Robert and I jump on to chat about Cloudflare’s product Durable Objects. It’s part of their Workers platform, which we already use at CodePen a good bit, but with Durable Objects…
Global Uniqueness guarantees that there will be a single instance of a Durable Object class with a given ID running at once, across the world. Requests for a Durable Object ID are routed by the Workers runtime to the Cloudflare data center that owns the Durable Object.
In their intro blog post a few years back, they call the “killer app” real-time collaborative document editing, which is obviously of interest to us. So we’ve been tinkering and playing with how that might work with CodePen’s future technology.
Equinix Metal’s Startup Partner Program helps early stage companies level up. Their experts work with startups like Koord and INVISV to build their competitive edge with infrastructure. Equinix Metal provides real time guidance and support to help startups grow faster. With up to $100,000 in infrastructure credit, access to Equinix’s global ecosystem of over 10,000 customers and 1,800 networks, they might just be what you need to take your startup global.
Good communication is not about forcing everyone to say “Yes” or to sell something to people that they don’t want to buy. Good communication is about sharing your ideas as clearly as possible during the time you have allocated to the meeting. To do this well, you need to have a suitable structure based on the timing and people’s background knowledge.
In the following article, I will try to explain how to prepare this structure and give you some tips based on my own design experience.
We all like to listen to good stories. Good stories involve us and don’t need additional efforts to follow the ideas they present. There is no simple answer as to what makes a story good, but we can subconsciously tell what makes it bad, such as illogical storytelling structure, unclear motivation of the main hero, lengthy descriptions of some obvious things, and so on. All those aspects impede us from understanding what is going on. I can often observe something similar during regular meetings. At first, everybody goes with their communication plan, but in the end, it often turns into a flow of random sentences and abbreviations, and then at the end of the meeting, everyone tries to keep their initial opinions.
If you want to avoid such poor meeting outcomes, follow me along. Here is a guide based on my personal experience, and I hope it will help you conduct more effective meetings, too.
Сonscious Participation Or Conduction
There are two reasons why meetings happen:
You want to present or discuss something with a few people.
Somebody thinks inviting you to a conference/meeting is a good idea.
Each one of these reasons dictates a different preparation strategy.
Reason 1: You Are The Initiator
Start with the question, “Why this meeting has to happen?”
Don’t get me wrong, but I haven’t actually met people who like meetings.
The truth is that people do their work in-between sessions. When you are in a meeting, you can’t do your work. You are distracted when you get a reminder about a meeting starting in 15 minutes. And after a one-hour session, you also need time to get back to work and to switch your mind to the things you were doing before the meeting. And being constantly distracted by meetings affects not only programmers but also designers.
So, rule No.1 is:
In 99% of the cases, a meeting takes more working hours than the time preallocated to it.
What can we do to improve the situation?
Invite people whose work is directly related to your meeting’s key topic.
Prepare and share the agenda in advance. People must understand why they should be there and what you will expect from them.
Describe the goal and the expected results so participants can prioritize the information they get during the meeting.
Plan the timeslots based on the agenda and the number of participants. If you have twenty people for a 30 minutes meeting, then everyone would have a 90 seconds timeslot. Just remember this fact. Note: Here, I don’t mean a presentation when you deliver some information to a group of people without the need for receiving feedback or just for hearing “yes” or “no” once the presentation ends.
Sometimes it’s hard to stop inviting people to a meeting because they may all look involved in the topic. So, ask yourself, “Will I cancel this meeting if that person cannot participate?” If the answer is “No,” then just go to the next participant in the list, and so on.
Rule No. 2:
The meeting is mainly for the tasks and decisions you cannot fulfill alone.
Of course, you can say that meetings keep the team together and help understand other project areas better. There are approaches based on regular meetings, such as Scrum, and I agree with that. But we talk about effective meetings now. Because if you invited ten people with an hourly rate of $ 50, the one-hour meeting session would cost you $500. Is this a reasonable price for a one-hour small talk?
Reason 2: You Are Invited As A Participant
In this case, you are on the opposite side. It means that you can (and should):
Ask in advance for the agenda and the goal of that session if this info is missing.
Clarify what would happen if you could not join, and then decide on joining the meeting (or not).
Prepare your communication plan based on the timeslot you have.
Investigate the documentation available on the topic so you can have some background and ask the right questions.
A communication plan is like a lantern that helps you keep the right track in the darkness of routine. When everything gets worse, you can count only on this communication plan, or at least on plan “B,” which you should have. And, unlike the Cheshire Cat, you definitely need to have a plan where you want to go!
Before starting, you need to ask yourself a few questions:
What do I want to get as a result of this meeting? Why do I go there?
How did I come up with the idea I want to present?
Why are other ideas, approaches, or alternative ways not so good? Have I explored all the options?
If I understand the weak side of my ideas, what strategy should I follow? Should we touch upon them in this meeting?
Answering these questions will help you clarify your vision first, as it’s impossible to communicate an idea effectively to somebody else if it is even unclear to you.
So, let’s get back to the things you want to communicate. Do you want approval for a new feature/mockup/technology, or do you want to gather various opinions and vote for the best option? Have you tried to solve it in a few different ways, and can you argue why other methods would work worse than this one? Are you open to discussing advice about improving your proposal, or do you think it’s already good enough?
Knowing the answers to these questions would make it much easier to move communication in the right, more productive direction. Otherwise, you will spend some time finding out the answers directly during the meeting.
Also, keep in mind the personal goals of the participants. When I was twenty, I was a freelancer and needed to chase projects. I completed over one hundred projects (mainly small-sized) and had a hundred kick-off meetings. When you are a freelancer, it means that during such kick-offs, you are trying to sell your service. At first, I was trying to explain the value of my designs, the excellent conversion of my landing pages, and how happy the users would be. Sometimes this approach worked, sometimes not.
I asked for feedback from a few people who didn’t want to buy my services. Once, I got honest feedback from a manager along these lines, “I’m a manager. I don’t care about customers or conversion rates. My goal is to complete the project on time and get my bonuses at the end of the year. Can you do it on time?”
When you double-check your communication plan, make sure it matches closely with the goals of the people you want to communicate with.
Conduction Of The Meeting
A smooth start
The worst thing you can do is go to a meeting, show something during the first minute and say, “This is it! Is it looking great?”
It’s like if you were trying to explain the movie Titanic as a man keeping a little cold piece of wood afloat in the Atlantic ocean and a woman trying to fit on that ice-cold piece of wood. Yes, that’s the scene when we usually cry during the movie, but we are not crying because of this scene — but because of the long and important set of events that brought Rose and Jack there.
So, start with the story that will help your audience dive into the right atmosphere. It could be the context of using the product, the moment when somebody meets the problem you are attempting to solve or something else that can help build a smooth way to the first piece of visual information or thesis. Don’t let people use their explanations about what they see now. Human imagination works faster than your talk, so getting them back to what you are saying will be challenging.
Also, it’s always good to deconstruct the idea and explain what was before. What is the reason why we do this? What did we discuss during the previous meeting, and where did we stop? What limitations do we have? What kind of information did we learn about the market, users, or competitors that should be shared here? The people around you should have these pieces of background knowledge to better understand the potential of your ideas. You shouldn’t tell everything you know. Remember that this is just an intro, and you need time for the “main dish.”
Switching Between Scenes And Ideas
When you move between details or screens, also tell your audience about the ways which may potentially lead to some dead-ends during your progress. The filament bulb may have looked small and simple when it was ready for mass production, but Thomas Edison (and not only he) conducted more than 1500 experiments before reaching that success. Tell people also about the failures to show the broader scope of work, and when you do so, this will give people the answers to the unasked questions — why you turned this way and not some other way. Those things might not be obvious at all to the people not as deeply involved in the project as you are.
The right side of the following illustration nicely demonstrates the way product designers work. I also strongly recommend talking about the “underwater side” during meetings. It helps to unfold the final result.
The most sensitive thing is to be able to present complex ideas during a conversation. You need some time to outline a basic concept, yet people may start asking questions even before you end up with the explanation. Most of the questions won’t be asked if the participants can see the whole picture, and the solution to this is pretty easy.
Warn that first, you will only outline the idea or the solution, and after that, you will go through that again step by step, answering all the questions in the proper context. It allows you to talk to an audience that understands your idea but can ask questions in the appropriate context. Using this approach, you can smoothly move from topic to topic and not make people wait till the end of the meeting to ask questions.
Depending on your soft skills, you will have different levels of engagement with your audience. So I recommend from time to time checking this through a dialogue with the audience. The simplest way is to ask, “Are you still following me?” But it’s a bit too direct, and there are many other, more subtle ways of ensuring you have an audience that follows you. We want every minute of the meeting to be valuable, right?
A Few Hints As To How To Keep People Involved:
Ask people to highlight the aspects they know better than you. It can be a few words about using the product in real life, market information, limitations, and so on.
Ask people to express their expectations about the next presentation slide. It helps you focus on the crucial things for the participants. Then, even if those expectations are not reflected in your solution, you have already been informed. So you can explain why you didn’t cover them or propose a plan for how to do that.
Use questions that can be answered with a “Yes,” “No,” or only a few words. “Does this feature make sense?”, “Are we happy with the positioning of this red button?”, “Is it clear what would happen if I click here?” and so on.
If it’s an online meeting, ask people to turn on their cameras (if possible). It’s easier to understand what’s happening if you see the people’s eyes. But, for many different reasons, people do not always like using cameras. So, be polite and explain why it is important to you and be honest. Here is a list of reasons that I compiled:
“I feel uncomfortable if I don’t see the people I am talking to.”
“I think I sound like a radio DJ. Could you please turn your camera on?”
“I’m a bit nervous when talking to the empty screen.”
And so on.
It’s better to say this while still inviting the people so they have time to prepare their cameras and backgrounds (real or virtual) in advance.
Sometimes your questions will meet the silence on the other side. There can be a lot of reasons why this happens, but it usually means that people don’t understand what you mean or maybe that you have invited introverts to the meeting. :-)
You need feedback that helps you understand the situation and get out of this corner. And if nobody wants to provide some feedback and critique, you must become your first critic. We do not live in an ideal world, and you probably know your idea’s weak sides and limitations. So speak about them loudly and show people that it’s OK for you (and for them!) to point out the wrong things if they happen because of your design decisions.
I don’t remember the name of the book where I read about this curious fact, but one company always included paid provocateurs in the focus groups to help people start talking about the issues in the company’s product. As a result, people provided a few times more feedback than before.
Managing Contexts
When everything looks fine, and your meeting appears on the right track, don’t forget to check whether all people are in the same context. For example, when you say, “On this page, the user makes a route from A to B,” everybody thinks about his own experience. So you have to take a step back and clarify how users do this and what obstacles they will encounter because your stakeholders usually are not your users; they stand on the business side.
Also, don’t forget about emotions. Here in Ukraine, we have a proverb, “The well-fed will never understand the hungry.” So, to understand the user, you should try to walk in his shoes. Help stakeholders understand the user through emotions as well. What’s going on when a user opens your app? Does the user have enough time to learn how to complete his task? What would happen if not? All those things will not be apparent to people looking at the static design image from your slide. Tell the story! We all like stories.
Conclusion
Before wrapping things up, a note about meeting notes. There is a common practice to take meeting notes, but personally, I’m not a fan of this. Of course, taking notes is OK if you have time or if somebody can write down the main ideas discussed. But don’t allow this to dictate the pace of the discussion. The goal is to move forward but not to make pauses because you need to time a few sentences.
Meeting notes are about the past, and in order to go ahead, you need the action plan. The action plan is the list of actions that need to be done before a few predefined deadlines are reached. All items in that list should be measurable and split into a few simple, understandable steps.
An example of an ineffective action plan:
Finalize the concept.
Think about better navigation.
Discuss the design concept with the users.
An example of an effective action plan:
Add a full search flow and a “Contact Us” page.
Create a minimum of two versions of the design concept with navigation based on best practices.
Conduct unmoderated user testing with at least five users.
Also, every item in the list should have a person assigned to it — an “action person.” It allows avoiding a situation where something is not done just because everybody thinks it’s not in their direct area of responsibility or a list of to-do items.
I hope this article will help you organize more productive meetings, save everyone’s time, and be more efficient. And if you have questions, I’d happily reply to them in the comments below.
A few extra tips:
The initiator is responsible for achieving the meeting results. So if you see that the discussion moves in the wrong direction, you are the person who should get it back onto the right track.
Sometimes, somebody may say, “As we are all here, can we also discuss...” Nope, it doesn’t work like that. The correct thing to do is to cover the agenda first, and then, if everyone agrees (and there’s some meeting time left!), you can discuss something else.
If you invite people who don’t know each other, it’s best to start by introducing everybody.
You can record the meeting; it’s a good option for people who can’t join. But before the recording is made, ensure everybody is OK with that.
Don’t make people ask about dropping off the meeting if/when the time is up. Instead, if you need more time, ask about a possible extension 5-10 minutes before the end of the scheduled timeslot and then adjust your plan accordingly. Discussing ideas with people who are late somewhere else is a bad idea, especially if the topic is complex and rather important! Make sure that it’s comfortable for everyone to extend the meeting a bit; if it is not, leave some of the topics and discussions for another time.
