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I have some bad news — your email marketing contact database degrades over time.
Your contacts’ email addresses change as they move from one company to another, opt-out of your email communication, or abandon an address they only used to fill out forms on websites.
As a marketer, it’s your job to make sure you’re constantly adding fresh contacts to your email lists so you can continue generating growth. While purchasing emails is an option, it’s not always the best way to go about this.
In this post, discover high-quality strategies to help you grow your email list to ensure that you have a large audience of subscribers eager to hear what you have to say and likely to make purchases and contribute to your business growth.

Sometimes called subscriber lists, email lists can get smaller if members unsubscribe and grow as you continue to collect more and more addresses through lead generation.
If you’re not working on building your email list already, or you’ve run out of ideas on how to do so, here are 39 simple ways to grow your email list. Please note that, with these methods, it’s essential to allow people to opt-in to receiving additional emails from your company, as some may not be interested.
39 Creative List Building Techniques
How To Grow Your Email List Using Email
1. Create unique email content.
Want to retain your current subscribers and have them help you grow your list? Create unique email content. If your emails are entertaining, informative, and valuable, recipients will always look forward to receiving them and will be more likely to forward them to their networks. This helps you gain exposure and obtain additional subscribers.
2. Encourage subscribers to share and forward your emails.
Include social sharing buttons and an “Email to a Friend” button on your marketing emails. By doing this, you’ll gain access to recipients’ friends, colleagues, and networks to expand your contact list. At the bottom of your emails, include a “Subscribe” CTA as a simple text-based link so that the people receiving the forwarded emails can easily opt-in too.
3. Segment your email lists by buyer persona.
Email recipients are more likely to click through emails that cater to their specific interests, so using varying types of email subscriptions to send targeted content to different segments of your audience is worth considering.
If you create multiple targeted subscriber types, you’ll increase the chance that visitors will subscribe to one of them. In fact, marketers who used segmented campaigns noted as much as a 760% increase in revenue.
4. Reinvigorate a stale email list with an opt-in campaign.
Do you have an older list that you suspect is mostly decayed? Create an engaging opt-in message and send it to your old list and encourage contacts to re-opt in if they’d like to, but also promising to remove all contacts who don’t respond.
Though it may seem counterintuitive to remove folks from your email list to grow them, emailing contacts that you know are engaged can improve your deliverability and increase the odds of your email being shared with those outside your current database.
5. Add an opt-in link to your employees’ signatures.
Hyperlinked email signatures can lead people to a landing page where they can sign up for your mailing list. Plus, if you’re already in a natural email conversation with them, subscribing to more emails can be a natural next step.
How To Grow Your Email List With New Content
6. Create a new lead-generation offer.
Create a new gated lead-generation offer, like a free ebook, and host it on a landing page that asks visitors to provide their email to download it.
7. Create a free online tool or resource that requires sign-up.
Free online tools make your users’ lives easier, especially if all they have to do is sign up with their email address. For example, we’ve created quite a few free tools, like Website Grader, to gather email addresses.
8. Create additional bonus content.
Not all gated content is worth it to a website visitor. Sometimes, to gain their interest, you need to give them free content first. You can begin with a blog post that offers beginner advice on a subject, then offer additional bonus content with more advanced tips that they can access by submitting their email address via a landing page.
How To Grow Your Email List Using Social Media
9. Promote an online contest.
Use your social media accounts to host a free giveaway that requires contact information to enter. You can encourage your followers to click through to your website and sign up using their email addresses.
10. Promote a lead gen offer on Twitter.
Create a Twitter campaign to promote an ebook or free resource to your followers that requires using an email address to redeem.
11. Use Pinterest to promote gated visual content.
Pinterest plays host to visual content that encourages visitors to sign up to see more content. Use this to your advantage, and promote your gated visual content on the platform, so users are eager to learn more from you and submit their email to get more high-quality information.
Featured Resource: 12 Pinterest Templates for Business

Download These Templates for Free
How To Grow Your Email List Using Facebook
12. Make your email newsletter the theme of your profile cover photo.
Your Facebook profile cover photos are a great place to call attention to something specific, especially your email newsletter. If you create a high-quality graphic that highlights and calls attention to its value, you can entice users to submit their email to gain further benefit from the content you offer.
Featured Resource: Five Free Facebook Cover Photo Templates
 
