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Email remains a top-performing channel for marketers. It’s no surprise that 64% of marketers use email to drive their marketing campaigns. Unfortunately, though, only 8% report any significant improvement in email marketing strategies. The problem? Well, we can attribute the dismal performance to a number of reasons. Still, in most cases, it boils down to…
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When I discover a new brand and land on their Instagram profile, the first thing I do is read their bio.
When done right, it gives me a peek into the brand, what they stand for, and even what offers they may have going on.

Want to learn how to keep social media users on your Instagram profile once they discover you? Let’s dive into what makes a good Instagram bio and see brand examples.
What should your Instagram bio include?
Every Instagram profile should have the following:

Name – This is your business name, which will help your current and prospective customers easily find you.

Profile picture – Having your logo as your profile picture will help with brand recall and recognition. Just be sure to be consistent across all social networks.

Link – This could be a link to your website or a link tree leading to various pages.

Description – This can be anything from your mission statement to your latest product feature. It tells users what your brand is about in just a few words.

Call to action – Want to direct social media users to your products and/or services? Use the “Shop Now” CTA. You could also have a “Contact Us” CTA to direct users to your phone or email.

Beyond the essentials, an Instagram bio can also have hashtags relevant to your brand or industry. Now that you know what to include, let’s see some examples from real brands.
7 Instagram Bio Ideas for Business
1. Funny
Social media is a place to engage and have fun with your audience. So, if you’re struggling to come up with a bio, stop overthinking and consider going the funny route.
Take Skittles.

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As a household brand, there are so many routes they could have taken for their Instagram bio. They chose to keep it lighthearted and funny, a great reflection of their brand voice.
Cards Against Humanity is another great example.

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Their Instagram bio is hilarious and straightforward. It tells users what their product is and pokes fun at their target audience.
2. Mission-Focused
Want a sure-fire strategy for your Instagram bio? Share your brand’s mission and/or values.
Sabai Design, a sustainable furniture brand, did just that.

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When a user lands on this brand’s profile, they’ll know exactly what they sell and what the company stands for. In today’s world, consumers want brands that champion social responsibility and are transparent about their practices.
Another thing Sabai Design does is include branded hashtags in their bio and invite users to use them when sharing their content. More on hashtags in the next section.
3. Hashtag Heavy
Hashtags help Instagram users find you more easily, so if you have the space in your bio, you definitely want to add relevant hashtags.

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Lifestyle brand Diarra Blu included multiple hashtags in its bio, such as #BlackOwned, #Conscious, and #SizeInclusive — telling users a lot in just a few words.
So, in addition to improving discoverability, using hashtags also helps brands tell their story in a quick and succinct way.
4. Tagline or Slogan
Adding your tagline or slogan can be incredibly effective in attracting your target audience.
Take Fe Noel.

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Their tagline reads, “Women’s collection designed…for the leading woman.”
Any user who identifies with that will be interested in learning more about the brand. And that’s exactly the effect you want an Instagram bio to have.
Another example of this comes from home goods brand, Black Like I Never Left.
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In their bio, they explain what their brand is about and include relevant hashtags.
5. Emoji Heavy
Are you using social media right if you don’t include emojis?
Many brands run away from emojis because they believe it hurts their brand’s credibility. However, when used appropriately, it’s an eye-catching tool that can help you attract users.
There are two routes you can take with emojis in your bio.
You can use several emojis to highlight multiple things, or you can limit your use to one emoji that relates to your brand.

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For instance, The Jungalow, a home decor brand, uses multiple emojis to emphasize its copy. It stands out without being distracting.
Sharlene Robertson Designs takes the uniform look by using the same emoji throughout its bio and using the pin emoji to designate its location.

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Both methods are effective, it’s just a matter of finding what works for your brand.
6. Offer Focused
Another great way to utilize your Instagram bio is by highlighting ongoing product offers.
Say you have a big sale going on or it’s the holiday season and you know consumers are looking for deals. Well, you can use your bio to share those offers and lead users to your website.