The traditional approach dictates you should invite all people related to one or more of the topics on the meeting agenda. But if you can discuss and resolve some of the questions in smaller groups or one-to-one meetings, please go this way; it’s much better. Ideally, every participant has to be involved in every aspect of the meeting plan. (It doesn’t feel right to join the forum only because of a five-minute question that concerns you, placed at the end of the meeting time.)
Try to hear the others. Unfortunately, sometimes we are so focused on our vision and following a plan that we can ignore the voices around us. As a result, good ideas may not get a chance to be heard and evaluated at the right time.
Further Reading
Here are a few additional resources on the topic of conducting effective meetings:
“The Anatomy of an Amazon 6-pager,” Jesse Freeman How Amazon conducts its meetings? Amazon is well known for its lack of using PowerPoint. This works because before a meeting, you print out enough copies for everyone in the room, and you’re not allowed to read the document from your computer unless you are remote. This long read will share plenty of details about how Amazon and their meetings work. Note:During the pre-pandemic times, things were much different from what they are today, meetings included. People worked in offices and in person much more often.
Big Timer Some teams choose a very specific duration of the meeting, e.g., 18 minutes or 23 minutes, with a large countdown displayed in front of everybody to bring the meeting to the point and right on time.
“Mental Health at Work (leverage focus blocks),” Cameron Moll In some teams, employees are allowed to block out hours for “focus work,” and no meetings can be scheduled during that time.
“Meetings,” Paul Adams After a fantastic meeting, everyone feels like progress was made, that things are clearer than before, and that there is continued momentum. At the same time, meetings are also expensive. Consider the opportunity cost of people being at a meeting, as they could all be doing other important things.
“Let’s Have Better Meetings!,” Laurel Hechanova & Patrick DiMichele How to run a tighter ship and make better use of everyone’s time.
“The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress,” Gloria Mark (University of California, Irvine), and Daniela Gudith & Ulrich Klocke (Humboldt University, Berlin) [PDF document] This is a paper about productivity, namely about meetings that “steal” from people because of interruptions.
Pipedrive is a sales-focused customer relationship management (CRM) software for sales teams. At its core, Pipedrive helps businesses visualize their entire sales process. The CRM includes useful features, including email syncing, activity reminders and updates, filters, and much more.
Despite its useful features, Pipedrive remains affordable for most small and medium businesses. It’s also easy to use, with a sales pipeline-based interface that is easy to understand even with little to no prior CRM experience.
Pipedrive Compared
Pipedrive made it to our list of the best CRM software for its ability to simplify the sales process. However, we think HubSpotand Salesflareare the best CRM software for most people.
Or are you more interested in a CRM focused on prospect management? With Salesflare, you can automate repetitive tasks like collecting data, populating contacts, and email, giving you more time to focus on mission-critical tasks. Claim your Salesflare 30-day free trial and access all of the CRM’s features.
Apptivo – Best for Adding Services As You Need Them
Pipedrive – Best for Simplifying the Sales Process
EngageBay – Best for Automating Customer Service Tasks
Salesforce – Best for Integrating Multiple Services
Check out our top list of the Best CRM Software to read the full reviews for our top picks.
About Pipedrive
Pipedrive was founded in 2010 with the ambitious goal of creating a CRM for salespeople, developed by salespeople. The company has since served more than 100,000 users in 179 countries. In 2020, Pipedrive received a majority investment from Vista Equity Partners, a global investment firm with more than $58 billion in capital commitments.
Pipedrive primarily focuses on helping users to manage complex sales processes. To this end, the CRM combines lead and deal management, communication tracking, automation, and insights and reporting features to create the ultimate sales-focused platform for sales teams.
Pipedrive Health and Stability
Pipedrive is a reputable global sales-first CRM with over a decade in the tech industry. Its founders boast more than four decades of combined sales experience. Pipedrive has more than 20 investors, having raised more than $90.2 million in funding to date.
Pipedrive is also serious about user security. The software incorporates world-class security infrastructure and offers numerous privacy and security features. Pipedrive has also earned multiple security certificates, including SOC 2 & 3, ISO/IEC 27001:2-13, and the US-EU Privacy Shield. The software is rated 4.8/5 by Trustpilot and 4.5/5 by Capterra, GetApp, and Software Advice.
Pipedrive Pricing
Unlike most CRM software, Pipedrive doesn’t offer a free plan. However, it is an affordable service, with prices starting at $9.90 per user per month for the Essential plan. The cheapest plan offers decent value, including lead, deal, calendar, and pipeline management.
Pipedrive offers four different paid plans depending on what you need from your CRM. The most expensive plan costs $59.90 per user per month. However, it’s still very affordable for an enterprise-grade CRM. In addition, you can enjoy unlimited active deals, custom fields, and reports which are capped on the cheaper plans.
All Pipedrive packages charge a per-user per-month fee. You’ll need to pay a monthly subscription for each user who uses the software. You can opt for annual billing to enjoy discounted prices.
However, each pricing tier has different features and limitations. For instance, you’ll need to upgrade to the Advanced plan to enjoy extra features like full email synchronization, workflow builder, and group emailing with open and click tracking. In addition, this plan costs $19.90 per user per month, up from $9.90 per user per month for the Essential Plans.
Additionally, you increase your active deals, custom fields, and reports limit as you move up the tiers. For example, the Advanced plan offers 10,000 active deals, 100 custom deals, and 30 reports up from 3,000 active deals, 30 custom fields, and 15 reports in the Essential Plan.
Pipedrive also offers add-ons for an extra price. For instance, the LeadBooster starts at $32.50 per user per month, billed annually. The lead booster is a lead generation tool that includes a chatbot, live chat, web forms, prospector, and scheduler.
Pipedrive Pricing Comparison
Pipedrive is one of the more affordable CRMs on the market, despite having additional pipeline management capabilities built on its CRM. You can start with basic lead and deal management for just $9.90 per month.
Most other competitors charge more for features. For example, HubSpot’s pricing starts at $45 per user per month for the Sales Hub, which is comparable to what Pipedrive offers. Similarly, you’ll need to pay at least $12 per user per month for Zoho CRM entry-level plan and at least $29 per user per month for a similar plan from Salesflare.
Overall, Pipedrive offers terrific value for businesses with a tight budget. The only exception is that Pipedrive doesn’t have a free plan. The best you can hope for is the 14-day free trial. Otherwise, Pipedrive isn’t an option if you have a $0 budget.
Conversely, HubSpot offers one of the most feature-rich free CRMs. You get a deal pipeline, contact management, list segmentation, email templates, email scheduling, email tracking and notifications, and more. So you could get more from HubSpot for free compared to Pipedrive’s cheapest plan, as long as you don’t mind keeping the HubSpot branding.
Similarly, FreshSales has a free plan. It offers contact management and contact lifecycle stages. It’s similar to Pipedrive’s pipeline-style approach. It also provides incredible value that doesn’t cost a dime.
Finally, Pipedrive has fewer features than HubSpot and many other alternatives. However, given the low price, it’s a worthwhile tradeoff. Most small businesses don’t want to pay for excessive and complex features they’ll never use in the first place. Pipedrive is hard to beat regarding value for money, especially if you know what you’re getting vs. what you have to sacrifice.
Pipedrive Trials and Guarantees
Pipedrive is conspicuously missing a free tier. However, you get a 14-day free trial for all plans, including the Enterprise plan. The free trial also offers excellent perks.
For example, you can invite as many people as you like to the free trial. You can also switch between the plans as much as you like during the trial period. There are also no free trial usage limits for the Advanced and Professional plans.
Pipedrive CRM Software Review
Pipedrive doesn’t offer the most extensive, complex, or customizable CRM features. However, the available CRM features center around activity-based selling. So whatever you do on Pipedrive, rest assured you’ll keep returning to the tasks and actions that drive sales.
The best part is you don’t have to break the bank to eliminate repetitive administrative tasks that don’t generate sales. Instead, you can easily automate these tasks with Pipedrive, leaving you sufficient time to focus on exploiting opportunities for growth and assessing threats.
Check out our top list of the Best CRM Software, where we review more options for your consideration.
What Makes Pipedrive CRM Software Great
Pipedrive sports a simple and intuitive UI that’s easy to understand.
Straightforward User Interface (UI): Complex CRMs are challenging to implement, especially among salespeople. Pipedrive sports a simple and intuitive UI that’s easy to understand. Plus, you can customize your pipeline to fit your unique sales process.
Additionally, Pipedrive ensures that your sales process is front and center. You can easily view all leads, deals, communications, progress, ownership, and activity history on a unified platform.
Custom columns and filters: Pipedrive is an industry-agnostic CRM. So you don’t have to worry that your sales process doesn’t follow conventional procedures for any industry. Pipedrive lets you add and remove columns, so you only capture the sales data that makes sense for your business.
Additionally, the CRM lets you create custom filters to review the most critical information at a glance. You can set up custom filters with up to 16 conditions for leads, deals, activities, contacts, or products.
Email templates: Like any good CRM, Pipedrive lets your team efficiently manage emails. The platform offers numerous email templates out of the box, so you don’t have to write sales emails from scratch. You can also import your tried and tested custom email templates.
Pipedrive also lets you connect your email to your account so you can view all client communication from Pipedrive’s Deal Detail or Contact views. The integration supports major providers, including Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud, and Microsoft Exchange.
Workflow automation: Pipedrive eliminates repetitive tasks and ensures crucial tasks don’t fall through the cracks. You even get 18 workflow automation templates out of the box. As a result, you can automate creating activities, sending emails, adding deals, moving deals to new stages, and converting leads to deals in just a few clicks.
You can customize the templates or create new workflows from scratch to fit your sales process. You’ll be able to create complex workflows to improve efficiency and productivity.
Visualize Pipeline Stages: There’s a reason why Pipedrive is one of the most popular opportunity management tools. The CRM lets you visualize every stage of the sales process from start to finish. For example, you can quickly view which opportunities are pending, need to be qualified, require a proposal, etc.
Where Pipedrive Falls Short
No Free Plan: Although Pipedrive is affordable, it doesn’t offer a free-forever plan. Competitors like HubSpot and FreshSales provide a free plan.
Limitations on Cheaper Plans: You’ll need to pay more to unlock Pipedrive’s most valuable features. For example, you’ll need to pay for the Advanced plan to unlock workflow automation. Even then, you’re limited to 30 active workflows.
You’ll need to upgrade to the Professional plan to raise the limit to 60 active workflows. Similarly, You’re limited to 10 workflow actions with all plans. In short, you’ll most likely need Professional or Enterprise plans to harness Pipedrive’s true power.
Limited Features: Pipedrive has a strong focus on sales features. However, you’ll be losing out on marketing and customer support tools. In addition, Pipedrive is simply not the all-in-one CRM that many businesses crave.
You’ll likely need more paid integrations to enhance the platform’s marketing and customer service features. Fortunately, the platform easily integrates with the most popular business tools.
Pipedrive CRM Software Compared
Pipedrive is an ideal choice for sales-focused teams on a tight budget. However, HubSpot and Salesflare offer more advanced CRM features, additional integrations, and customer service features.
Here’s how Pipedrive compares to other CRM software on the market:
Apptivo – Best for Adding Services As You Need Them
Pipedrive – Best for Simplifying the Sales Process
EngageBay – Best for Automating Customer Service Tasks
Salesforce – Best for Integrating Multiple Services
Pipedrive Small Business CRM Software Review
Pipedrive also made it to our list of the best small business CRM software. The software is most useful for small businesses looking for robust email marketing capabilities at an affordable price. Additionally, the software is straightforward, making it a terrific choice for a small company implementing CRM for the first time.
Pipedrive is a top contender for a small business that wants to streamline its sales process. It’s an operation CRM, meaning you can automate most repetitive sales tasks. For example, Pipedrive does a terrific job of automating email marketing, keeping track of customer interactions, and identifying prospects.
Pipedrive also simplifies managing people and the daily tasks they’re responsible for. You can easily track important performance metrics, including your team’s deals won, activities completed, and new deals.
However, Pipedrive is limited to sales-focused tools, with fewer marketing tools and features. Furthermore, customer service features are conspicuously missing from this CRM. For example, HubSpot offers sales, marketing, and customer service bundles. Similarly, Salesflare has a good mix of sales, marketing, and customer service features.
Pipedrive Small Business CRM Software Compared
While Pipedrive is a budget-friendly sales-focused CRM, many small businesses may require a more robust solution. Other options that made it on our list of the best small business CRM software include:
HubSpot CRM – Best for Cross-Platform Communication
Salesflare CRM – Best for Supercharging Your Sales Funnel
Freshworks CRM – Best for Lead Generation and Management
It can be challenging to distinguish between customer relationship management and contact management. While CRMs typically offer contact management features, the reverse isn’t always true. So naturally, Pipedrive offers basic contact management capabilities.
Again, Pipedrive’s contact management is focused on sales teams. You get all the crucial features, including custom contact management, contact communication tracking, insights and reporting, and a contact manager app. Check out our full review of the best contact management software on the market.
What Makes Pipedrive Contact Management Great
Pipedrive’s meeting scheduler is simple and intuitive.
Automatically retrieve contact data: Pipedrive has an opt-in app called Smart Contact Data. The app automatically retrieves publicly available information from your contact’s email address or domain name.
You can view Google+ and LinkedIn contact data from the apps information section. The feature also pulls data 200 times every eight hours, and you always have up-to-date information about your valuable contacts.
