voice, but Twitter’s limit of 280 characters per Tweet means your business may have to use long threads of multiple Tweets to get your message across. Carefully choosing the types of contentyour business will post can help ensure that your content provides value to your audience.

Step 4: Determine what platforms you will post on.

Once you know your business’s content goals and the types of content you will publish, it’s time to choose where your business will post.

Your business’s social media presence should be informed by its content, goals, and target audience demographics. For example, while posting on Instagram may help your business reach a young audience and market goods, the photo and video sharing platform may be a poor choice if you want to increase blog traffic among professionals in your industry. Likewise, a LinkedIn post may help drive traffic to your business’s blog but may not help you drive traffic to your online store.

Considering each social media platform’s strengths and weaknesses can help you accomplish your business’s content goals without wasting time and money marketing to users who are outside of your target audience.

Step 5: Determine the most efficient posting schedule for your content.

After deciding on your business’s goals, the types of content you will publish, and where you will post the content, you need to create the posting schedule that your business will use. Each social media platform has peak engagement times — certain days and times of day when users are most likely to view and engage with posts. Therefore, knowing the best times to post on each social media platform will help you maximize the reach of your business’s posts. For instance, user engagement on Facebook peaks between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. on Wednesdays. User engagement on Facebook is lowest on Sundays, before 7 a.m. each day, and after 5 p.m. each day.

When creating your business’s content calendar, account for the engagement patterns for each of your social media accounts to demystify the scheduling process, save time, and get your posts in front of your audience when they are most likely to see them.

What is the best social media calendar?

Now that we’ve reviewed a few helpful tools to kick your social media strategy into high gear, it’s time for you to experiment with them. The best social media calendar saves you time, streamlines processes, and helps you work smarter, not harder.

Several of the platforms we’ve suggested are free to use or offer a free trial. Have one person on your team test one out and report their findings. You might find the tool that helps you reach your next social media KPI. Remember, every social media team is different. Combining these tools could help you execute your strategy efficiently to drive ROI.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in 2017 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Marketers spend hours brainstorming ways to grow their email lists. No matter what industry you’re in, email capture is a powerful and high-impact marketing activity.

Now, there are many ways to grow your subscriber base — beyond the simple sidebar lead magnet and pop-up forms. This blog will cover:

What Is Email Capture?
7 Email Lead Capture Strategies to Use in 2022
7 Email Lead Capture Tools to Use in 2022

1. Ask, “What’s in it for me?”

While every company in every industry may have a different tactical implementation to capture email leads, at the core of every strategy is this formula:

“What’s in it for me?” is such an underrated question in marketing. In other words, you need to ensure that whatever information you’re asking for is worth giving up in exchange for your offer.

In some cases, the value exchange is extremely straightforward.

Take, for example, WaitButWhy. The blog’s author, Tim Urban, writes incredibly comprehensive and interesting articles (more like books). The posts are amazing. The quality is unquestionable. So it’s enough of a benefit to simply be notified when these works of art are published.

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However, most business blogs can’t compete on that standard. Therefore, most of us rely on “lead magnets” — exchanges of value for information. These are things like ebooks, free email courses, discounts, webinars, etc.

Essentially, it’s a piece of premium content you can use to entice someone to sign up for your list.

Here’s an excellent example of a lead magnet from ConversionXL:

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Or here’s an eCommerce-focused example from J.Crew.

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Both of these examples are great for their appropriate contexts. The value alignment is obvious.

2. Target the right segments of your audience.

When starting out, you’ll likely have one universal lead magnet or email subscription form for all of your visitors. This is particularly true if your traffic numbers are small and your visitors are relatively homogenous.

However, when you scale your content program, you’ll need different lead magnets for different types of visitors.

In 2021, McKinsey found that 76% of consumers are frustrated by generic marketing. The takeaway? It’s essential to tailor your lead capture messaging and interactions to each segment of your audience.

For instance, our J.Crew example above targets first-time visitors. This makes more sense than giving a 15% discount to a repeat buyer who was going to purchase something anyway.

Even simpler, you can target visitors based on whichever blog post they’re reading. If someone views a post on writing case studies, a good offer might be “case study templates.”

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You should also consider the device someone is using. One of the biggest mistakes with lead capture is using the exact same tactics on mobile and desktop.

However, in 2022, 90% of people used the internet via smartphones, compared to 66% who browsed the web on a laptop or desktop. You might be losing conversions if your email capture method is not optimized for mobile.