Get These Customizable Templates
If you do this, you should also consider leveraging our next tip, making it easy for users to seamlessly submit their emails once you’ve attracted their attention.
13. Add a call-to-action button to the top of your Business’s Facebook page.
The value of this list-building technique is in the destination: add a CTA button to your Facebook page that links users to your sign-up landing page or a gated featured resource that requires email access. We added CTAs to our HubSpot Academy Facebook page, as displayed in the image below.
Image Source
In addition, placing a sign-up CTA button within your profile makes it easier for users, as they won’t need to leave Facebook and go to your site — they simply click the link, and you take them there.
Here’s a guide from Facebook on how to add one to your profile.
14. Share newsletter previews on your profile.
Creating a Facebook post that showcases a snippet of your email newsletter is a great way to attract your audiences and entice them to join your email list. They’ll get a preview of what you have to offer, become eager to learn more, and sign up to continue generating value from your business. Within this post, you can include a link to your sign-up page for easy and quick sign-up.
15. Promote content through Facebook that requires an email address to access.
Promote content in your Facebook posts that encourage email submission to access. This content can be something like a gated ebook, joining a giveaway or contest, or even saying that email subscribers get early access to new products.
Be sure to add social sharing buttons to your landing and thank-you pages to encourage your leads to share within their networks.
How To Grow Your Email List Using YouTube
16. Add engagement features to your YouTube videos.
End screens, also called video outros, are a tool that YouTube offers creators to direct viewers to take additional action after finishing a video, like clicking on a link to your website or watching another video on your channel. As they are used to generate further engagement from your viewers, it’s worth considering adding hyperlinks to your sign-up landing page in your end cards to grow your email list.
This tip is beneficial if you have created an informative video with mostly surface-level content. A more advanced view is provided in a gated offer or your email newsletter.
17. Use your header and images to promote your email newsletter.
Capture leads by placing a link to your sign-up landing page in your channel header. This image is front and center on your profile, and if your banner is eye-catching, well designed, and calls attention to your content offer, users will be drawn to it, which places the CTA link in their direct line of sight.
The red arrow in the image below points to a CTA on the HubSpot Academy YouTube page that leads users to a course enrollment offer that requires an email to sign up.

18. Promote your emails in your video descriptions.
Your YouTube video descriptions talk about the content within your videos, so viewers know what they’re about to watch. Each of your descriptions will likely contain unique elements, but it’s worth plugging your email sign-up landing page link within each of them.
This tip can be especially useful if you create how-to style videos, and you can entice users to sign up for more informative content and instruction by clicking the link in your description.
Featured Resource: 7 YouTube Description Templates [Free Prompts]
Download These Customizable Prompts
How To Grow Your Email List Using Instagram
19. Add a call to action to your Instagram bio.
Your Instagram bio is a great place to share information with your audience, like a CTA that calls attention to your email list and a link to your sign-up form.
Your CTA text should entice users by explaining the benefit they get from signing up, like obtaining bonus info, access to exclusive offers, or a general business newsletter. Placing the link directly in your bio also reduces customer effort, as they can simply click and sign up in a pop-up window within the app.
20. Share posts that lead users to click the call-to-action email link in your bio.
While you may not share posts that outright say “Give us your email,” you can certainly see success from sharing posts that entice users to share their contact info.
For example, you can advertise a giveaway and let users know that they can enter by clicking the link in your bio and submitting their email addresses. In another case, if you post an informative video about how to use your products, you can entice users to sign up because your emails will offer more informational content about how to use your products.
21. Use the swipe-up feature to share your landing page.
If you have an Instagram Business profile and more than 10k followers, you can add a clickable link to your Stories that users can access by swiping up on the story.
This feature is an excellent opportunity to share a link to your sign-up page or another offer on your site that collects email addresses in exchange for value, like a free trial. You can also use this feature to link to something like an informative blog post with a lead generation offer that your audience will be excited to sign up for.
Featured Resource: 8 Instagram Story Templates