Easily import customer data: You don’t have to worry about populating customer data from scratch. Pipedrive lets you easily import customer data from web forms, email, social media platforms, and SMS. Then, you can easily manage all customer information in one place.
Customize contact management: Pipedrive lets you segment contacts using unlimited custom labels. The software also has robust filters to help you track performance across all your contacts.
Map contacts: You can integrate Pipedrive with Google Maps to get granular information about your contacts’ locations. For example, you can sort contacts by city, state, or country. The maps view is also helpful for gathering this information at a glance.
Where Pipedrive Contact Management Falls Short
Expensive for stand-alone contact management: The lack of a free plan has been a consistent theme. While Pipedrive is helpful for its CRM, it is costly for simple contact management. Alternatives like Bigin offer a free version.
Bigin’s free version also includes the basic features you’d want from a contact management tool. These include 500 records, one pipeline, and three workflows. You can also make and receive calls, route calls, and set up automated voice responses with the free Bigin plan.
Pipedrive Contact Management Software Compared
Pipedrive has decent contact management features. However, you can get a cheaper solution with more contact management features and high-level customization elsewhere. Our top picks for the best contact management software include:
Streak – Best Contact Management Software for Gmail Users
Pipedrive – Best Contact Management Software for Sales Teams
Maximizer CRM – Best Custom Contact Management Software
Metrilo – Best Contact Management Software for Ecommerce Sites
Nutshell – Best Easy-to-Use Contact Management Software
Pipedrive Lead Management Review
Pipedrive is a sales-oriented CRM, so you can expect built-in lead management features. The software doesn’t disappoint and offers most of the features you need to capture, track, score, route, and nurture your leads.
Most contact and lead management feature overlap. Still, you get the essential lead management features to make Pipedrive a worthwhile investment. Remember to check out our top picks of the best lead management software.
What Makes Pipedrive Lead Management Great
Pipedrive’s web form makes lead management easy.
Activities tracking: Pipedrive’s activity tracking is one of its most robust features. The software lets you keep an eye on your progress for everyday tasks. For example, you can track the number of activities added, completed, or planned.
You can also track activities within your preferred timeframe, such as daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly. You can add custom activities, use a template, and view your activity data as a scorecard, pie chart, or column chart.
Leads inbox: Your CRM can quickly get cluttered with prequalified leads that aren’t ready for the sales pipeline. Pipedrive offers a handy lead’s inbox where you can store potential leads until you’re ready to move forward. Then, you can add them to your pipeline when you’re prepared to proceed.
Deal rotting: Again, Pipedrive ensures that no leads fall through the cracks. The Deal Rotting feature lets you define a timeframe for inactivity. Then, any rotting details will appear red in your Pipeline view.
It is a handy feature for keeping track of neglected deals. You can restore the deal in your pipeline by scheduling a new activity.
Where Pipedrive Lead Management Falls Short
Lead capture as an add-on service: Lead capture is a rudimentary feature many tools offer for free. However, you’ll need to purchase the LeadBooster to create, share, and embed lead capture forms on your website.
Similarly, you’ll have to pay for the LeadBooster if you want a live chat, chatbot, and prospector functionality. But, again, this add-on costs at least $32.50 per company per month, on top of your paid Pipedrive subscription.
Lacks native lead scoring: Lead scoring is a primary lead management feature that is conspicuously missing from Pipedrive. You don’t get lead scoring even with the most expensive plan. Instead, you’ll need to use a third-party tool that will likely increase your software stack’s cost.
Pipedrive Lead Management Software Compared
Pipedrive offers most of the features you need to manage your leads. However, most of these features are either behind a paywall or require add-ons and third-party integrations. Our top picks for the best lead management software include:
HubSpot CRM– Best free lead management software for solopreneurs and growing sales teams
Zoho CRM– Best lead management software for marketing automation
Pipedrive– Best lead management software for real estate professionals
noCRM.io– Best standalone lead management software for small businesses and startups
Salesforce Sales Cloud – Most robust lead management softwareforce.com/eu/products/s for large enterprises
Pipedrive Sales Tools Review
Pipedrive’s sales tools span CRM, contact management, and lead management. It’s not surprising since Pipedrive is specially developed for sales teams. Overall, it’s a valuable sales CRM with multiple noteworthy features.
Pipedrive’s star feature is its pipeline view. The software comes prepopulated with the expected sales stages, including Deals In, Contact Made, Needs Defined, Proposal Made, and Negotiations Started. However, you can customize these columns to reflect your unique sales process.
You can also create multiple pipelines. You can customize the stages for each pipeline. You can also edit your pipelines. It’s a terrific tool for organizing and visualizing complex sales processes.
Pipedrive also offers robust automation. For example, you can automate most sales process stages, including email marketing, scheduling sales calls, and moving deals along the pipeline. The software also provides personalized tips for automating your workflows.
You also get additional sales tools like contact management, reporting dashboard, integrations, and security. Although Pipedrive offers fewer features and less customization than HubSpot and other Sales CRM, it is still an excellent choice for sales teams that don’t want to get bogged down with complex features and incomprehensible workflows.
Pipedrive Sales Tools Compared
Pipedrive offers the essential sales tools you need to drive more sales and automate repetitive daily tasks. However, the platform lacks advanced customization, in-depth reporting and analytics, and numerous native integrations.
Here’s a quick look at how Pipedrive compares to our top picks of the best sales tools:
Salesforce – Best for automating the sales process
Pipedrive is a decent sales-first CRM that simplifies complex sales processes. It is affordable, easy to use, and offers all the primary features you need to increase sales. Its pipeline view also keeps sales-driven tasks and activities foremost in your mind.
You can get more complex workflows and automation with alternatives like HubSpot. Still, Pipedrive is a terrific entry-level CRM for small businesses and sales reps. You can always upgrade to a more robust tool when you outgrow Pipedrive’s functionality.
Trello is one of the most widely used project management software solutions for a reason. Its simple Kanban setup makes it easy for new users as well as more seasoned Agile veterans. Millions of teams trust Trello with their projects, especially when you can have unlimited team members for free.
This software has a visual layout that shows your task cards and assigned team members all on the same page. The platform works especially well for simpler projects and smaller teams. It helps prevent bottlenecks and promotes organization and productivity.
The 9 Best Project Management Software Services
We researched several project management software solutions to bring you the best ones to explore for your team. Zoho Projects earns its place as the best overall project management software for its user-friendly interface and extensive tools that have what you need for projects of any size and complexity. You can see the full list here.
Zoho Projects gives you a solid foundation with its easy setup, and it doesn’t take long to learn the software. The platform’s customizability and extensive tools make it an excellent tool for businesses of any size. With so many options, from workflow rules and automation to time tracking to task management, you can build a dashboard unique to your team’s needs and get started on your project in no time.
Zoho Projects’ task management tools give you more options than most project management software with tools for work breakdown, issue tracking, task views, sprints, and project baselines. With custom fields, views, and functions, your team can prioritize tasks with a clear view of what needs to get done next. Plus, Zoho Projects makes it easy to automate repetitive tasks and free up team members for more focused tasks.
Unfortunately, Zoho Projects doesn’t provide pre-built templates, but you can still build your own to suit your team and projects. Your team also has plenty of communication channels within the software, including chat, mentions, forums, and document collaboration.
Zoho’s flexibility and customization puts it in the top spot for project management.
How Zoho Projects Compares to Trello
Zoho Projects has many more features than Trello, but part of Trello’s strength lies in its simplicity. However, if you’re looking for something to cover any size project with flexible team sizes, Zoho Projects is a good bet.
Trello is better for small teams and doesn’t have the same level of adaptability as Zoho Projects. It functions as a Kanban board setup with a few extras and add-ons, while Zoho Projects comes with extensive features built-in. In other words, with Zoho Projects you don’t have to go searching for too many things you’ll need to increase productivity.
Zoho Projects is the exact same price as Trello, with a free plan and a $5 base plan that you pay by the user. The next step up costs $10 on both plans, and Trello’s only advantage here is that it offers a fourth plan. At the same time, that plan doesn’t offer much that you can’t get with Zoho Projects.
Monday.com—Best for Customizing Your Project Workflow
Monday.com allows you to customize your dashboard and workflow more than any other software on our list. You can create your own templates to fit your project, color-code your columns and team members, and use drag-and-drop editing to move tasks to create a setup that works for your team. If you want a low-effort startup, Monday.com also has over 200 templates in its library that you can choose based on your project and industry.
This project management software prioritizes communication and collaboration. It lets multiple team members edit a single document and leave comments and suggestions. You can also message team members individually or as a group to stay updated on projects. With the software’s live updates, you can even get alerts to see in real time when someone comments or assigns work.
Monday.com’s Gantt and Kanban charts help you keep track of your tasks visually. Its different views help coordinate your team and prevent bottlenecks by organizing your workflow according to project goals. Whatever Monday.com lacks, you can find in one of its hundreds of integrations.
Explore all of Monday.com’s industry templates.
How Monday.com Compares to Trello
Above all, Monday.com excels in communication and collaboration compared to Trello. While Trello allows you to comment on cards, mention team members, and effectively assign tasks, Monday.com goes several steps further. It also offers much better automation capabilities.
Monday.com may be more expensive than Trello, but that’s because it offers much more. It has significantly more views, with Gantt charts, timelines, calendars, and a Kanban setup that rivals Trello’s. It offers a free plan for individuals, but its most basic package starts at $8 per person per month for a minimum of three users.
If you have a large team, Monday.com will serve you better than Trello. Despite Trello’s unlimited user feature, Monday.com is built for more complexity.
Wrike stands out among the rest for giving marketing teams everything they need to stay on track. It has extensive tools to help with campaign management, content creation, event management, and more. Your team can collaborate and keep track of campaign results while using Wrike’s templates designed for creating content to take your team from the idea and brief stage to the moment you hit publish.
Wrike offers plenty of reporting and analytics, which is a necessity for marketing teams to ensure their campaigns are working. Wrike updates its analytics every 15 minutes so that you always have the most updated information. Plus, its department-specific solutions mean that you can choose templates made specifically for the kind of work your team does.
Wrike has more than 400 integrations and over 100 automations to make your team’s lives easier and streamline your workflow. However, its enterprise-level features also mean that Wrike works better if you know what you’re doing before you get started.
Stay up to date with Wrike’s analytics and reports.
How Wrike Compares to Trello
Wrike is much more complicated to use than Trello, but it also comes with more specific functions. While Trello’s Kanban boards and collaboration features work on a general scale, Wrike’s industry-specific templates and marketing compatibility give it a leg up in those areas.
Wrike coordinates everything you need into three panes, unlike Trello, which keeps it all on one page. These panes make it easy to view and manage your projects, assign tasks, and focus on the tasks you’re currently working on. This setup allows you to come together with your team while staying focused on your own tasks, as opposed to viewing everyone’s tasks along with your own.
Wrike is much more expensive than Trello, with its cheapest package after the free plan starting at $9.80 and a Business package beginning at $24.80. That’s almost twice as expensive as Trello, but Wrike gives you significantly more project management options. It also offers a free trial.
Favro was built for small teams with big goals. Its agility makes it ideal for teams that work in SaaS and the games industry, as both are constantly changing. Its Agile tools present all your tasks and information upfront, so you can work efficiently with a visual system.
Favro makes it easy to collaborate and communicate with simple file sharing, organization, and progress views. It shows any edits from team members in real time, so everyone is always working from the same document version. The software allows you to quickly transfer work between departments when necessary so that no matter where everyone works from, they have access to the information they need to boost productivity.
The software lets you create complex rules for automation to help your team stay on track with the more technical projects. Its integrations, including GitHub and GitLab, only serve to streamline your workflow even further.
Favro has robust collaboration tools.
How Favro Compares to Trello
Favro and Trello have one thing in common—they’re both built for small teams. However, Favro takes a more niche approach with its focus on tech and gaming. Favro’s Standard and Enterprise packages especially offer more technical features, like API calls and OAuth with Google and GitHub. The main difference between Trello and Favro is how you use them, and more technical industries probably won’t get everything they need with Trello.
Favro looks more expensive at first glance, but it’s priced not based on the number of seats but by offering a set price up to a certain number of users. Its Lite package starts at $10.20 per month for up to 10 users. Standard goes up to $13.60, and Enterprise begins at $25.50.
When you need to bring your remote team together, Teamwork is the place to do it. It thrives on visibility with project boards that users can navigate seamlessly, templates for fast setup, and excellent communication features.
It has packages built for all team sizes, and its convenient chat feature allows for a check-in whenever you need it. Teamwork’s charts show project milestones with upcoming, current, and late tasks so that as the project manager, you know who’s on track and who might be getting overwhelmed.
Teamwork also has an entire software solution dedicated to marketing. It combines your projects with your team’s client work to allow for better communication about marketing projects while encouraging productivity with time tracking.
Unify your remote team with Teamwork.
How Teamwork Compares to Trello
Both Trello and Teamwork are excellent project management solutions for remote teams. Teamwork offers more specific resources, and it has features that Trello lacks, including project and time tracking. It also has more advanced automations and organization tools to help cut down on busy work.
Teamwork and Trello both have free plans. Teamwork’s Deliver package starts at $9.99 per user per month and its Grow package begins at $17.99. However, because of its five-user minimum, you’ll pay a lot more than that.