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Hair brand Luvme Hair effectively uses the bio section to direct users to its sales, even using emojis to draw attention to their link tree.
This works great during the holiday season when promotions and deals are top of mind.
7. Call to Action
Social media is a major discovery point for most brands and many users find brands through hashtags.
As such, brands like Lulu and Georgia, use their Instagram bios to use their hashtags to invite users to engage.

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This not only invites users to explore the brand’s hashtag but it’s also a great way for Lulu and Georgia to collect user-generated content that they can reshare on their page. A win-win!
Short Instagram Bio Ideas
Your Instagram bio doesn’t need to be long.
In fact, in some cases, it’s best to keep it short and sweet. Here are examples of brands that did this well.
1. NPR

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Media organization NPR tells you everything you need to know about its platform in less than 10 words. It gives the page a clean look and remains consistent across all social platforms, which helps with brand recognition..
2. Malenki Shoes

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This brand, which offers stylish shoes for petite women, gets straight to the point and tells users who its target audience is, what it offers, and where it’s located.
It tells a compelling story while including information that will promote easy discoverability.
3. Mangishi Doll

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Here’s another great example of a short, but effective Instagram bio. When you read this bio, you know what the brand is about and what they offer.
At the end of the day, if your bio doesn’t do either of these, that’s when you’re in trouble and should reassess. Otherwise, longer isn’t always better.
What The Best Instagram Bio Ideas Have in Common
In this article, we’ve covered a wide range of Instagram bio ideas. So how do you choose one for your brand?
Well, as long as it meets these criteria, you are set:

It tells a story.
It reflects your brand voice.
It complements other elements on your page.

There isn’t a single right way to write your Instagram bio. You can try a combination of these tactics and or stick to one method and find great success with both.
In addition, don’t be afraid to switch up your strategy during different times of the year, based on your marketing goals.

While email marketing may not get the attention some newer marketing channels get, it’s still a terrific way for you to generate leads and convert more prospects for your business.

With that in mind, I want to share some email marketing best practices you can use to generate more leads for your business.

 

1. Don’t purchase contact lists.
This first tip should come as no surprise, but given the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it bears repeating.
Email campaigns depend on a healthy open rate, and if you’re contacting people whose information you bought – rather than earned from a previous interaction – you’ll quickly see your emails’ performance drop.
The GDPR also requires each European recipient’s consent before you reach out to them, and purchased email lists usually do not come with that consent.
For help reaching your target audience, consider Versium Reach – a platform made for B2B marketers that allows you to own data on your target audience across multiple marketing channels.
2. Avoid using ‘No-Reply’ in the sender’s email address.
Have you heard of CAN-SPAM? This longstanding piece of legislation is a popular and important guideline for all email marketers in the U.S.
One major rule in CAN-SPAM is to never use the words “no reply,” or a similar phrase, as your email sender’s name (for example, “noreply@yourcompany.com”).
“No reply” in an email message prevents recipients from responding and even opting out of further emails, which CAN-SPAM protects their right to do so at any time.
Instead, have your automated emails come from a first name (for example, jamie@mycompany.com). Your customers are much more likely to open emails if they know they were written by a human being and it keeps you compliant with email regulations.
3. Stick to fewer than three typefaces.
The less clutter you have in your email, the more conversions you’ll get.
Don’t junk up your email with more than two fonts or typefaces, as that can distract readers and ruin your email’s visual appeal.
In addition, you want to use web-safe fonts with sizes between 10-point and 12-point. This ensures your email will be legible on all readers and devices.
4. Optimize the email’s preview text.
If you subscribe to a newsletter, you’ve likely seen a message like this at the top of your email: “Email not displaying correctly? Click here.”