Download These Free Templates
22. Add an email button to your business profile.
A more direct way to get user emails is to add an email button to your business page. This tool is primarily used for service needs so that customers can reach out to you for support inquiries. Still, it gives you the opportunity for further lead nurturing by asking if customers want to opt-in to receiving more emails.
Here’s a guide on how to add one to your profile.
How To Grow Your Email List Using LinkedIn
23. Send readers to a landing page for email sign-up.
After having conversations on LinkedIn, you can share links to your sign-up pages. You’re allowing users to continue the interaction you’ve just had, as your email will provide them with further high-quality information and content related to your business.  
You can send these links in InMail messages, comment threads, and personal 1:1 direct messages.
24. Post about your email newsletter.
If you have an email newsletter, you can post snippets of its content on LinkedIn and let users know that, if they sign up, they’ll get access to the entire piece and every newsletter from there on out.
25. Publish links to gated offers.
When you share a post on LinkedIn that contains high-quality information your audience can benefit from, round it out by encouraging users to sign up for your email list. If what you’ve said has resonated with them, they’ll recognize that receiving emails from you will give them additional access to the high-quality content you offer.
You can also do this in appropriate and relevant LinkedIn group discussions — just be mindful of the topic being discussed to ensure your offer is a welcome addition to the conversation.
How To Grow Your Email List On Your Website
26. Ask website visitors for feedback
People enjoy offering feedback on information that pertains to them. On your site pages, include a form that asks visitors what questions they might have about your business, and collect email addresses to follow up with them.
27. Shorten the length of your lead-capturing forms
It’s tempting to collect as much information on a user as possible right away, but adding too many fields to your landing pages and lead-capturing forms can drive people away. Reduce the length of your forms to just two to three fields — you can collect more information from them once you start a conversation.
28. Link to offers across your website that capture email signups
Create CTAs that link to your offers across your website that captures email sign-ups. Some key places to consider include your website’s homepage, your ‘About Us’ page, and your ‘Contact Us’ page.
29. A/B test different campaign copy
You might be doing all the right things to generate leads — landing pages, gated content, contests, and more, but not seeing the success you’re looking for. The problem may be that the design or copy itself isn’t driving the engagement you need.
A/B test different aspects of your list-building campaigns with different versions of the same content. This includes the call-to-action text, the color of the gated offer, and even where these sign-up forms are placed on your website. Sometimes a small change can drive hundreds more conversions.  
Featured Resource: The Complete A/B Testing Kit

Download the Free Kit
30. Create a blog that readers can subscribe to.
If you don’t already blog, you should. Blog posts help you increase your ranking on search engines and generate blog subscribers to upgrade to more actionable email campaigns over time.
31. Guest blog for other websites and share a call-to-action.
There are many websites and publishers out there that cater to your audience — and larger portions of it. Guest blogging for these websites helps you expand your contact list through exposure to a new audience.
When you create guest blogging content, include a CTA for readers to subscribe to your sites’ blog or email newsletter.
32. Include customer reviews on your sign-up landing pages.
It’s one thing for you to tell people to sign up for a campaign, but it’s another thing for your happiest customers to say it too. Customer reviews are the social proof that encourages people to join in on something, and you should publish these reviews on your website, especially landing pages with sign-up forms. Including reviews will add genuine value to your content when people are on the fence about submitting contact information.
How To Grow Your Email List With a Partner
33. Run a promotion on a partner website or email newsletter.
Similar to guest blogging, partner websites can help you target a new audience. Use this partner source to direct visitors to your website, where you’re already sharing sign-up forms.
34. Host a co-marketing offer with a partner.
Creating an ebook or webinar with a partner can split up the work of content creation and allow you to share the audience of a similar business. After you release your content, split the leads you generate with your partner.
Creating an ebook or webinar with a partner can split up the work of content creation and allow you to share the audience of a similar business. If the content is gated, you’ll collect email addresses from a new audience for nurturing.
How To Grow Your Email List With Traditional Marketing
35. Collect email addresses at a trade show.
Offline events like trade shows are highly anticipated growth opportunities for professionals in your industry. Demo your latest product at an appropriate conference and collect signups in person.
Once you’re back at the office, import these signups into your contact database, and be sure to send a welcome email that confirms their opt-in to your list.
36. Host your own offline, in-person events.
Meetups, seminars, hackathons, educational panels, and your conferences place you front and center of a networking event. Those who attend are often more qualified to be contacted because they came to your event. Take the opportunity to collect email addresses from attendees, and send a welcome email and encourage opt-in.
37. Host an online webinar.
Webinars are the perfect opportunity to talk about your industry and access the audience of thought leaders that you may want to present with. The best part? Webinars are normally registered for via email, so you have audience emails to add to your list for further nurturing upon registration.
38. Add QR codes to your display ad.
Incorporate a QR code into your print marketing collateral that people can scan for more information on the printer content. You can set it so that your codes require email addresses to access additional content so that you can grow your list.
39. Collect emails in-store.
If you have a brick-and-mortar store where you interact with customers face-to-face, launch a store membership that they can sign up for via email at the register. You can create an email campaign designated to walk-in customers, which can help you keep in touch and reward loyalty to your product.
The examples above are all things you can do to increase your business’s email list. The best way to do so is to leverage multiple strategies on this list, helping you reach your audiences from a wide variety of angles and increase the chances of growing your list.
As you grow your email list with fresh, opt-in contacts, you’ll be able to nurture them with middle-of-the-funnel offers that allow you to convert early-stage leads into sales-ready leads.