Teamwork adds a few features outside of Trello’s wheelhouse, too, including budgeting and billing. Trello also doesn’t let you communicate through chat with teammates without integrations, which can make things less convenient when you have a remote team.
TeamGantt—Best Project Management Software for Beginners
TeamGantt uses Gantt charts to give your team a visual platform to track their projects. Its simple drag-and-drop interface lets you order your tasks and change timelines in minutes while keeping all your projects in one transparent space.
TeamGantt makes managing resources efficient with its availability tab that tells you who’s available for more work. You can also share progress and documents with stakeholders to ensure tasks progress as intended. If your team starts neglecting any tasks, this software identifies the problem areas with project health reports and portfolio views.
TeamGantt offers a different approach to productivity boards.
How TeamGantt Compares to Trello
TeamGantt and Trello are similar in that they both focus exclusively on one specific type of chart. TeamGantt’s free version offers far fewer tools than Trello’s with only the most basic features available.
When comparing these two solutions, they work much better together than on their own. Combining the two can enhance their capabilities, as on their own they’re more suited for small teams and simple projects.
TeamGantt costs much more than Trello’s $5 base price, coming in at $19.90 per month for one user, plus unlimited guests, on its Standard plan. Its Advanced plan starts at $24.45 per month.
Celoxis works best for users who already know how to use software like it. It’s got a longer learning curve because it handles more complicated projects for enterprise businesses. It allows you to see your team members and delegate work based on their availability and skills, and the software even estimates your revenue per project.
With Celoxis, you can manage your accounting, resources, and portfolio. Its comprehensive project management features, including various board views, issue tracking, and risk management, allow your team to stay on task. It also makes sharing project reports easy by sending them directly to the people who need to see them.
Celoxis has advanced enterprise features for large teams.
How Celoxis Compares to Trello
Celoxis and Trello are both project management software solutions that include Kanban boards, but the similarities stop there. Celoxis has a much more advanced interface designed for companies much larger than Trello can accommodate.
Celoxis costs $25 per user per month for its cloud-based version, but you can also pay a one-time $450 per person fee for its on-premise version. Above all, Celoxis provides more data than any other project management software. Remember, too, that this software is enterprise software regardless of your package, so it’s fairly affordable for its tools.
LiquidPlanner adapts to project changes well, which makes it ideal for engineering teams. Its forecasting engine predicts outcomes for your projects based on current progress and project goals. It also dives deep into budgeting and risk to reduce errors and boost productivity.
The software balances your team’s workload by showing availability and each team member’s current schedule. With priority-driven boards, LiquidPlanner ensures that each person works on the most important tasks while reducing uncertainty.
LiquidPlanner pivots fast for teams in tech.
How LiquidPlanner Compares to Trello
LiquidPlanner is a much more advanced and flexible platform than Trello. Where Trello struggles to pivot, LiquidPlanner was made for it. Trello has no predictive capabilities, but LiquidPlanner teams rely on them, and they’re a major function of this software.
LiquidPlanner costs a lot more than Trello at $15 a month per person with a five-member minimum. Its professional package is $25 per person and the Ultimate package starts at $35 per person.
We just recently published the 300th CodePen Spark. Marie joins me on the show, as she leads up the creation of the vast majority of Spark newsletters. We get into things like why we do it, how we create it, how we send it, and things we’ve learned along the way sending a newsletter of this magnitude. We have some interesting failsafe procedures in place. Plus we get into some of the analytic numbers behind what we’re doing. Here’s to another upcoming many hundred more!
Notion is an amazing collaborative tool that not only helps organize your company’s information but helps with project management as well. We know that all too well here at CodePen, as we use Notion for countless business tasks. Learn more and get started for free at notion.com. Take your first step toward an organized, happier team, today.
Are you looking for the latest marketing statistics and trends?
The marketing industry is always evolving. It’s important for your business to be up-to-date so you can stay competitive.
In this article, we’ve gathered tons of digital marketing statistics for you, all in one place. With this data, you can see what’s missing from your marketing strategy.
The Ultimate List of Digital Marketing Statistics (2022)
We’ve divided these marketing statistics into several different categories. You can jump straight to the section you’re most interested in using the links below.
48% of companies that have a content marketing strategy use blogging.
The most popular blog content formats are how-to articles (77%), followed by news and trends (49%), and guides and eBooks (47%).
B2B blogs with educational content get 52% more organic traffic than B2B blogs with company-focused content.
The leading content marketing types used by B2C marketers are blog posts/short articles (83%), email newsletters (74%), and pre-produced videos (62%).
For B2B marketers, webinars, online courses, and virtual events were the content types that produced the best content marketing results in 2022.
80% of marketers who produce audio content and podcasts planned to invest the same amount or more in 2022.
Only 16% of marketers say they’ve invested in audio chat rooms like Twitter Spaces and Clubhouse.
38% of marketers planned to include infographics in their content creation for the first time in 2022.
60% of marketers report that content marketing generates demand/leads.
70% of marketers say that content marketing helps to educate the audience.
60% of marketers say that it helps build loyalty with existing clients/customers.
76% of content marketers use organic traffic as a key metric for measuring content success. Only 22% use backlinks.
The purpose of content marketing is to create and share relevant information to attract and engage a target audience that’s interested in your product or service.
Blogging has been a staple of content marketing for a long time. What’s important to note here is that the most popular blog format is how-to articles. Blogs with educational content get 52% more organic traffic than blogs with company-focused content.
This shows how important it is to provide valuable content that solves the pain points of your target audience, instead of just promoting your company.
The global pandemic also encouraged marketers to try new strategies. As we shifted away from in-person events, smart marketing teams used virtual events like webinars and online courses to attract and engage their audience.
Search Engine Optimization Statistics
Google currently has 83.84% of the search engine market share.
Google receives over 105,191 searches per second.
53% of shoppers say they always do research using a search engine before deciding to purchase a product.
50% of search queries are 4 words or more.
Around 8% of search queries are phrased as questions.
67% of clicks go to the first 5 results displayed in search engines.
The #1 result in Google gets about 32% of all clicks.
Only 3.4% of clicks on Google search results go to AdWords or paid listings.
90% of web pages get zero organic traffic from Google.
Google uses over 200 factors in its algorithm for ranking websites including keywords, content length, page speed, image optimization, mobile usability, and more.
Organic search results that rank on page 1 of Google contain an average of 1,447 words.
71% of marketers say using strategic keywords was their number one strategy for SEO.
According to a HubSpot survey, over 50% of respondents say keyword rankings and organic traffic are the top ways they measure the success of their SEO strategies.
49% of marketers report that organic search has the best ROI of any marketing channel.
By looking at these stats, it’s easy to see why SEO is so important. With proper WordPress SEO, you can get more visitors to your website via search results. And 49% of marketers say that organic search has the best return on investment (ROI).
The fact that 90% of web pages get zero traffic from Google could be because they’re not properly optimized.
To optimize your site and improve your search engine rankings, we recommend using All in One SEO (AIOSEO). It’s the best SEO plugin and toolkit on the market.
AIOSEO will analyze your entire website and identify any critical errors that could be harming your rankings, and provide actionable tips for improvement. Plus, the TruSEO on-page analysis makes it easy to optimize your posts and pages for your focus keywords.
47% of emails are opened or discarded based solely on their subject line.
Personalized subject lines are 22% more likely to be opened.
Subject lines with a sense of urgency and exclusivity get a 22% higher open rate.
Adding a popup on your blog can increase your email list by list by 1.375%.
15.8% of all emails go missing or have been caught by popular spam filters.
These statistics show that email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to communicate with your audience. A marketing ROI of 4400% is amazing!
But, it’s important to remember that 77% of ROI comes from using email automation to send segmented, targeted, and triggered email campaigns. When campaigns are personalized to a user’s preferences or actions they’ve taken on your site, they’re more likely to convert.
If you’re interested in using email automation to boost conversions and improve ROI, check out our picks of the best email marketing services.
Another interesting stat is that 15.8% of all emails go missing.
To prevent any of your important messages from being sent to the spam folder, we recommend using one of these SMTP service providers. STMP service providers are specially configured to make sure your emails reach users’ inboxes.
Social Media Marketing Statistics
The average social media user has accounts on more than 8 social media platforms.
Users spend on average around 2 hours and 29 minutes on social media every day.
43% of people use social media to make purchasing decisions.
Facebook is still the most popular social media platform, with 2.9 billion monthly active users. YouTube is in second place with 2.2 billion monthly active users.
Other social networks that land in the list of the top 10 include Instagram (2 billion monthly active users), TikTok (1 billion monthly active users), Pinterest (444 million monthly active users), and Twitter (217 million monthly active users).
Over 90% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for organic social marketing.
98.3% of Facebook users access the app on mobile phones.
The majority of marketers say they post on most social media platforms 4 to 6 times a week.
84% of marketers target Millennials as part of their social media strategy. This makes sense because 44% of Millennials use social media on a daily basis.
Marketers report that the number one goal for their social media marketing efforts is to advertise their products or services, followed by increasing brand awareness.
27% of marketers say that the biggest challenge they face on social media is creating engaging content.
82% of marketers say they repurpose content across social media channels.
80% of marketers say funny content is the most effective on social media.
68% of marketers’ companies work with influencers on social media.
64% of marketers say they invest in building social media communities.
With billions of people on social media, it’s no surprise that businesses integrate their marketing strategies with these popular platforms.
But, the biggest challenge marketers face is creating social media content that’s engaging for internet users. Content that’s too focused on promoting your product or service likely won’t get the engagement you’re looking for.
That’s why marketers use strategies like repurposing helpful blog content, sharing funny memes, and working with influencers.
You can also create a social media community, which is an easy way to build a highly engaged audience around your brand. We created our own Facebook group called WPBeginner Engage which currently has nearly 90,000 active members.
Video Marketing Statistics
The current average viewer spends 100 minutes per day watching digital videos.
86% of businesses use video as a marketing tool.
Video is expected to be the most invested in B2B marketing channel in 2022.
34.4% of marketers create new videos monthly, while 33% create new videos every week.
The most commonly created types of video are explainer videos (74%).
Other top video types are social media videos, presentation videos, video testimonials, video ads, sales videos, and product demos.
96% of people have watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service.
Videos less than one minute long receive the highest average engagement rate at 50%.
82% of marketers say video has helped them increase dwell time.
94% of marketers say video has helped them increase their audience’s understanding of a product or service.
86% of marketers say video has helped them generate leads.
81% of marketers say video has helped them directly increase sales.
49% of marketers say video has helped them reduce support calls.
Over 80% of marketers agree that video can help your business generate more traffic, leads, and sales.
The best part is that adding video to your marketing strategy is easy and affordable. Anyone with a smartphone and the internet can produce quality video content.
Plus, you can upload your videos to YouTube and automatically display them on your WordPress site using a plugin like Smash Balloon.
Smash Balloon’s YouTube Feed Pro lets you easily display customizable YouTube feeds on your website. This is the perfect way to showcase social proof and boost user engagement on your WordPress site.
50% of marketers consider lead generation a top priority in their marketing campaigns.
61% of marketers consider generating traffic and leads to be their biggest challenge.
3% of your target audience is actively buying, 56% aren’t ready, and 40% are getting ready to begin.
Content marketing is 3X more effective at generating leads than traditional marketing. It also costs 62% less.
B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads than those that don’t.
74% of companies use web forms for lead generation, with 49.7% stating their online forms are their highest converting lead generation tool.
More than half (53%) of marketers say webinars are the top-of-the-funnel format that generates the most high-quality leads.
53% of marketers say email has been the most effective channel for early-stage lead generation.
Increasing your number of landing pages from 10 to 15 increases leads by 55%.
Websites with 40+ landing pages generate 1200% the number of leads than those with just one.
53% of content marketers use interactive content in their lead generation efforts.
79% of top-performing businesses have been using marketing automation to generate leads for three or more years.
Lead generation is the process of getting people interested in your business and gradually moving them through your sales funnel.
At WPBeginner, we recommend creating a landing page for each of your lead generation campaigns. This helps your website visitors to focus on the offer in front of them with no distractions, making them more likely to convert.
The fact that websites with 40+ landing pages generate 1200% more leads proves just how effective landing pages are.
The easiest way to create high-converting landing pages is with SeedProd. It’s the best drag and drop page builder for WordPress. Plus, it comes with hundreds of customizable landing page templates to get you started quickly.
According to marketing spend stats, on average, for every $92 spent on acquiring a customer, just $1 is spent on trying to convert them.
68% of small businesses don’t have a structured or documented conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategy.
Only about 22% of businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates.
The average landing page conversion rate is 2.35%.
The best websites have conversion rates of 11.45% on average.
Using visual content like videos on landing pages can improve conversions by 86%.
The mean conversion rate for online forms sits at approximately 21.5%. Although, this number varies depending on the industry.
Multi-step forms in WordPress can lead to 300% more conversions.
50% of marketers who use lead magnets to encourage signups report higher conversion rates.
eBooks are the most popular lead magnet amongst subscribers, with 27.7% of marketers using them.
Personalized calls to action (CTAs) convert 42% more visitors than non-personalized ones.
50% of people say that case studies are the accelerant for moving people through their sales funnel.
A 1-second delay in your site speed can reduce conversions by up to 7%.
Asking for a phone number has the worst impact on conversion rates.
The average mobile conversion rate is around 1.53% compared to 4.14% on desktop.