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Pro tip: Think about which portion of your audience sees which CTA. As your content production capacity grows, a one-size-fits-all approach becomes less effective.

3. Target your audience at the correct time.

Who you target is very important, but when you target your audience is also vital. For example, first-time site visitors should receive a discount on arrival.

This person is probably comparison shopping, so you’re fighting for attention and want to hook them quickly. This is the case with many ecommerce lead capture messages, including the lead magnet from Ralph Lauren below.

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Meanwhile, if you’re capturing emails on a blog post, you don’t want to interrupt the user experience before the reader even gets past the first paragraph. That’s a good way to skyrocket your bounce rate. “Welcome mat” pop-ups — those giant messages that completely take over your screen — are another mistake.

A better trigger for those pieces would be a scroll-triggered pop-up or an exit intent pop-up. These are behaviorally triggered. The former shows up when someone scrolls past a certain point in the article.

The latter appears when someone moves their mouse toward the corner of the screen, as if they were going to exit the window. When used properly, exit intent pop-ups can deliver results. One OptinMonster customer re-engaged 53% of visitors who were leaving by offering a discount via an exit intent pop-up.

Here’s a great example of an exit intent pop-up from Sprout Social.

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You can get creative with your time-based or behavior-based targeting as well. Does a behavioral event on your website imply intent or a high interest in an offer? That’s a great time to trigger a CTA.

For example, if you see someone copying and pasting your templates, you can trigger a message that they’re also all available for download.

At a simpler level, you can leave a text link in your copy and use that as a signal of intent to trigger a form.

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4. Build the right lead magnets.

We’ve already discussed the need to answer the question “what’s in it for me.” Here, we’ll dive deeper into the idea of a “lead magnet.”

A lead magnet is a free offer you deliver in exchange for a visitor’s information. This could be many things, but it usually looks like a long-form piece of content. Get inspired with these common lead magnet formats.

The Ebook

The ebook is probably the most common form of a lead magnet. You can relatively easily repurpose multiple blog posts into a giant ebook and get someone on Upwork to design it.

Ebooks are best suited for:

Complex topics that require deep exploration.
Inquisitive buyers that love doing their own research into a topic.
Topics that can be described largely through texts or diagrams.

Conversion rate optimization, user experience, or search engine optimization are all topics that make great ebooks. Take, for example, this ebook from UserTesting on building customer-centric products.

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Here are some free ebook templates to get you started with your own.

The Webinar

Webinars are probably the second most common lead magnet seen in the wild. They’re largely used by B2B businesses and are a popular marketing tactic for SaaS companies.

Webinars tend to work well when:

The topic is technical or needs to get quite granular.
You or your guest are charismatic on camera or well-known.
Your webinar topics can still be useful for those not using your product.

Looking for an example? Check out Instapage’s webinar on improving landing page conversions.

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Research from GetResponse found video-based lead magnets have among the highest conversion rates at 24.2%.

Remember: With webinars, execution matters. Getting people to sign up for a webinar is just the tip of the iceberg. The webinar needs to then be entertaining as well as useful.

If you can do this at scale, you’ll be able to build an inbound lead generation machine.

The Email Course

The email course is one of my favorite underutilized tactics. It’s essentially an ebook, but split into chapters and delivered via email.

The best part is that you can normally get experts to write individual chapters. This not only distributes the effort required to produce the content, but if you choose your experts correctly, it also adds to the value for the subscriber.

Marketing training company Conversion XL attracts prospects with this free email course on building an optimization program.

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Another great example is Growth Machine’s free, seven-part SEO course.

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With these lead magnets, you’re promising informational value in exchange for an email address. The difference here is that you’re using email to deliver the core value, which leads to an increase in open rates.

Email courses go to your subscribers like a drip campaign. This tactic is extremely effective. Email drips are said to boast a 3x average click-through rate when compared to individual emails.

The Free Tool

Free tools are a more challenging lead magnet to create. You need to think of a compelling idea and find the right back-end team to build it. However, if done right, free tools can really break through the noise.

HubSpot’s Website Grader is one free tool that generates traction. By putting in your website URL you’ll be able to see your site’s performance — a benefit worth your email address.

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The Resource Bundle

If your topic interests someone, helping them accomplish what you talk about in the article can be a tremendously powerful hook.

Typically, this is done with additional resources, templates, or tools designed to help the visitor implement whatever you’re talking about. For example, this HubSpot Blog on feedback surveys offers a feedback survey template.