Did you know that social platforms saw an increase of 1.3 million users every day in 2020? And the number of active email users in 2023 is predicted to reach 4.3 billion. Now consider the results if you combine the two.  If you’re online, you can’t ignore either social media or email marketing. Both are indispensable to…
The post Social Media Emails Done Right (How to Embed Social Posts and Events) appeared first on Benchmark Email.

The title pretty much says it all. We’re looking for a way to stay compliant with DNC regulations and need a solution that will fit into either Salesforce or Outreach. We’ve been checking out some solutions just for the DNC piece (dnc.com) but it seems like their integrations are sort of heavy and entail dev work to call the APIs, etc. Are there any DNC solutions that plug right into Salesforce or Outreach? Or auto- dialer solutions with the DNC integrations built in? I looked on the app exchange and there is really nothing of note (just a handful of items with hardly any reviews). What are other people using to solve DNC compliance stuff? Is there no good off the shelf solution out there?! Edit: To add: It would be ideal if we could find a solution that would hook into Outreach (in an ‘out of the box’ kind of way), and then where reps could have it check the numbers against the DNC list just for the ones they are queuing up calls for– this way we don’t have to pay to check and re-check every single number in our database– we could just check the ones we are about to use.
submitted by /u/busy_with_business [link] [comments]

When you’re sifting through your News Feed, what tends to catch your attention? More likely than not, it’s YouTube videos, pictures, animated GIFs, and other visual content, right?
While text-based content is always important when seeking answers to a question, creating visuals such as infographics, charts, graphs, animated GIFs, and other shareable images can do wonders for catching your readers’ attention and enhancing your article or report.

I know what you might be thinking: “I don’t know how to design awesome visuals. I’m not creative.”
Hi. I’m Bethany, and I will be the first to tell you that I’m not naturally artistic. And yet, I found a strength in data visualization at HubSpot, where I’ve spent most of my days creating infographics and other visuals for blog posts.
So, while I wouldn’t say I’m naturally artistic, I have learned how to create compelling visual content. So can you.

And you can do this by learning color theory. Consider this your introductory course, and we’ll be covering the following topics:

What Is Color Theory?
Why Is Color Theory Important in Web Design?
Color Theory 101
Additive & Subtractive Color Theory
The Meaning of Color
The Seven Color Schemes
How to Choose a Color Scheme
Color Tools

What is color theory?
Color theory is the basis for the primary rules and guidelines that surround color and its use in creating aesthetically pleasing visuals. By understanding color theory basics, you can begin to parse the logical structure of color for yourself to create and use color palettes more strategically. The result means evoking a particular emotion, vibe, or aesthetic.

While there are many tools out there to help even the most inartistic of us to create compelling visuals, graphic design tasks require a little more background knowledge on design principles.
Take selecting the right color combination, for instance. It’s something that might seem easy at first but when you’re staring down a color wheel, you’re going to wish you had some information on what you’re looking at. Understanding how colors work together, the impact they can have on mood and emotion, and how they change the look and feel of your website is critical to help you stand out from the crowd — for the right reasons.
From effective CTAs to sales conversions and marketing efforts, the right color choice can highlight specific sections of your website, make it easier for users to navigate, or give them a sense of familiarity from the first moment they click through.
But it’s not enough to simply select colors and hope for the best — from color theory to moods and schemes, finding the right HTML color codes, and identifying web-accessible colors for products and websites, the more you know about using color, the better your chances are for success.
Read on for our designer’s guide to color theory, color wheels, and color schemes for your site.