A/B testing is the most used method of conversion rate optimization.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take your desired action, whether it be filling out a form or buying a product.
The statistics above will give you smart ideas that can help you convert more of your website traffic.
For example, you can speed up your website to improve the customer experience and increase conversions by up to 7%.
68% of marketers stated that paid advertising is “very important” or “extremely important” to their overall marketing strategy.
Search advertising spending is projected to exceed $137 million by 2022.
eMarketer predicts that PPC (pay-per-click) ad spending will reach over $258 billion in 2022.
The typical cost per click for search ads in 2022 is in the range of $2 to $4.
Industries with the highest average cost per click are attorneys and legal services, dentists and dental services, and home improvement at $6-8 per click.
80% of brands use paid social media advertising.
Facebook is the most popular platform for companies to buy social media ads.
26% of marketers say that they’re seeing the best direct ROI from ads on Facebook.
Ad placement and audience targeting by demographics are the top ways that advertisers drive more demand.
Mobile advertising has been rapidly growing in the past couple of years but is expected to slow down to about 10.4% by the end of 2022.
Video ad spending is expected to show an annual growth rate of 4.9% between 2020 and 2024.
Paid search ads and social media ads are commonly used by marketers to increase brand awareness, attract customers, and generate revenue.
Facebook is the most popular platform for buying social media ads and 26% of marketers are seeing the best direct ROI from it.
This makes sense because Facebook has the highest monthly active users at 2.9 billion, so it has the highest potential ad reach.
Affiliate marketing generates 16% of all online orders in the US and Canada.
Affiliate marketing is considered a crucial skill by 40% of online marketers.
In the United States, the total spending by customers that were referred by an affiliate is expected to reach $8.2 billion in 2022.
Over 80% of brands and 84% of publishers run an affiliate program.
Affiliate marketing is the #2 marketing tactic that publishers use to generate revenue, behind Google AdSense.
The top 3 affiliate categories are Fashion, Sports/Outdoors, and Health & Beauty.
Marketers use affiliate programs at all stages of the customer journey: 83% targeted consumers during the discovery and awareness phase, 79% during conversion or purchase, and 79% to create ongoing customer engagement.
Affiliate marketing conversion rates average between 0.5% to 1%.
Affiliate programs generate between 15% and 30% of revenue for advertisers.
40% of US merchants consider affiliate programs to be their best client acquisition channel.
With affiliate marketing, you can get your biggest fans, customers, and other marketers to promote your products for you.
Affiliate marketing programs generate between 15% – 30% of revenue for businesses. It’s clear that this is a marketing strategy you don’t want to ignore.
42% of marketers plan to increase their budget in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR).
33% of marketers who don’t use automation or artificial intelligence (AI) plan to in 2022.
34% of retail customers would be comfortable speaking with customer service through AI chatbots instead of a live customer support representative.
64% of businesses believe that chatbots will allow them to provide a more customized support experience for their customers.
93% of marketers love gamification.
88% of B2B marketers plan on converting 10 to 30% of their material to interactive content.
Marketers are still interested in experimenting with technology like virtual reality, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence.
These marketing trends might seem too complicated and expensive for small business marketing budgets.
But, small business owners can easily use live chat software with artificial intelligence chatbots to automate conversations with prospects and customers.
In this show, Stephen and Chris get to talk about an internal technical detail we were improving in our database, which led to a public-facing feature for y’all. The idea is that all (most, anyway) database tables should have a deleted_at column. When you query against them, under regular circumstances, any rows that have a non-null value will be filtered out. This is the concept of “soft” delete. It’s not really gone from the database, it just behaves like it is. This has two clear benefits:
Deleting is super fast, it’s just manipulating a single value.
It opens the door for un-deleting things that perhaps were mistakenly deleted.
This approach can be slightly more work. You’ll need to offer a way to truly wipe data completely for users. You’ll probably want a reaper to clean up data that has been deleted long enough. You’ll need to comply with regulations about data deletion. You might have to build un-deletion features. You might need to be doing that filtering yourself throughout the app. It’s work, but it’s generally worth it.
In our case, because we soft delete everything on CodePen now, the Deleted Items area of Your Work now works for all Item Types (Pens, Collections, and Projects). Before, it only worked for Pens, and even there it was a little messy as it didn’t retain the URL slug or comments and such — now it does.
Memberful is a best-in-class membership software used by the web’s biggest creators. If you’re building a membership website for a client, Memberful handles the hard stuff so you can complete your builds quickly and your clients can focus on creating content while earning revenue with ease. It seamlessly integrates with popular tools like WordPress, Mailchimp, and Discord, so they can reach and monetize their existing audience. Memberful maintains GraphQL API, webhooks, and OAuth Single Sign on to make integration even easier.
In the first article of this two-parter, we have covered a crucial yet unresolved problem in UI design concerning toggle buttons. Getting across which option is active isn’t easy. There are many visual cue types to choose from: font style, colors, and outlines, just to name a few. To assess which visual cues communicate effectively the option toggled on, we have conducted a thorough case study with over 100 real users and 27 visual cues. Read on to learn about our findings and their implications to take away when designing toggle buttons of your own.
Case Study Results
Let’s see what we found out about effective ways to put an emphasis on a button to make it clear that it’s active. But first, a quick summary of our participants.
Participant Review
After our data collection was completed, we first had to review the quality of participants in our study. This review has led to the disqualification of some participants, mainly those who have shown signs of choosing the answers at random 50-50, a clear sign of not making an effort to complete the tasks genuinely. After we removed these offenders, we were left with the following numbers of participants per study:
Study type:
5-Second Test
20-Second Test
Group:
1
2
1
2
Number of participants:
28
29
30
27
Note:These numbers are still higher than the number of results that we set out to collect as the minimum since we accounted for a dropout rate of up to 16% while launching our recruitment online.
Metric For Comparing Utility Of Visual Cues
We conducted four studies with the tool Five Second Test. Two with a 5-second time limit and two with a 20-second limit. We needed a metric that could objectively compare toggles to each other and how a specific toggle fared in 5-second and 20-second test variants.
We created a weighted metric, which we named the Success-Confidence score. The Success-Confidence score is derived from the number of correct answers (according to expectations) combined with the Likert scale answers to the question: “How sure do you feel about your answer?”
First, we calculate the average confidence for correct and incorrect answers separately and for every toggle. Average confidence can range from 0 to 1 based on how participants answered the Likert scale question. For example, if every respondent who chose the correct toggle side were to respond with “Absolutely sure” on the Likert, the average confidence for the correct answers for the given toggle would be 1.
We then used the calculated average confidence for correct and incorrect answers and calculated the Success-Confidence score of the toggle by using the following formula:
Success-Confidence score = (correct_num correct_conf) - (incorrect_num incorrect_conf)
correct_num -> number of correct answers
incorrect_num -> number of incorrect answers for toggle
correct_conf -> average confidence with correct answers
incorrect_conf -> average confidence with incorrect answers
Since we had different numbers of participants available for each test, we normalized the Success-Confidence score by dividing it by the total number of participants for the given test. Resulting in the following formula:
Normalized Success-Confidence score = Success-Confidence score / number of participants
The scale of normalized Success-Confidence score is -1 to 1. Minus 1 designates a toggle where all participants provide wrong answers with high confidence, and 1 designates a toggle where all respondents answer correctly with high confidence.
Evaluation Of Research Questions
RQ 1: Bold text
A low error rate of 1.7% and a high Success-Confidence score of 0.86 confirmed our expectation that emboldened text in a toggle button makes options perceived as active compared to regular text. This version of the toggle even performed well enough to earn the third best average rank among all the evaluated toggles. Based on this result, we can safely pronounce bold text in the active button as a functional yet simple solution for communicating which toggle option is selected. This knowledge should be particularly useful if all your toggle buttons use fonts of equal weight, as is often the case.
RQ 2: Text size
We tested four toggles with varying size differences between the text in the active and inactive buttons. As predicted, the toggle where the font size difference was barely noticeable performed the worst with an error rate of almost 15% and a confidence score of only 0.63. Compared to that, the toggle with the greatest difference in font size was perceived with an error rate of only 4.4% and a confidence score of 0.81, which are both significant improvements when compared to the smallest difference. The performance of the two middle toggles was set between these two extremes. Unexpectedly, the toggle with the second smallest difference slightly outperformed the toggle with the second greatest difference. However, this irregularity is small enough to be explained by noise in the data.
Since the performance rate grew in general with the font size, our expectation of “greater size difference means better visual cue for toggles” was confirmed. However, since using a significantly bigger font to represent the active state can prove to be visually unappealing, we suggest using bold text instead. Bold text is not only easier to include in your design, but also performs better.
RQ 3: Contrast of inverted colors in text labels
The black & white and orange & blue inverted color combinations proved to be some of the worst performing toggles we’ve tested, with error rates of 19.3% and 23.7% and confidence of only 0.56 and 0.41, respectively. The low confidence levels suggest that even the respondents who managed to select the correct answer weren’t confident at all in their answers. Our prediction of the darker colors perceived as active was confirmed by the error rate of less than 0.5 in both cases. However, the low confidence deteriorates the strength of the lower error rates. This means that our hypothesis that inverted font colors are an ineffective visual cue was confirmed. Try to avoid using colors of the same visual importance, as also seen in research question number 8 which concerns toggle backgrounds.
RQ 4: Cultural perception of red vs. green in text labels
A seemingly surprising (although not completely unexpected) result came from the toggle with red and green text. The error rate for this toggle is 32.5% and confidence only 0.32, making it one of the worst performing toggles overall, with an average rank of 24.67. This result suggests that the red/green combination not only fails to improve the results compared to other color couples but actually makes it worse. The possible explanation could be that the green color was perceived as a switch, not a sign of an active state. Red-green colorblindness is also the most common type of color vision deficiency, which is reason enough not to use this visual cue, as wrong answers in our experiment also reflect.
RQ 5: Color vs. black/white in text labels
The combination of colorful and white labels performed well (avg rank of 9.33). The toggle which was surprisingly problematic was the combination of color and black. This toggle with an error rate of 14% and confidence of only 0.59 shows that the participants weren’t able to pick the active side reliably. We predict that this phenomenon was most likely caused by the visual strength of black text compared to colored text, regardless of hue. Therefore, simply distinguishing active and inactive toggles by turning inactive black text colorful isn’t recommended. For better color-based approaches, simply continue reading our findings for the next research questions.
RQ 6: Primary color vs. neutral color (shades of gray) in text labels
Compared to the toggles from the immediately preceding research question, this toggle represents a middle ground between the white and black inactive options with its gray color. This was reflected in the resulting average rank of 12, which is better than the color vs. black option, but worse than color vs. white.
RQ 7: Different saturation of the same color in text labels
The last text color variant of toggles we tested also confirmed our theory. The difference in saturation was a strong enough cue to secure satisfying results (an error rate of 8.7% with a confidence of 0.77). This suggests that the respondents reliably selected the correct option. Note that while the error rate was comparable to primary vs. neutral color, different saturations of the same color inspired higher confidence. Therefore, the preferable option is to use a lower saturation of the same color instead of greyscale for inactive toggle buttons.
RQ 8: Contrast of inverted colors in the background and RQ 9: Cultural perception of red and green in the background
The toggles defined in these hypotheses were counterparts to the toggles from hypotheses 3 and 4. We kept the color pairs the same, but this time we filled the toggle’s backgrounds with the color instead of coloring the text. The results with background colors followed the same pattern as with the text, with the black-&-white combination performing the best, the orange-&-blue coming second and red-&-green taking last place. However, compared to the colored text variants, the filling variants performed better than their text alternative (error rate improvement by 5-8%).
What may seem counterintuitive at first is that although black-&-white filling has a stronger potential to stimulate confusion due to dark/light mode settings, it still performed better than black-&-white text alternative or inverted colors with hue. How a light/dark mode setting would affect the results for this specific toggle could bear further investigation. However, for building an optimal toggle, it might be unnecessary, considering the overall better results achieved by other types of toggle backgrounds.
RQ 10: Different saturations of the same color in the background
Different shades of orange achieved an error rate of 9.7% and a normalized Success-Confidence score of 0.72. Compared to that, different shades of gray had an error rate of 15% and a normalized Success-Confidence score of 0.63 for the gray toggle — both overall decent scores which proved these visual cues as usable. The improvement of the orange color over the greyscale variant has been significant (resulting in an average rank of 13.67 compared to 18). It is important to note that even though the orange variant performed better than the gray one, their performance was still average at best. If background colors are used in this form, we recommend combining them with another visual cue.
RQ 11: Saturated colors and grayscale colors in the background
As expected, the version where the inactive button was a lighter shade of gray performed better (6.1% error rate and 0.79 confidence) than the darker gray version (12.3% error rate and 0.66 confidence). It also outperformed the orange version from hypothesis 10 and overall performed well, earning the average rank of 6.67 (sixth best). The more saturated version was placed in the bottom half but still managed to outperform the grayscale version from hypothesis 10 (average rank 15 compared to 18). The results of these two hypotheses suggest that if we want to use a saturated color fill to denote activity, it is best coupled with low saturated gray.