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The Checklist

Checklists are best for topics that are technically complex or require a lot of time and organization to accomplish. Make sure your document can be easily edited, so recipients can check off tasks easily as they are completed.

A/B testing is one subject that benefits from a checklist. This blog post from Alex Birkett, a content agency founder, offers the checklist as a Google Doc for easy access.

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5. Reduce friction where possible.

If a visitor wants to sign up for your list, make it as easy as possible for them to do so. When designing forms, ask yourself the following questions.

Do I need this piece of information I’m asking for? If so, can I ask for it later via progressive profiling?
What form fields are causing the highest drop-off?
Can we run user tests to see where people are struggling with our forms?
Do we have any basic usability or accessibility problems with our forms?
Do our forms work on all browsers and devices?

You’d be surprised how many simple changes you’ll make after a quick audit of your forms.

6. Match the intent of a blog post with the right offer.

If your blog post is about “top marketing books of 2022,” it may not be prudent to offer an ebook on “The Ultimate Guide to Digital Analytics.” There’s a mismatch there. Some visitors may still convert, but it’s certainly not fully optimized.

Align the messaging on your lead magnet offer with the blog post it appears on.

Here’s a quick trick to ensure the message aligns properly. Go into Ahrefs and plug your blog post URL in the site explorer feature. Look at all the keywords it ranks for.

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Your goal here is to understand broadly what your post ranks for and find other topics that are gaining traffic. For instance, the keyword “what to do in Austin this weekend,” might actually make a really good headline for an ebook or checklist.

Take a look at how the HubSpot Blog matches lead-generation content to user search intent.

7. Choose the best lead capture tools for the job.

Remember: You’re not stuck to only using web forms. You can use pop-ups, surveys, live chat, and many more tools to capture leads.

We’ve seen all kinds of successful approaches using different types of lead magnets. Below we’ll explore different tools you can use to capture leads.

1. Web Forms

Web forms are still the gold standard of online email capture. Nearly 50% of marketers cite web forms as their most effective lead-capture tool, according to HubSpot’s 2020 State of Email Lead Capture.

Email capture software makes building web forms easy. We’ve gathered two tools that can help you get the job done.

HubSpot Forms

This free tool allows you to easily acquire new email subscribers using conversion-driven forms like the one below. With HubSpot, you can decide which fields users need to fill out. Information is then compiled into a list in your CRM. From here, you can easily pass leads to sales.

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Gravity Forms

This WordPress plug-in is a one-stop solution for almost all your website’s form needs, from lead capture to job applications. It also gives you the resources to build accessible and GDPR-compliant forms. Here’s how to install Gravity Forms on your WordPress website.

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2. Pop-Up Forms

Pop-ups, once annoying and ill-designed, are now common and wildly effective when done correctly.

If you can target the right audience at the right time, you can win with this method. At the very least, an exit intent form helps capture some would-be bouncers from your site. HubSpot Pop-up Forms offer a free and easy setup for this.

Other popular tools include the following.

OptinMonster

This leading email capture tool lets you quickly create engaging pop-up forms with a responsive design. With this tool, you can hone in on the right website visitors with laser-sharp targeting. You can also split-test your campaigns to see what works best.

OptinMonster also allows you to build inline forms, gated content, coupon wheels, and content upgrades. Here’s an example of their exit-intent-triggered pop-up.

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Popupsmart

This tool makes building pop-ups easy. You can choose from 40+ designs, 18+ targeting features, and 100+ replicable campaigns.

Want to entice your visitors to click through, and a simple pop-up form isn’t working? Try their gamified pop-ups, multiple-choice questions, or teasers. Here’s an example of a teaser pop-up.

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3. Surveys and Quizzes

Surveys are often underutilized. They’re engaging and entertaining. Plus, you can collect the same visitor information with far less friction than traditional forms.

Quizzes offer the same benefit. Quiz builder Interact found that 40.1% of people who start a quiz become leads. It turns out a lot of people like to see how well they performed.

You can use the following tools to get started.

Interact

With this tool, you can easily build the right quiz for your niche, personalize it to suit your brand design, and track your conversions. Interact also integrates with 35 leading tools such as Zapier, Mailchimp, and ConvertKit.

Take a look at how Interact uses a quiz on its website to capture leads.

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After completing the quiz, the following email capture form appears. Notice that signing up isn’t compulsory to see your results, allowing more qualified leads to come through.

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Pointerpro (previously Survey Anyplace)

This tool allows you to create surveys, quizzes, assessments, and personality tests that you can use to generate leads.