Color Theory 101
Let’s first go back to high school art class to discuss the basics of color.
Remember hearing about primary, secondary, and tertiary colors? They’re pretty important if you want to understand, well, everything else about color.

Primary Colors
Primary colors are those you can’t create by combining two or more other colors together. They’re a lot like prime numbers, which can’t be created by multiplying two other numbers together.
There are three primary colors:

Red
Yellow
Blue

Think of primary colors as your parent colors, anchoring your design in a general color scheme. Any one or combination of these colors can give your brand guardrails when you move to explore other shades, tones, and tints (we’ll talk about those in just a minute).
When designing or even painting with primary colors, don’t feel restricted to just the three primary colors listed above. Orange isn’t a primary color, for example, but brands can certainly use orange as their dominant color (as we at HubSpot know this quite well).
Knowing which primary colors create orange is your ticket to identifying colors that might go well with orange — given the right shade, tone, or tint. This brings us to our next type of color …
Secondary Colors
Secondary colors are the colors that are formed by combining any two of the three primary colors listed above. Check out the color theory model above — see how each secondary color is supported by two of the three primary colors?
There are three secondary colors: orange, purple, and green. You can create each one using two of the three primary colors. Here are the general rules of secondary color creation:

Red + Yellow = Orange

Blue + Red = Purple

Yellow + Blue = Green

Keep in mind that the color mixtures above only work if you use the purest form of each primary color. This pure form is known as a color’s hue, and you’ll see how these hues compare to the variants underneath each color in the color wheel below.
Tertiary Colors
Tertiary colors are created when you mix a primary color with a secondary color.
From here, color gets a little more complicated, and if you want to learn how the experts choose color in their design, you’ve got to first understand all the other components of color.
The most important component of tertiary colors is that not every primary color can match with a secondary color to create a tertiary color. For example, red can’t mix in harmony with green, and blue can’t mix in harmony with orange — both mixtures would result in a slightly brown color (unless of course, that’s what you’re looking for).
Instead, tertiary colors are created when a primary color mixes with a secondary color that comes next to it on the color wheel below. There are six tertiary colors that fit this requirement:

Red + Purple = Red-Purple (magenta)
Red + Orange = Red-Orange (vermillion)
Blue + Purple = Blue-Purple (violet)
Blue + Green = Blue-Green (teal)
Yellow + Orange = Yellow-Orange (amber)
Yellow + Green = Yellow-Green (chartreuse)

The Color Theory Wheel
Okay, great. So now you know what the “main” colors are, but you and I both know that choosing color combinations, especially on a computer, involves a much wider range than 12 basic colors.
This is the impetus behind the color wheel, a circle graph that charts each primary, secondary, and tertiary color — as well as their respective hues, tints, tones, and shades. Visualizing colors in this way helps you choose color schemes by showing you how each color relates to the color that comes next to it on a rainbow color scale. (As you probably know, the colors of a rainbow, in order, are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.)

When choosing colors for a color scheme, the color wheel gives you opportunities to create brighter, lighter, softer, and darker colors by mixing white, black, and gray with the original colors. These mixes create the color variants described below:
Hue
Hue is pretty much synonymous with what we actually mean when we said the word “color.” All of the primary and secondary colors, for instance, are “hues.”
Hues are important to remember when combining two primary colors to create a secondary color. If you don’t use the hues of the two primary colors you’re mixing together, you won’t generate the hue of the secondary color. This is because a hue has the fewest other colors inside it. By mixing two primary colors that carry other tints, tones, and shades inside them, you’re technically adding more than two colors to the mixture — making your final color dependent on the compatibility of more than two colors.
If you were to mix the hues of red and blue together, for instance, you’d get purple, right? But mix a tint of red with the hue of blue, and you’ll get a slightly tinted purple in return.
Shade
You may recognize the term “shade” because it’s used quite often to refer to light and dark versions of the same hue. But actually, a shade is technically the color that you get when you add black to any given hue. The various “shades” just refer to how much black you’re adding.
Tint
A tint is the opposite of a shade, but people don’t often distinguish between a color’s shade and a color’s tint. You get a different tint when you add white to a color. So, a color can have a range of both shades and tints.
Tone (or Saturation)
You can also add both white and black to a color to create a tone. Tone and saturation essentially mean the same thing, but most people will use saturation if they’re talking about colors being created for digital images. Tone will be used more often for painting.
With the basics covered, let’s dive into something a little more complicated — like additive and subtractive color theory.