RQ 12: Inverted design of buttons
We believed that the inversion of design would be more confusing to the users than the saturations described in hypotheses 10 and 11. With a 6.1% error rate and 0.78 Success-Confidence score, this toggle ranks just below the best saturation variant (saturated color and less saturated gray), scoring seventh place overall with an average rank of 7.33. However, it is important to note that this toggle performed significantly worse in the 20-second test compared to the 5-second test (a drop of 9 between the rankings). This can be explained by the fact that the half with the filled background (the correct one to pick) lures the user’s attention very quickly (resulting in better performance on a 5-second test). However, when the user is provided with a longer time to observe the toggle, they start to question their instincts, resulting in a more than doubled error rate (from 3.5% to 8.8%). Therefore, we recommend avoiding inversion of toggle buttons in favor of visual cues that avoid potential confusion and don’t highlight the inactive button in any way.
RQ 13: Highlighted outline of the active button
As expected, the highlighted outline provided a reliable cue for respondents to decide (8.8% error rate and 0.76 Success-Confidence score). The average rank of 10 puts this toggle in the top half of toggles performance-wise. Due to being outperformed by other visual cues, a combination with another cue is recommended for better visual clarity.
RQ 14: Inactive button coincides with the background
Another exciting result. Although we suspected that the respondents could have problems perceiving the inactive button as a button at all, this toggle achieved stellar results. With an error rate of only 0.9% and confidence of more than 0.89, it ranked first overall with an average rank of 1.33, which is an improvement over the simple saturated color vs. grayscale toggle seen in RQ11. This means that having the inactive button of the same color as the surroundings is a supreme way to communicate selection in a toggle button.
RQ 15: Embossed vs. debossed button
The error rate for both embossed toggles was 83.3% and the confidence score was the same as well with -0.58. This means that chasing skeuomorphism isn’t always the right solution, at least when it comes to toggles.
We expect this result is due to the common use of embossing effects in digital interfaces to bestow more weight on interface elements. A toggle with more visual weight would be perceived as active.
RQ 16: Check sign
As expected from its straightforward nature, the check sign icon added to an active button in a toggle performed very well, achieving the second best average rank of 2.33 with only a 5% error rate on Success-Confidence score of 0.86. The only problem we see in choosing this toggle is its potential cumbersome inclusion in the design of the web, and it may induce unwanted connections with checkboxes.
RQ 17: Radio button
Even though the nature of the radio button toggle is similar to the check sign design, when used as an icon, its meaning is less explicit. This was confirmed by achieving a worse average rank of 5.67 and a higher error rate of 9% combined with a lower Success-Confidence score of only 0.8. Despite the rather good performance of this visual cue, using radio buttons as toggles doesn’t align with their semantics since the radio buttons are meant to be used in forms, while toggles are meant to signify an immediate change of state.
Ranking The Visual Cues
We ranked the visual cues represented by toggles separately for the results they achieved in 5-second tests, 20-second tests, and the two combined. This resulted in 3 separate rankings. We calculated the average rank for every toggle and came up with the three worst and three best toggles.
Worst Toggles
Third last place — Toggle #9 — Red & Green Text Labels
Average rank: 24.67
5-second test rank: 25
20-second test rank: 24
Combined rank: 25
Second last place — Toggle #22 — Embossed button (no shadow version)
Average rank: 26.33
5-second test rank: 27
20-second test rank: 26
Combined rank: 26
Last place — Toggle #27 — Embossed button (shadow version)
Average rank: 26.67
5-second test rank: 26
20-second test rank: 27
Combined rank: 27
Best Toggles
Third place winner — Toggle #2 — Bold text
Average rank: 2.67
5-second test rank: 4
20-second test rank: 2
Combined rank: 2
Second place winner — Toggle #24 — Check sign
Average rank: 2.33
5-second test rank: 1
20-second test rank: 3
Combined rank: 3
First place winner — Toggle #26 — Inactive button coincides with the background
Average rank: 1.33
5-second test rank: 2
20-second test rank: 1
Combined rank: 1
Difference between the 5-second and 20-second test
Our secondary goal was to learn the difference in perception of toggles based on the time the respondents had to observe them, before deciding on an answer. Our expectation was that the result from the 20-second tests should be better overall (lower error rate and higher confidence score) than the results of the 5-second tests since the participants would have more time to think about the toggles in front of them.
We have calculated the average values and the results can be seen in the following table:
Test type
Average error rate
Average n. confidence score
5-second test
0.1728
0.5749
20-second test
0.1670
0.6013
The results confirmed our expectations since the average error rate was lower in the 20-second tests and the Success-Confidence score was higher. However, these differences were not significant. What interested us was whether any specific toggles showed significant differences between the two test variants. Therefore we focused on toggles that showed the biggest improvements/deteriorations between the 5-second and 20-second test results.
Toggles that performed better after 20 seconds
The greatest improvement in the number of ranks gained between a 5-second and a 20-second test is shared between toggles #4, #11, and #18 seen below. They all gained 6 ranks once participants had more time to observe them. This signifies that the clarity of the cues improved with added observation time.
This visual cue had the second smallest font size difference between the active and inactive states. We believe the change in rank is due to some participants needing time to notice smaller font size differences. However, the difference was noticeable enough to matter when the additional time was added to the test.
The next two toggles have enough in common for us to analyze them together.
Both these cues were designed in a way that the more pronounced/saturated color denotes the active option while the inactive option is portrayed by a lighter color. The difference in results shows that a certain percentage of users initially view a lighter color as the more pronounced one. However, the percentage decreases when users spend more seconds thinking about the toggle. To make a toggle that is easy to comprehend right away, an interface designer should probably look at the other visual cues.
Toggles that performed worse after 20 seconds
Toggle 15
Toggle 17
Toggle Number
5-second test rank
20-second test rank
Error Rate Difference
N. Confidence Score Difference
15
11
19
0.0526
-0.1018
17
15
21
0.0877
-0.1299
Toggle 15 showed the biggest drop in rank, while toggle 17 suffered the most significant negative changes in error rate and confidence score.
We explain the drop in these two by the fact that these two toggles are similar in a way — both have a dark and a light half — which means they would be perceived differently, for example, when using the light mode versus dark mode setting on a mobile device. While the user’s instinctive reaction may be to pick the darker color as active, given some time, more people will begin to second-guess themselves. Instead of the darker color capturing their gaze, they may start overthinking that the brighter color is highlighted against the dark. A good toggle shouldn’t encourage such doubts.
Potential For Future Research
All the cues we tested in our study were simple/singular. Going from here, the natural next step for research would be to go deeper, with a study that focuses on evaluating our findings in more detail: Can I use a bold font in an inactive toggle button if the inactive button is even bolder? Will the combination of visual cues perform better than either cue individually? While the answers may seem intuitive, research data may prove otherwise, as our study has shown.
Another next step would be testing the effect of color alterations. Would the saturation of green work just as well as the saturation of orange?
Testing the performance of visual cues in prototypes of website navigation using different color schemes is another ambitious area for continued research. We tested our toggles in the void, but it’s possible that their performance would vary depending on the visual context.
Conclusion
In this article, we described our research where we analyzed a complex list of visual cues used by toggle buttons to communicate which of their options is active. By testing our research questions with real users, we collected a respectable amount of data to make reliable statements about the effectiveness of visual cues.
Here are some of the main points we arrived at that you should keep in mind when designing your next toggle button:
If you choose to use color as the main lead, we suggest you use a combination of a saturated lively color (ideally corresponding with your CTA color scheme) and a light grayscale neutral color. Using the colors in the toggle’s background fill is preferable to using colored text. If the color of the inactive button is the same as the surrounding background, this will further improve the button’s comprehensibility.
Contrasting colors of similar visual weight should not be used under any circumstances. Red and green’s cultural perceptions won’t help you communicate what’s selected. There are much better ways to go about this. Be wary of the black and white combination as well. Toggles that use this color scheme are the ones most prone to the confusion rooted in the dark/light mode settings.
You may choose a minimalistic path and use the font itself to show the difference between button states. The bold-thin combination is the go-to solution, but you may also use different font sizes. Just make sure to differentiate the font sizes well enough. Using font-weight or size is recommended to support other visual cues as well since it’s very flexible.
If you decide to use embossment as the main cue — you really shouldn’t. It proved to be unreliable at communicating the active state of a toggle. Even a simple border was more effective. If you decide to use embossed toggles for their visual appeal, we suggest combining embossment with a primary visual cue, such as bold text or color fill.
There’s no shame in using designs that you are sure will work. A tick or a radio-button icon both performed very well. The evident drawback of choosing them is the cumbersome inclusion in the design of your web since radio buttons as UI elements serve a different function from toggles. The ticks could be perceived as outdated (akin to a physical form more than a website). As for radio button icons, you might as well use a radio button instead.
Follow these tips, and your toggle button designs will no longer cause users to hesitate about what’s selected at the moment.
Do you want to know what our top choice is? Jump ahead and check out SendPulse, the best free email marketing tool for most people.
How do you develop an effective email marketing program that combines beautiful design and effective sales tactics?
Email marketing tools allow for advanced personalization, professional-looking design, and relationship building. What’s more, you can use these tools to automatically nurture customers and increase sales.
It’s also worth noting that many of the top providers provide free-forever plans. So we’re not talking about the best free tools here but the best tools—that happen to be free. Win.
If you don’t take a multi-channel approach nowadays, you’re working at a disadvantage. Modern consumer journeys are complex and involve multiple touchpoints.
For this reason, you need to be able to communicate with customers on multiple channels. It extends your reach and allows you to communicate with customers where they spend their time.
The great thing about SendPulse is that it offers a wide range of messaging options that you can control via one platform. The added bonus here is that you can combine the tools and have them work together to optimize campaigns across the customer journey.
But the biggest reason we consider SendPulse the best free email marketing tool on the market is its far-reaching free-forever plan. With this plan, you get to send up to 15,000 emails per month to up to 500 subscribers, and you can manage your contacts with the tool’s free CRM. You can also create up to three different chatbots on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook Messenger, through which you’re able to send up to 10,000 messages to 1,000 contacts for free.
The free plan also includes web push notifications for up to 10,000 subscribers. Plus, you can create a landing page for free.
Effective use of a CRM drives customer loyalty and retention. HubSpot combines the capabilities of its robust CRM tool with email marketing to help you create relevant and accurate data-driven campaigns.
For instance, you can pull CRM information such as customer lifecycle stage or engagement level. Then use these insights to send hyper-relevant marketing emails to customers from the subject lines you use right down to the CTA.
Another useful feature of HubSpot’s free email marketing software is the ability to schedule emails according to the user’s optimal open time. This, of course, leads to more opens and click-throughs.
Naturally, the tool also carries the key features of any good email marketing tool such as a drag-and-drop email builder and reporting. Yet, the data-driven approach is what makes the software stand out.
You can send up to 2,000 emails per month with the free version of HubSpot’s Marketing Hub. If you want to increase sending limits, remove HubSpot’s branding, and add functionalities such as more advanced automations, you may wish to opt for the paid package starting at $480 for the year.
Omnisend is an email marketing tool that was created with ecommerce businesses in mind. Thus, its features are geared towards acquiring and, more importantly, retaining customers for online stores.
First, its design tool has a number of unique features that’ll help increase sales. For instance, the tool makes it easy to add coupon codes. It even automatically picks and inserts relevant products into emails for you.
But, where Omnisend really shines is its ecommerce automations. There are a number of pre-built workflows on offer with the option to customize or add your own unique workflows.
These workflows comprise the pillars of ecommerce email marketing including the welcome series, cart abandonment, transactional, and win-back campaigns.
Fair warning: the free version is pretty limited. Free users can only send 500 emails per month. However, this may work well for those who are just getting started with email marketing.
Nevertheless, Omnisend’s paid options are some of the most reasonably priced on the market. The Standard plan is just $16 per month for up to 6,000 emails and unlimited web push notifications.
When it comes to your email marketing KPIs, it’s easy to become obsessively focused on metrics such as click-throughs and ROI. Yet, it’s just as important to manage and maintain your email subscriber list.
At the end of the day, those who you’re able to develop a long-term relationship with are going to provide the most value to your company over time.
Zoho Campaigns excels in this area. For instance, its topic management feature allows recipients to choose which types of emails they’d like to receive. This will reduce the number of bounces and unsubscribes.
Furthermore, admins are able to set limits on the number of emails sent to customers each week or month. This will ensure your emails aren’t perceived as spam and build trust with customers in the long term.
It may not seem like much, but features like these are vital to maintaining a healthy email list.
Zoho’s forever-free plan is one of the most extensive you’ll come across. It allows you to send up to 6,000 emails to 2,000 contacts. Plus you can have up to four users alongside your admin account. And email templates, reports and analytics, and signup and popup forms are all included for free.
Personalization is key to email marketing success. It’s not simply that customers appreciate personalized messages, they expect it nowadays.
Segmentation allows you to target groups of customers with personalized messaging. This helps to create customer loyalty and increase sales via personalized product recommendations and the like.
Sendinblue has advanced segmentation capabilities. It places trackers on your site which monitor user behavior. This can be used to create segments and complex automated workflows to ensure you deliver the right messages to the right people at the right time.
Lists and contact info are updated automatically and in real-time. Seeing as Sendinblue is an all-in-one platform with a range of communication options, you can also create personalized customer journeys across the marketing funnel.
The tool’s free offering allows for an unlimited list of contacts and up to 9,000 emails per month. If you need to scale, you can upgrade to a paid plan for $65 per month.