The best part? You can instantly offer tailored reports to your respondents with specific suggestions based on their answers. Here’s a sample from Pointerpro’s website.

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4. Live Chat

“Can I please speak with a human?” That’s a common plea when stuck in a roundabout conversation with a chatbot. But did you know that live chat — mostly viewed in the context of customer support and sometimes for sales — can also be used as a marketing tool?

It’s especially effective when targeting visitors who have been to your site several times or are heavy readers.

Though live chat is a less consistent way of collecting leads, you will find a few opportunities to engage visitors and collect their info. Here are two tools you can use.

HubSpot Live Chat

With Hubspot, you can seamlessly answer specific queries as they come in and create automated responses to common questions via a free chatbot builder.

Plus, the universal inbox makes it simple for anyone to review a person’s chat history and continue the conversation.

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Zendesk for Service

Zendesk’s live chat solution allows you to communicate with people on your website, mobile app, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger — that’s multiple avenues for email capture.

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5. Chatbots

Chatbots are another way to collect lead information. They’re automated so you can save your reps’ time. You can also do better targeting and filtering with the right chatbot design.

For example, check out this chatbot on the HubSpot website. You can build a similar interface using HubSpot’s free chatbot builder software.

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Other tools you can try include the following.

MobileMonkey

OmniChat by MobileMonkey lets you easily collect email addresses of potential leads via your website, Facebook Messenger, or Instagram. This tool comes with a free mobile app, so you can access chats while on the move. You’ll also be notified when a high-intent lead is online.

Here’s how MobileMonkey collects leads via its chatbot.

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Landbot

Want to use chatbots on your own custom platforms? With Landbot’s API and SDK, it’s possible. It also comes with multiple lead-generation templates. Customer reviews comment on the top-notch customer support and ease of integration with outside apps.

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6. Giveaways and Contests

Giveaways were very popular a few years ago. Though they’ve faded a bit, I still see them all the time, particularly in B2C companies — and, ultra-specifically, in travel or experience-related industries.

Normally, several companies partner up to offer a giveaway. The brands then promote the giveaways to their respective audiences. After the giveaway, email leads are shared.

First, the positive: Contests get the clicks. These emails have a 5.5% higher average CTR compared to regular email campaigns.

However, while a good way to gather a large number of emails, there’s a big drawback: The quality of the emails probably isn’t very good. This is true for two reasons.

You’re sharing emails with a bunch of companies.
You’re relying on commercial incentives to get the email (in other words, they’re not interested in your company — they’re interested in winning that trip to Denmark).

However, the occasional giveaway can give your email capture strategy a boost. If you’re interested in experimenting with this format, consider the following tools.

KingSumo

With KingSumo, you can create giveaways that encourage social sharing. Participants can earn bonus entries by completing certain actions, such as promoting the contest by email, answering a poll, or following the business on social media.

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Wishpond

This tool makes content creation easy. Choose from 10 types of contests, such as referral competitions or photo contests, to boost your email capture efforts. Plus, their email capture tactics are optimized for all devices.

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7. Content Upgrades

Finally, we have content upgrades. While this is really a pop-up form, this email capture tactic deserves its own category. Content upgrade pop-ups are click-triggered and behaviorally contextual pop-ups. Basically, when someone clicks a link that says “get the PDF of this” or “click here to get a checklist,” they can then opt-in with a very simple, dynamic form.

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When you click the link, this comes up.

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Some email marketing platforms offer a way to set up content upgrades. If this technique is not available with your marketing platform, consider the tools below.

Hello Bar

This pop-up builder allows you to seamlessly collect leads using content upgrades. You can also create other pop-ups, such as sliders and full-page takeovers.

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Thrive Leads

Content upgrades are just the tip of the iceberg with this WordPress plug-in. Scroll mats, pop-ups, slide-ins, content locks, and other email capture techniques are also available.

Customize your forms for mobile, test multiple variations with its A/B testing engine, or use a SmartLink to show your subscribers a different opt-in form on a particular page.

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In terms of user experience, and all the strategies we went over above, content upgrades are some of the best ways to collect email leads. They’re relevant to the blog post, not a hindrance to user experience, and are only triggered to those who click on the link.

Getting Started with Email Lead Capture

This blog gives a general outline as well as some ideas to capture email leads. As with anything, success requires some experimentation and tinkering. Test these tactics, learn from them, and iterate to improve. Small wins compound and lead to greatness.

And if you want an easy way to implement some of these lead capture methods, check out HubSpot’s free lead generation tools.

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