Don’t get me wrong – it’s a helpful warning but keeping it in the preview text of your email (also known as the preheader) can drastically impact your email’s open rate.
Firstly, because you’re telling recipients, “Hey, this email might not work.” Secondly, it doesn’t provide any insight into what the email is about.
Your preview text should supplement your subject line by adding in details to capture your audience’s attention and encourage them to open.
By default, preview text pulls in the first several words of the email body and displays it next to the subject line before the person opens it.
The problem is custom email templates often stick with conditional statements like “Can’t see images?” or “Not displaying correctly?” at the top banner, allowing it to slip right into the preview when it goes out.
As a rule of thumb, always write a custom preheader that teases what your email will offer.
Pro-tip: HubSpot users can fix this problem by customizing the preview text themselves in the backend of their email marketing newsletter.
5. Include an email signature.
Even if your newsletter is technically being sent to your contacts on behalf of the company, rather than an individual, the email should include the signature of a specific person.

In a 2019 State of Business Email Marketing study, 41% of marketers said they use email signatures for branding and visibility. The second most popular reason for its use was to maintain standard, cohesive sign-offs across all their companies.
Another reason you should include your email signature is that it’s a touch of personalization. People are naturally more inclined to read an email if they know it came from a human being, not just a collective marketing team. Your email signature is your ticket to their attention.
Want a quick way to make a beautiful email signature? Use HubSpot’s Email Signature Generator. We also have an Out-of-Office Email Generator to make your response to incoming messages just as delightful.
6. Clean your mailing list regularly.
Some of your email contacts might not opt-out of your email campaign, but will still never open your emails.
It’s tempting to email as many people as possible to reach more prospects, but keeping your least-engaged recipients on your mailing list can kill your open rate. People who never open emails make your campaign look worse since you’re not analyzing the campaign’s quality against your most loyal recipients.
Review your list of subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails over a certain period of time, and remove them on a regular basis. This gives you a more accurate email open rate and keeps your email campaign clean of the people who are no longer interested in hearing from you.
You can also implement a workflow in which they’re gradually moved to a less frequent email list based on activity.
For instance, say you have a daily newsletter. You could implement a workflow in which subscribers who do not open your email in two consecutive weeks are moved to the weekly email. Then, those subscribers could be moved to the monthly newsletter if they don’t open 4 consecutive emails. And so on.
It keeps you from bombarding your subscribers with emails they’re not interested in while keeping your list clean.
7. Keep the main message and call-to-action above the fold.
Above the fold refers to the information that’s visible to the reader before they scroll down.
Even though recent research suggests that consumers scroll more than they used to – because of social media and vertical timelines – above the fold content still gets the most attention.
Eyetracking research from Neilsen Norman Group found that consumers spend 57% of their viewing time on above-the-fold content. That number drastically goes down to 17% of the second screenful and gradually decreases as they scroll.
With this in mind, place your message and CTA above the fold. It’s the first thing your recipients will see once they open your email, therefore increasing your conversion rate.
You can also run an A/B test first to validate the hypothesis and see if it works for your emails.
8. Personalize the email greeting.
How often do you read emails that begin, “Dear Member”?
You might segment your email audiences by the type of customer they are (member, subscriber, user, etc.), but it shouldn’t be the first thing recipients see in your company messages.
Personalizing the greeting of your emails with your contacts’ first names grabs the attention of each reader right away. For HubSpot users, this is called a personalization token, and creating one looks like this:

Then, the address line of your email would automatically produce the contact’s first name by fetching this personalization token in the email’s HTML, like this: Hi, !
Don’t worry, personalizing an email’s greeting line with 50 recipients’ names doesn’t mean you’ll have to manually write and send 50 different emails from now on.
Many email marketing tools today allow you to configure the greeting of your email campaign so that it automatically sends with the name of the people on your contact list – so everyone is getting a personal version of the same message.
9. Keep your email around 500 to 650 pixels wide.
If your email template is wider than 650 pixels, your email won’t show up correctly and will require users to scroll horizontally to read the full email.
This is a pain, to say the least, and will likely affect your conversion.
Having your template fit within the standard format will make for easier readability, better conversions, and an overall better user experience.
10. Split test your subject lines and calls to action.
If you can’t seem to increase your email’s open and click-through rates, a couple of things might be wrong: You’re not emailing the right people (are you buying your contact list? See the first tip at the top of this blog post), or the content needs to be improved.
To start, focus on the latter, and conduct an A/B test.
A/B tests can be used to improve almost any of your digital marketing content. In an email, this test splits your recipients into two groups: Group A receives the regular newsletter, while Group B receives the newsletter with a specific variation.
This variation tests to see if your audience would be more or less likely to take an action based on that element.
HubSpot Marketing Hub users can conduct email A/B tests on anything from the subject line to the call-to-action (CTA) inside it.
For example, you might change the color of your CTA from red to green to see if your email’s clickthrough rate increases. If it does, the test indicates that you should change your emails’ CTA color to green from now on.
11. Include your logo.
Logos are a must when it comes to emails.
A 2020 study by Red Sift and Entrust found that logos positively impact email engagement as well as brand recall.
Brand recall increased by 18% after a five-second exposure when including a logo in the email. Purchase likelihood also went up by a whopping 34% in emails where logos were included.
With this in mind, add your logo to your email design to ensure that it’s always included.
12. Name the offer in your subject line.
When you include an incentive in your subject line, you can drastically increase your open rates.
“Free shipping when you spend $25 or more” and “Receive a free iPod with a demo” are examples of good, incentive-focused subject lines.
However, be careful not to overwhelm your readers with savings- or product-related emails.
Customer loyalty starts with casual industry insights – only after nurturing should you start introducing offers. Here’s an example of an email with an enticing subject line and warm, welcoming body copy:

13. Allow recipients to subscribe to your newsletter.
You might be thinking, “Wait, if they received the email to begin with, shouldn’t they have already subscribed?”
Usually, yes, and therefore adding a “Subscribe” button to your email doesn’t help those who’ve already agreed to receive your emails. But great content is shareable content, and if your current subscribers are forwarding your emails to their friends and colleagues, you’ll want to help them subscribe, too.
Add a small but visible CTA that allows an email viewer to subscribe to the newsletter if they received this email from someone else.
But remember, because your newsletter should already be driving another action, such as downloading an ebook or becoming a community member, make sure this “Subscribe” button doesn’t distract or confuse users, weakening your main campaign goal in the process.
14. Write compelling (but concise) subject lines.
A good subject line should contain between 30 and 50 characters, including spaces. The reason why you do this is that email providers often cut off subject lines that go beyond this length.
Your email subject line should also create a sense of urgency while giving readers some indication of what to expect once they open the email.
15. Use auto-responders for opt-ins.
Be prepared for your readers to forget they opted in.
Set up an auto-responder that reminds people they opted into your email database. The auto-responder should be sent out one day, five days, and 10 days after the person registers.
Each auto-responder email should also include additional content or bonus material to reward the reader for opting into the newsletter– or your readers might not feel they have enough incentive to actually opt-in.
16. Closely tie emails to landing pages.
Your landing page should match the email in terms of headline, copy, and content. The look and feel of your landing page should also match the email as consistency goes a long way toward a customer’s trust.
Just make sure you’re using tracking tools to see which emails and landing pages performed the best so you can keep sending what’s working.
17. Conduct a five-second test.
Send a copy of the email to a friend or business associate. Can they quickly tell what your call-to-action is? If so, you’re golden. If not, keep working.
There are a lot of new tools at a marketer’s disposal that are getting attention these days. But email marketing has stood the test of time regarding its influence on your users. This old, reliable, and faithful tool can really ensure you get the most out of your marketing initiatives.
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in June 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

You probably already know the value of building a community behind your brand: more powerful word of mouth, stronger customer retention, better organic growth. And yet, I find many small business owners aren’t quite sure how to foster real communities or don’t believe they can if they don’t have the money to really do it successfully.
I’ve built two thriving communities on startup budgets, first as employee #1 and Director of Marketing and Community at theSkimm and now as the founder and CEO of puzzle company JIGGY. Here’s my advice for doing it right.
1. Find Ways to Support & Celebrate Your Organic Ambassadors
You probably already have a community of champions—people who love what you’re doing and want to tell the world about it—even if it’s just a small one. If the cheapest customer is always your existing one, the easiest community to build is the one you already have. So, look for ways to help your current advocates help you, and thank them when they do.
At JIGGY, we make it clear on our product packaging and website how puzzlers can share their progress on social, tagging us and the artist who designed the puzzle artwork. We also always react or share their posts on our stories to show how much we appreciate them (and encourage them to continue sharing!).