This tool has rather a unique offering catered to a specific group – content creators. These include, for instance, podcasters, authors, musicians, and coaches. There are currently over 400,000 creators that use the platform.
ConvertKit has created an effective sales funnel through which these creators can build an audience and sell their digital products. Many online entrepreneurs, for example, use ConvertKit to sell online courses.
It all begins with building a landing page using a customizable, free template. This is perhaps what ConvertKit is most well-known for and we could’ve easily awarded the tool “best landing page builder” too.
The landing page is used to advertise your next project and/or collect email subscribers. You can then use ConvertKit to send out email broadcasts or set up automated workflows to nurture leads.
Step three is of course selling your digital product or subscription service. ConvertKit has a commerce tool through which you can receive payments and send products to your customers automatically.
The tool’s free plan allows you to create an unlimited number of landing pages and send an unlimited number of emails for free. However, you only get to have 300 subscribers, which isn’t as extensive as we’d like.
How to Find the Best Free Email Marketing Tool for You
There are many common features that all of these email marketing platforms have. For instance, a drag-and-drop email builder and automated workflows.
So the question is how do you choose the right one for you when many of the tools look similar, at least on the surface?
Here, we’ve covered the functionalities that are unique to each tool, i.e. what makes them stand out. Plus, the types of businesses that might use certain tools e.g. the fact that ConvertKit is made with creators in mind and Omnisend with ecommerce stores in mind.
You need to consider what it is specifically that your business needs in an email marketing tool. Perhaps, you run a B2B company and therefore need a well-integrated CRM. Tools such as HubSpot and SendPulse offer that for free.
So one way to look at it is to determine which tool is the right fit for the type of company you operate.
But if you’re still struggling to figure out which free email marketing tool to choose, here are a few more key points for you to consider:
Audience-Nurturing Features
This is arguably the most important aspect to look out for. At the end of the day, nurturing a relationship with your audience is what email marketing is all about.
The types of features that are conducive to nurturing an audience are, for example, segmentation and personalization features. For instance, the tool might allow for the collection of first-party data.
It’s also great when a tool helps you map the customer journey in some way by creating complex funnels or workflows perhaps. It’s this kind of thing that allows you to develop relationships over time without constantly being sales-y.
Number of Emails and Subscribers
It’s clear that some of the tools on this list have a much more expansive free plan than others. You should certainly consider the number of free subscribers you’re allowed to have and the number of emails you’re able to send when researching email marketing tools.
That’s not to say you should go for the tool with the highest subscriber or send limit. Just pick one with a limit that’s right for your company and what you hope to achieve in the future.
This means you can ensure the email tool has the right limits for now so that you won’t need to migrate to a paid plan too quickly.
Email and Workflow Templates
A solid catalog of templates will help you get started with email marketing quickly. Having a library of professional email designs also means there isn’t such a steep learning curve to contend with.
When it comes to workflows, you must ensure the tool has the right kind of workflows for your company. Say you run a SaaS company, you’ll need a strong onboarding sequence available. While an ecommerce brand needs a post-purchase sequence and so on.
Top Free Email Marketing Tools in Summary
The best free email marketing tools combine design, automation, and relationship-building. Though many have these features, some tools have better free plans than others.
SendPulse, for instance, has an extensive plan that allows you to send thousands of messages across a number of different messaging channels. That’s why we consider it the best tool for most.
Though you should look at your campaign goals to figure out which is the right tool for you specifically.
CodePen will host your assets, like images, data models, libraries, whatever. It’s quite useful! They are easy to browse, easy to copy URLs or code snippets of usage, served with the right headers from a fast global CDN, and heck, we’ll even help optimize them. It’s easy to amass a lof of them, as we allow you upload many at a time.
But while we had Bulk Upload, as it were, we didn’t offer any other “bulk” actions, until now. Stephen and I talk about how we added more bulk actions for assets, making them all the easier to manage. Shout out to our user with many thousands of assets which helped provide the motivation to get this out.
Memberful is a best-in-class membership software used by the web’s biggest creators. If you’re building a membership website for a client, Memberful handles the hard stuff so you can complete your builds quickly and your clients can focus on creating content while earning revenue with ease. It seamlessly integrates with popular tools like WordPress, Mailchimp, and Discord, so they can reach and monetize their existing audience. Memberful maintains GraphQL API, webhooks, and OAuth Single Sign on to make integration even easier.
Marie and I this week! Marie dug up some interesting data about “external library” usage on CodePen. In the Pen Editor (specifically), you have the option of adding external resources. These are literally placed in the Settings area and added to the end of your HTML. We’re specifically focused on these (not scripts you might add in the HTML by hand, Projects, imports, or otherwise) because we have them in a special database table — good for exactly this kind of data analysis! We’re also focusing on just JavaScript this time. We’ll look at the top 10 in terms of usage over time.
Whiskey Web and Whatnot is different than your typical dev podcast. We show a lighter, more human side of developers you know and love, like a fireside chat with your favorite devs. Past guests include Tom Preston-Werner, Kent C. Dodds, Charlie Gerard, Wes Bos, and the incomparable Chris Coyier! We have discussed everything from Next.js and TypeScript to Chuck’s past life as a blackjack dealer, favorite power tools, the best casseroles, and of course whiskey!
Asana and Monday.com are two of the most popular project management tools today. They offer similar features, but we think Monday.com is the better option. It made it onto our top list of the best project management software, while Asana did not. However, we still believe Asana is capable enough to pit against one of our top picks.
You certainly want project management software to keep up with your project’s complexity. Monday.com does a significantly better job of accommodating your project size and complexity.
Starting with the basics, you cannot assign a task to multiple people in Asana. Instead, you’ll need to create copies of the task and assign the copied task to multiple team members. Moday.com lets you assign the original task to multiple members or even entire teams. This feature is especially useful for large teams working on related tasks.
Additionally, Asana doesn’t provide a default way to view all tasks on one page. The default view is Incomplete Tasks, so you’ll need to change your view preference whenever you want to see all the tasks. Similarly, there’s also no default single view of all tasks, for all people, across all projects.
Conversely, Monday.com offers a feature called My Work. You can set your preferences for the information you want to see. For instance, you can choose to view all your tasks from all boards regardless of status. Similarly, you can set your preferences and view specific boards, columns, and people.
Finally, Monday.com focuses more on the project while Asana prioritizes individual task lists. You immediately see this difference when you view each platform’s homepage. Asana has configurable widgets centered on managing individual work that’s tied back to an overall project.
You can still view individual tasks from the My Work view on Monday.com. However, the platform uses Workspace as the default homepage view.
It’s more focused on the larger project, which is the sensible approach for large and complex projects. In short, Monday.com makes it easy to manage personal work in the context of the overarching project.
Team Size: Asana Wins
Good project management software should be able to support the number of people on your team. You also want to keep costs down even as your team grows. Both platforms charge for each user. Asana refers to each person as a user, while Monday.com calls them seats.
Starting with the free plan, Asana supports more users. You can have up to 15 users on the free plan. Monday.com limits its users to five with the free plan. So most teams might prefer Asana if they’re specifically looking for a free project management tool.
Monday.com has a three-seat minimum for its paid plans. This isn’t a problem for most teams. However, it’s a bad deal for individual users. You’ll have to pay for two unused seats if you hope to upgrade to the paid tiers to unlock more features.
Similarly, Monday.com pricing works for groups of seats rather than per seat. For instance, you’ll have to pay for the five-seat subscription even if your team has four people. So, you may see some extra charges here.
Additionally, upgrading your subscription applies to all seats. So, you’ll pay the new premium for all your seats. This setup might be problematic if you only need to unlock premium features for specific team members.
Asana isn’t any different. There is no single-user plan for the paid tiers. However, the platform caters to small teams of two people. As a result, individual users will only pay for one extra user, compared to Monday.com’s three-seat minimum.
Asana also supports groups of 2, 3, 4, and 5 users, so small teams are more likely to get a plan that fits perfectly for the team size.
You’ll also see a difference when it’s time to upgrade your subscription. For example, Asana lets you upgrade individual teams rather than the entire organization. This option is perfect if you want premium features for specific members.
Finally, both platforms let you choose between monthly and yearly payments. Both platforms also offer discounts if you go with annual billing.
Overall, Asana is more flexible for different team sizes.
Ease of Use: Asana Wins
Change is difficult to manage in an organization. So you don’t want software that requires endless hours of training and deployment. Fortunately, Asana and Monday.com are built for ease of use. They come with simple and easy-to-use dashboards and interfaces.
However, Monday.com has a slightly steeper learning curve than Asana. Asana has a simple Kanban-style interface that’s easy to come to grips with. Monday.com offers more complex features and customizations. It’s great for creating your custom dashboard but requires time to learn how everything works.
Asana also maintains a familiar layout. You get all the critical features on the left-side menu. You can quickly figure out core functions such as adding a new task, assigning team members, and creating due dates with no special instructions.
It is not that Monday.com is difficult to understand, but it might be slightly less intuitive for some people.
Features: Monday.com Wins
The ideal project management tool makes work easier. So, you want to look for valuable features to streamline your workflow. Both tools offer decent features across their plans. These features also work more or less the same way on either platform.
For example, you get task management with either software. Both tools let you create and assign tasks, set deadlines, track progress, and mention team members. Similarly, Asana and Monday.com offer workflow management. As a result, you can easily track team members’ workloads and performance on either platform.
However, Monday.com offers more valuable features than Asana.
First off, time tracking is conspicuously missing in Asana. You’ll need to rely on third-party integration. Monday.com offers this capability out of the box.
Similarly, Monday.com has an interactive whiteboard which is helpful for brainstorming sessions. This feature is also missing in Asana. You’ll need to use a different tool if you prefer interactive brainstorming sessions.
Furthermore, many shared features are more developed on Monday.com than in Asana. For instance, both platforms offer portfolio management. However, Monday.com supports granular insights such as total investment and overall profitability. You don’t get this level of detail in Asana portfolio management.
Finally, Monday.com lets you send and receive emails on its platform, while Asana doesn’t support this feature. Monday.com also supports collaborative document editing, while Asana doesn’t.
Both software offers excellent project management and supporting features. However, Monday.com has a more robust and better-developed feature set.
Price: Monday.com Wins
Naturally, price is a critical factor when choosing project management software. You want the best value for your money. Asana and Monday.com are affordable, but the latter is the better deal. Here’s a breakdown of Asana vs. Monday.com pricing:
Asana and Moday.com offer a free tier. But, Asana’s free forever plan is far more attractive. First, it supports up to 15 team members, while Monday.com only provides five seats with its free plan.
Additionally, Asana’s free plan includes unlimited file storage, messages, and an activity log. You also get time tracking integrations and assignee and due dates. You could conceivably use Asana’s free plan to manage small projects with a few team members.
Monday.com’s free plan is better suited for individuals. You’re limited to three project boards, and there are few project management features in this tier.
Then, Asana offers two paid plans, including:
Premium – This plan costs $10.99 per user per month. You get many helpful project management features, including a timeline, unlimited workflows, workflow builder, start dates and times, milestones, and task templates.
Business – This plan costs $24.99 per user per month. This tier unlocks more features, including approvals, workload, goals, proofing, portfolios, and custom rules builder.
Monday.com offers four paid plans, including:
Basic – The plan costs $8 per seat per month. It’s a scaled version of the free plan and comes with unlimited items, unlimited free viewers, 5 GB of file storage, and a dashboard for one board.
Standard – Which costs $10 per seat per month. You get helpful project management features such as guest access, timeline & Gantt views, automation, and a unified dashboard for up to five boards.
Pro – This plan costs $16 per seat per month. You get additional features such as a chart view, dependency column, time tracking, automation, and a dashboard for up to 10 boards.
Enterprise – You’ll need to contact Asana for your Enterprise quotes. The plan offers enterprise features such as advanced reporting and analytics, tailored onboarding, enterprise-scale automation and integrations, and a dashboard for up to 50 boards.
Asana wins for its feature-rich free forever plan. However, Monday.com offers better value for money with its paid plans.
Integrations: Asana Wins
There’s no such thing as perfect project management software. You might need additional capabilities that are only possible with third-party integrations. Furthermore, it’s helpful if your chosen software easily links to other products you use for your daily workflow.
Monday.com offers 40+ integrations with the most popular software stacks. These include GoogleDrive, Mailchimp, Zapier, Jira, Slack, and Shopify. The platform also has an API that you can use to perform other integrations via data share.
Asana certainly offers more native integrations with more than 100 supported software. These include GitHub, Mailchimp, Slack, Dropbox, and an API. Asana also offers more than 100 free integrations with its free plan.
You’ll need to upgrade to the Standard plan on Monday.com to enjoy integrations. Even so, you’re limited to 250 actions per month. You’ll need to purchase the Pro plan to enjoy at least 25,000 actions per month.
Asana offers far more native integrations than Monday.com. There are also no limits for integration actions with any of Asana’s plans, including the free one. As a result, Asana is the clear winner for integrations.
Security: Monday.com Wins
We shouldn’t forget data integrity and confidentiality when choosing project management software. This is especially important if you’re required to comply with compliance regulations. Asana and Monday.com come with security built into the software.
Both platforms offer top-notch security with SOC 1 and 2, EU-US Privacy Shield, and GDPR compliance built into the software. You also get two-factor authentication (2FA) with all plans on either platform.