Additive & Subtractive Color Theory
If you’ve ever played around with color on any computer program, you’ve probably seen a module that listed RGB or CMYK colors with some numbers next to the letters.
Ever wondered what those letters mean?
CMYK
CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key (Black). Those also happen to be the colors listed on your ink cartridges for your printer. That’s no coincidence.
CMYK is the subtractive color model. It’s called that because you have to subtract colors to get to white. That means the opposite is true — the more colors you add, the closer you get to black. Confusing, right?

Think about printing on a piece of paper. When you first put a sheet in the printer, you’re typically printing on a white piece of paper. By adding color, you’re blocking the white wavelengths from getting through.
Then, let’s say you were to put that printed piece of paper back into the printer, and print something on it again. You’ll notice the areas that have been printed on twice will have colors closer to black.
I find it easier to think about CMYK in terms of its corresponding numbers. CMYK works on a scale of 0 to 100. If C=100, M=100, Y=100, and K=100, you end up with black. But, if all four colors equal 0, you end up with true white.
RGB
RGB color models, on the other hand, are designed for electronic displays, including computers.
RGB stands for Red, Green, Blue, and is based on the additive color model of light waves. This means, the more color you add, the closer you get to white. For computers, RGB is created using scales from 0 to 255. So, black would be R=0, G=0, and B=0. White would be R=255, G=255, and B=255.

When you’re creating color on a computer, your color module will usually list both RGB and CMYK numbers. In practice, you can use either one to find colors, and the other color model will adjust accordingly.
However, many web programs will only give you the RGB values or a HEX code (the code assigned to color for CSS and HTML). So, if you’re designing digital images or for web design, RGB is probably your best bet for choosing colors.

You can always convert the design to CMYK and make adjustments should you ever need it for printed materials.
The Meaning of Color
Along with varying visual impact, different colors also carry different emotional symbolism.

Red — typically associated with power, passion, or energy, and can help encourage action on your site
Orange — joy and enthusiasm, making it a good choice for positive messaging
Yellow — happiness and intellect, but be wary of overuse
Green — often connected to growth or ambition, green can help give the sense that your brand is on the rise
Blue — tranquility and confidence, depending on the shade — lighter shades provide a sense of peace, darker colors are more confident
Purple — luxury or creativity, especially when used deliberately and sparingly on your site
Black — power and mystery, and using this color can help create necessary negative space
White — safety and innocence, making it a great choice to help streamline your site

Worth noting? Different audiences may perceive colors differently. The meanings listed above are common for North American audiences, but if your brand moves into other parts of the world, it’s a good idea to research how users will perceive particular colors. For example, while red typically symbolizes passion or power in the United States, it’s considered a color of mourning in South Africa.
While it’s possible to create your website using a combination of every color under the rainbow, chances are the final product won’t look great. Thankfully, color experts and designers have identified seven common color schemes to help jumpstart your creative process.
Let’s examine each in more detail.
1. Monochromatic
Monochromatic color schemes use a single color with varying shades and tints to produce a consistent look and feel. Although it lacks color contrast, it often ends up looking very clean and polished. It also allows you to easily change the darkness and lightness of your colors.

Monochromatic color schemes are often used for charts and graphs when creating high contrast isn’t necessary.
Check out all the monochromatic colors that fall under the red hue, a primary color.

2. Analogous
Analogous color schemes are formed by pairing one main color with the two colors directly next to it on the color wheel. You can also add two additional colors (which are found next to the two outside colors) if you want to use a five-color scheme instead of just three colors.

Analogous structures do not create themes with high contrasting colors, so they’re typically used to create a softer, less contrasting design. For example, you could use an analogous structure to create a color scheme with autumn or spring colors.
This color scheme is great for creating warmer (red, oranges, and yellows) or cooler (purples, blues, and greens) color palettes like the one below.