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JIGGY’s customers love sharing their puzzling journey—and we’ve made it easy for them to help spread the word about our brand in the process.
At theSkimm, a simple prompt in our daily newsletter to share it with a friend evolved into an entire ambassador program (called Skimm’bassadors), with detailed guidance on how to best spread the word and tiered perks based on the number of referrals. For a long time, we even chose incentives that cost us almost nothing and further drove community engagement: access to a private Facebook group, invites to Skimm events, and the chance to meet the team.
Whatever you do, taking a little time now to support and appreciate your biggest fans will save you a lot of money in the long run when it comes to your community growth.
2. Bring Your Followers Into the Business-Building Process
Traditional marketing is a one-way conversation, but to build a strong community, you should create opportunities for your customers to feel like they have a voice, too.
Again, this doesn’t have to be complex. Our JIGGY team makes sure to respond to every customer email we get so our users know they are being heard. We keep an ear to the ground and make product decisions based on what our customers want, letting them know when we’ve addressed their feedback. We ask our followers for their thoughts on ideas we’re considering, rather than just trying to read their minds. Even a simple Instagram poll can be engaging and insightful.

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When we released our first kids puzzle, we emphasized that this decision came from customer requests.
By treating your customer community as a very large board of advisors, you may also start to feel confident trying half-baked ideas to see what kind of reaction you get. For instance, when we were figuring out how to monetize our newsletter at theSkimm, we simply told our readers, “We’re going to start putting some ads in, let us know what you think!” By staying transparent and opening up this line of communication, our users felt more invested in what we were doing—and more forgiving as we figured it out.
3. Encourage Connections Within Your Community
The real magic of a brand community starts happening when you help users build connections with each other.
About a year after we started doing events for our Skimm’bassadors, we did a user survey, and found that a huge indicator of satisfaction was the people our users were meeting through the group: new friendships, professional connections, even some romantic relationships.
Early on with JIGGY, we saw a ton of organic engagement on social between our customers and the artists who create the work for our puzzles, and we found that it made both communities feel more dedicated to what our brand is doing. More recently, we noticed users having puzzle parties over Zoom—so decided to launch the Puzzle Club to help further encourage this kind of engagement.
Puzzle Club members get the same exclusive puzzle every month so they can all share their progress, as well as opportunities to interact with JIGGY artists—both great drivers of deeper community.
Think of ways to bring your community together, and then step back and watch the real connections start to happen.
4. Stay Guided by Your Why
Ultimately, none of this works if you don’t have a deeper why behind your brand. At theSkimm, that was about being informed and connected with current events in the world around you. At JIGGY, it’s about reconnecting with downtime and practicing mindful self care while also supporting independent artists. People want to be part of these communities because they want to be around like-minded people.
It’s not just about stating your values—it’s about living them out in your branding, your copy, and even your business decisions. In the early months of Covid-19, we ran out of product and couldn’t restock because of supply chain issues. All we had access to was blank puzzles so, after hearing about the financial struggles our artists were having, we had them draw one-of-a-kind puzzles on these blanks and auctioned them off for charity and artist relief. This didn’t benefit our bottom line, but helped puzzlers stay engaged with our company even when we couldn’t sell them anything, supported our artist community, and reinforced what we’re all about as a company.

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During the early months of Covid, our Jiggy Originals campaign supported our artist community and drove a deeper connection with our puzzlers.
Communities don’t rally behind a product—they rally behind values that matter to them or a lifestyle they identify with. Figure yours out, live it out in the brand, and make sure you really care about your customers along the way, and you’ll be amazing at the dedicated following you can build.