However, Monday.com has a slight edge over Asana, with more robust security and privacy features. For example, Monday.com complies with ISO 27018, SOC 3, and HIPPA regulations, whereas Asana does not.
Automation: Draw
Automation helps get repetitive tasks off your plate. It leaves more time to focus on core project management functions. So you want software that lets you automate as much of your workflow as possible.
Asana and Monday.com both do a great job of automating everyday tasks. Asana comes with pre-defined rules, such as automatically setting due dates for tasks that are no longer blocked. You can also automatically move tasks to a new section once they’re marked complete. Lastly, Asana also lets you create custom rules to suit your workflow.
Similarly, Monday.com provides predefined rules and creates your own rules. You can also automate creating tasks, assigning due dates, and real-time updates and reminders. You also don’t need to learn any code to automate your workflow.
Both platforms do a solid job of supporting automation.
Asana and Monday.com have their unique strengths. But Monday.com takes the cake from a pure project management perspective. It’s cheaper and provides more and better features to streamline your workflows.
Still, Asana is notable for its collaboration features. So Asana may be the better option if you’re more interested in creating a cohesive team of somewhat independent members. However, for most project managers, Monday.com is the clear top choice.
This week I got to speak with Alex Trost! Alex has been hard at work created Frontend Horse, a clever brand celebrating the beautiful and clever things in our industry via a newsletter, articles, streaming, a Discord community and more. This is the way to do it!
Notion is an amazing collaborative tool that not only helps organize your company’s information but helps with project management as well. We know that all too well here at CodePen, as we use Notion for countless business tasks. Learn more and get started for free at notion.com/codepen. Take your first step toward an organized, happier team, today.
This week I got to speak with Chris Smith! We got to talk about all sorts of things from blogging, to pushing the boundaries of CSS, to logic in CSS, to digging into some of Chris’ most interesting Pens, to Chris’ actual favorite Pen of all time.
Ken Wheeler, Tejas Kumar, Sara Vieira, Tanner Linsley – these are just a few of the names coming to this year’s React Summit, the biggest React conference worldwide. Discover the future of the React and meet thousands of front-end and full-stack engineers!
The format of the event will be hybrid. The first day, June 17, will be streamed from the Amsterdam venue. The second day, June 21, and numerous free workshops will be streamed to the global audience online.
Would you like to participate? Get 10% off on remote & in-person tickets with our discount code CodePen.
Memory and performance management are important aspects of software development and ones that every software developer should pay attention to. Though useful, weak references are not often used in JavaScript. WeakSet and WeakMap were introduced to JavaScript in the ES6 version.
Weak Reference
To clarify, unlike strong reference, weak reference doesn’t prevent the referenced object from being reclaimed or collected by the garbage collector, even if it is the only reference to the object in memory.
Before getting into strong reference, WeakSet, Set, WeakMap, and Map, let’s illustrate weak reference with the following snippet:
// Create an instance of the WeakMap object.
let human = new WeakMap():
// Create an object, and assign it to a variable called man.
let man = { name: "Joe Doe" };
// Call the set method on human, and pass two arguments (key and value) to it.
human.set(man, "done")
console.log(human)
The output of the code above would be the following:
WeakMap {{…} => 'done'}
man = null;
console.log(human)
The man argument is now set to the WeakMap object. At the point when we reassigned the man variable to null, the only reference to the original object in memory was the weak reference, and it came from the WeakMap that we created earlier. When the JavaScript engine runs a garbage-collection process, the man object will be removed from memory and from the WeakMap that we assigned it to. This is because it is a weak reference, and it doesn’t prevent garbage collection.
It looks like we are making progress. Let’s talk about strong reference, and then we’ll tie everything together.
Strong Reference
A strong reference in JavaScript is a reference that prevents an object from being garbage-collected. It keeps the object in memory.
The following code snippets illustrate the concept of strong reference:
let man = {name: "Joe Doe"};
let human = [man];
man = null;
console.log(human);
The result of the code above would be this:
// An array of objects of length 1.
[{…}]
The object cannot be accessed via the dog variable anymore due to the strong reference that exists between the human array and object. The object is retained in memory and can be accessed with the following code:
console.log(human[0])
The important point to note here is that a weak reference doesn’t prevent an object from being garbage-collected, whereas a strong reference does prevent an object from being garbage-collected.
Garbage Collection in JavaScript
As in every programming language, memory management is a key factor to consider when writing JavaScript. Unlike C, JavaScript is a high-level programming language that automatically allocates memory when objects are created and that clears memory automatically when the objects are no longer needed. The process of clearing memory when objects are no longer being used is referred to as garbage collection. It is almost impossible to talk about garbage collection in JavaScript without touching on the concept of reachability.
Reachability
All values that are within a specific scope or that are in use within a scope are said to be “reachable” within that scope and are referred to as “reachable values”. Reachable values are always stored in memory.
Values are considered reachable if they are:
values in the root of the program or referenced from the root, such as global variables or the currently executing function, its context, and callback;
values accessible from the root by a reference or chain of references (for example, an object in the global variable referencing another object, which also references another object — these are all considered reachable values).
The code snippets below illustrate the concept of reachability:
let languages = {name: “JavaScript”};
Here we have an object with a key-value pair (with the name JavaScript) referencing the global variable languages. If we overwrite the value of languages by assigning null to it…
languages = null;
… then the object will be garbage-collected, and the value JavaScript cannot be accessed again. Here is another example:
let languages = {name: “JavaScript”};
let programmer = languages;
From the code snippets above, we can access the object property from both the languages variable and the programmer variable. However, if we set languages to null…
languages = null;
… then the object will still be in memory because it can be accessed via the programmer variable. This is how garbage collection works in a nutshell.
Note:By default, JavaScript uses strong reference for its references. To implement weak reference in JavaScript, you would use WeakMap, WeakSet, or WeakRef.
Comparing Set and WeakSet
A set object is a collection of unique values with a single occurrence. A set, like an array, does not have a key-value pair. We can iterate through a set of arrays with the array methods for… of and .forEach.
Let’s illustrate this with the following snippets:
let setArray = new Set(["Joseph", "Frank", "John", "Davies"]);
for (let names of setArray){
console.log(names)
}// Joseph Frank John Davies
A WeakSet is a collection of unique objects. As the name applies, WeakSets use weak reference. The following are properties of WeakSet():
It may only contain objects.
Objects within the set can be reachable somewhere else.
It cannot be looped through.
Like Set(), WeakSet() has the methods add, has, and delete.
The code below illustrates how to use WeakSet() and some of the methods available:
const human = new WeakSet();
let paul = {name: "Paul"};
let mary = {gender: "Mary"};
// Add the human with the name paul to the classroom.
const classroom = human.add(paul);
console.log(classroom.has(paul)); // true
paul = null;
// The classroom will be cleaned automatically of the human paul.
console.log(classroom.has(paul)); // false
On line 1, we’ve created an instance of WeakSet(). On lines 3 and 4, we created objects and assigned them to their respective variables. On line 7, we added paul to the WeakSet() and assigned it to the classroom variable. On line 11, we made the paul reference null. The code on line 15 returns false because WeakSet() will be automatically cleaned; so, WeakSet() doesn’t prevent garbage collection.
Comparing Map and WeakMap
As we know from the section on garbage collection above, the JavaScript engine keeps a value in memory as long as it is reachable. Let’s illustrate this with some snippets:
let smashing = {name: "magazine"};
// The object can be accessed from the reference.
// Overwrite the reference smashing.
smashing = null;
// The object can no longer be accessed.
Properties of a data structure are considered reachable while the data structure is in memory, and they are usually kept in memory. If we store an object in an array, then as long as the array is in memory, the object can still be accessed even if it has no other references.
let smashing = {name: "magazine"};
let arr = [smashing];
// Overwrite the reference.
smashing = null;
console.log(array[0]) // {name: 'magazine'}
We’re still able to access this object even if the reference has been overwritten because the object was saved in the array; hence, it was saved in memory as long the array is still in memory. Therefore, it was not garbage-collected. As we’ve used an array in the example above, we can use map too. While the map still exists, the values stored in it won’t be garbage-collected.
let map = new Map();
let smashing {name: "magazine"};
map.set(smashing, "blog");
// Overwrite the reference.
smashing = null;
// To access the object.
console.log(map.keys());
Like an object, maps can hold key-value pairs, and we can access the value through the key. But with maps, we must use the .get() method to access the values.
According to Mozilla Developer Network, the Map object holds key-value pairs and remembers the original insertion order of the keys. Any value (both objects and primitive values) may be used as either key or value.
Unlike a map, WeakMap holds a weak reference; hence, it doesn’t prevent garbage collection from removing values that it references if those values are not strongly referenced elsewhere. Apart from this, WeakMap is the same as map. WeakMaps are not enumerable due to weak references.
With WeakMap, the keys must be objects, and the values may be a number or a string.
The snippets below illustrate how WeakMap works and the methods in it:
// Create a weakMap.
let weakMap = new WeakMap();
let weakMap2 = new WeakMap();
// Create an object.
let ob = {};
// Use the set method.
weakMap.set(ob, "Done");
// You can set the value to be an object or even a function.
weakMap.set(ob, ob)
// You can set the value to undefined.
weakMap.set(ob, undefined);
// WeakMap can also be the value and the key.
weakMap.set(weakMap2, weakMap)
// To get values, use the get method.
weakMap.get(ob) // Done
// Use the has method.
weakMap.has(ob) // true
weakMap.delete(ob)
weakMap.has(ob) // false
One major side effect of using objects as keys in a WeakMap with no other references to it is that they will be automatically removed from memory during garbage collection.
Areas of Application of WeakMap
WeakMap can be used in two areas of web development: caching and additional data storage.
Caching
This a web technique that involves saving (i.e. storing) a copy of a given resource and serving it back when requested. The result from a function can be cached so that whenever the function is called, the cached result can be reused.
Let’s see this in action. Create a file, name it cachedResult.js, and write the following in it:
let cachedResult = new WeakMap();
// A function that stores a result.
function keep(obj){
if(!cachedResult.has(obj){
let result = obj;
cachedResult.set(obj, result);
}
return cachedResult.get(obj);
}
let obj = {name: "Frank"};
let resultSaved = keep(obj)
obj = null;
// console.log(cachedResult.size); Possible with map, not with WeakMap
If we had used Map() instead of WeakMap() in the code above, and there were multiple invocations on the function keep(), then it would only calculate the result the first time it was called, and it would retrieve it from cachedResult the other times. The side effect is that we’ll need to clean cachedResult whenever the object is not needed. With WeakMap(), the cached result will be automatically removed from memory as soon as the object is garbage-collected. Caching is a great means of improving software performance — it could save the costs of database usage, third-party API calls, and server-to-server requests. With caching, a copy of the result from a request is saved locally.
Additional Data
Another important use of WeakMap() is additional data storage. Imagine we are building an e-commerce platform, and we have a program that counts visitors, and we want to be able to reduce the count when visitors leave. This task would be very demanding with Map, but quite easy to implement with WeakMap():
let visitorCount = new WeakMap();
function countCustomer(customer){
let count = visitorCount.get(customer) || 0;
visitorCount.set(customer, count + 1);
}
Let’s create client code for this:
let person = {name: "Frank"};
// Taking count of person visit.
countCustomer(person)
// Person leaves.
person = null;
With Map(), we will have to clean visitorCount whenever a customer leaves; otherwise, it will grow in memory indefinitely, taking up space. But with WeakMap(), we do not need to clean visitorCount; as soon as a person (object) becomes unreachable, it will be garbage-collected automatically.
Conclusion
In this article, we learned about weak reference, strong reference, and the concept of reachability, and we tried to connect them to memory management as best we could. I hope you found this article valuable. Feel free to drop a comment.
I got to talk with Lea Rosema this week! She’s an incredibly talented digital artist and front-end developer. She does quite a bit of art with some of the trickiest web technology out there: shaders! But rather than just learn it and use it, she helps other people learn and get more out of it. Several times that has taken the shape of Web Components. For example, a <shader-art> Web Component that takes some of the boilerplate work out of designing with them. See this Collection of examples.
Evan You, Kyle Simpson, Addy Osmani, Sarah Drasner – these are just a few of the speakers coming to this year’s JSNation, a 2-day conference focusing exclusively on JavaScript development. Discover the future of the JavaScript ecosystem and get connected to its stellar crowd! The format of the event will be hybrid. The first day (June 16) will be streamed from the Amsterdam venue. The second day (June 20) & numerous free workshops will be streamed to the global audience online.
Would you like to participate? Get 10% off on remote & in-person tickets with our discount code CodePen.
I got to talk to Paulina Hetman this week! Paulina is a heck of a creative coder, using her skills as an illustrator and all-around web developer to make ideas come to life. And she doesn’t keep all those ideas to herself, she spends time educating other budding developers both professionally and by building courses and things like her incredibly clever quizzes (as Pens!).
Notion is an amazing collaborative tool that not only helps organize your company’s information but helps with project management as well. We know that all too well here at CodePen, as we use Notion for countless business tasks. Learn more and get started for free at notion.com/codepen. Take your first step toward an organized, happier team, today.
I got to talk to Varun! Varun is an incredible artist and would have been interesting to talk with him about literally anything, but since he’s dipped numerous toes into the world of NFTs, I wanted to chat with him about that in conjunction with his own art and other artists he’s a fan of.
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