Analogous schemes are often used to design images rather than infographics or bar charts as all of the elements blend together nicely.
3. Complementary
You may have guessed it, but a complementary color scheme is based on the use of two colors directly across from each other on the color wheel and relevant tints of those colors.

The complementary color scheme provides the greatest amount of color contrast. Because of this, you should be careful about how you use the complementary colors in a scheme.
It’s best to use one color predominantly and use the second color as accents in your design. The complementary color scheme is also great for charts and graphs. High contrast helps you highlight important points and takeaways.

4. Split Complementary
A split complementary scheme includes one dominant color and the two colors directly adjacent to the dominant color’s complement. This creates a more nuanced color palette than a complementary color scheme while still retaining the benefits of contrasting colors.

The split complementary color scheme can be difficult to balance because unlike analogous or monochromatic color schemes, the colors used all provide contrast (similar to the complementary scheme).
The positive and negative aspect of the split complementary color model is that you can use any two colors in the scheme and get great contrast … but that also means it can also be tricky to find the right balance between the colors. As a result, you may end up playing around with this one a bit more to find the right combination of contrast.

5. Triadic
Triadic color schemes offer high contrasting color schemes while retaining the same tone. Triadic color schemes are created by choosing three colors that are equally placed in lines around the color wheel.

Triad color schemes are useful for creating high contrast between each color in a design, but they can also seem overpowering if all of your colors are chosen on the same point in a line around the color wheel.
To subdue some of your colors in a triadic scheme, you can choose one dominant color and use the others sparingly, or simply subdue the other two colors by choosing a softer tint.
The triadic color scheme looks great in graphics like bar or pie charts because it offers the contrast you need to create comparisons.

6. Square
The square color scheme uses four colors equidistant from each other on the color wheel to create a square or diamond shape. While this evenly-spaced color scheme provides substantial contrast to your design, it’s a good idea to select one dominant color rather than trying to balance all four.

Image Source
Square color schemes are great for creating interest across your web designs. Not sure where to start? Pick your favorite color and work from there to see if this scheme suits your brand or website. It’s also a good idea to try square schemes against both black and white backgrounds to find the best fit.
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7. Rectangle
Also called the tetradic color scheme, the rectangle approach is similar to its square counterpart but offers a more subtle approach to color selection. 

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As you can see in the diagram above, while the blue and red shades are quite bold, the green and orange on the other side of the rectangle are more muted, in turn helping the bolder shades stand out.

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No matter which color scheme you choose, keep in mind what your graphic needs. If you need to create contrast, then choose a color scheme that gives you that. On the other hand, if you just need to find the best “versions” of certain colors, then play around with the monochromatic color scheme to find the perfect shades and tints.

Remember, if you build a color scheme with five colors, that doesn’t mean you have to use all five. Sometimes just choosing two colors from a color scheme looks much better than cramming all five colors together in one graphic.
1. Prioritize the user experience, first.
Before you add color to your website, app, product, or packaging, get the basic design downpat in greyscale.
This lets you focus on what matters most: User experience. Instead of focusing on the color scheme of your overall site or the hue of specific buttons or links, make sure everything works like it’s supposed to. Make sure links aren’t broken, product pages are up-to-date and email opt-ins are ready to go.
Here’s why: Even the best-looking website or product with perfect color selection won’t be enough to keep visitors if they can’t find what they’re looking for.
2. Leverage natural inspiration.
Once your site operations are solid, it’s time to start selecting colors.
Not sure what looks good? Take a look outside. Nature is the best example of colors that complement each other — from the green stems and bright blooms of flowering plants to azure skies and white clouds, you can’t go wrong pulling context from natural colors and combinations.
3. Set a mood for your color scheme.
With a few color choices in mind, consider the mood you want your color scheme to set. If passion and energy are your priorities, lean more toward red or brighter yellows. If you’re looking to create a feeling of peace or tranquility, trend toward lighter blues and greens.
It’s also worth thinking negatively. This is because negative space — in either black or white — can help keep your design from feeling too cluttered with color.
4. Consider color context.
It’s also worth considering how colors are perceived in contrast.
In the image below, the middle of each of the circles is the same size, shape, and color. The only thing that changes is the background color.
Yet, the middle circles appear softer or brighter depending on the contrasting color behind it. You may even notice movement or depth changes just based on one color change.

This is because the way in which we use two colors together changes how we perceive it. So, when you’re choosing colors for your graphic designs, think about how much contrast you want throughout the design.
For instance, if you were creating a simple bar chart, would you want a dark background with dark bars? Probably not. You’d most likely want to create a contrast between your bars and the background itself since you want your viewers to focus on the bars, not the background.
5. Refer to your color wheel.
Next, consider your color wheel and the schemes mentioned above. Select a few different color combinations using schemes such as monochrome, complementary, and triad to see what stands out.
Here, the goal isn’t to find exactly the right colors on the first try and create the perfect design, but rather to get a sense of which scheme naturally resonates with your personal perception and the look of your site.
You may also find that schemes you select that look good in theory don’t work with your site design. This is part of the process — trial and error will help you find the color palette that both highlights your content and improves the user experience.
6. Use the 60-30-10 rule.
Often used in home design, the 60-30-10 rule is also useful for website or app design. The idea here is to use three colors: A main color for 60% of your design, a secondary color for 30% of your design and an accent color for the last 10%.
While these aren’t hard-and-fast numbers, they help give a sense of proportion and balance to your site by providing a primary color with secondary and accent colors that all work together.
7. Draft multiple designs.
Draft and apply multiple color designs to your website and see which one(s) stand out. Then, take a step back, wait a few days and check again to see if your favorites have changed.
Here’s why: While many designers go in with a vision of what they want to see and what looks good, the finished product often differs on digital screens that physical color wheels — what seemed like a perfect complement or an ideal color pop may end up looking drab or dated.
Don’t be afraid to draft, review, draft again and throw out what doesn’t work — color, like website creation, is a constantly-evolving art form.

Put simply? Practice makes perfect. The more you play with color and practice design, the better you get. No one creates their masterpiece the first time around.
Color Tools
There’s been a lot of theory and practical information for actually understanding which colors go best together and why. But when it comes down to the actual task of choosing colors while you’re designing, it’s always a great idea to have tools to help you actually do the work quickly and easily.
Luckily, there are a number of tools to help you find and choose colors for your designs.
Adobe Color
One of my favorite color tools to use while I’m designing anything — whether it’s an infographic or just a pie chart — is Adobe Color (previously Adobe Kuler).
This free online tool allows you to quickly build color schemes based on the color structures that were explained earlier in this post. Once you’ve chosen the colors in the scheme you’d like, you can copy and paste the HEX or RGB codes into whatever program you’re using.
It also features hundreds of premade color schemes for you to explore and use in your own designs. If you’re an Adobe user, you can easily save your themes to your account.

Illustrator Color Guide
I spend a lot of time in Adobe Illustrator, and one of my most-used features is the color guide. The color guide allows you to choose one color, and it will automatically generate a five-color scheme for you. It will also give you a range of tints and shades for each color in the scheme.
If you switch your main color, the color guide will switch the corresponding colors in that scheme. So if you’ve chosen a complementary color scheme with the main color of blue, once you switch your main color to red, the complementary color will also switch from orange to green.
Like Adobe Color, the color guide has a number of preset modes to choose the kind of color scheme you want. This helps you pick the right color scheme style within the program you’re already using.
After you’ve created the color scheme that you want, you can save that scheme in the “Color Themes” module for you to use throughout your project or in the future.

Preset Color Guides
If you’re not an Adobe user, you’ve probably used Microsoft Office products at least once. All of the Office products have preset colors that you can use and play around with to create color schemes. PowerPoint also has a number of color scheme presets that you can use to draw inspiration for your designs.
Where the color schemes are located in PowerPoint will depend on which version you use, but once you find the color “themes” of your document, you can open up the preferences and locate the RGB and HEX codes for the colors used.
You can then copy and paste those codes to be used in whatever program you’re using to do your design work.

Finding the Right Color Scheme
There’s a lot of theory in this post, I know. But when it comes to choosing colors, understanding the theory behind color can do wonders for how you actually use color. This can make creating branded visuals easy, especially when using design templates where you can customize colors.

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