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Let’s say you’re in charge of writing up a series of new transactional emails for your company.
You could spend half the afternoon reading blog posts about best practices for transactional emails. You could just wing it and hope for the best. Or you could use a template and instantly build upon the knowledge of transactional email experts.
Using a marketing template that’s already been proven to work saves you a lot of time and is a better way to ensure that whatever you’re putting together will perform the way you want it to.
To help you take advantage of marketing templates to save time and produce better results, we curated this list of free marketing templates for everything you might need to create.
Need to create a proposal for a client, design an impressive transactional email, create an explainer video, or put together a report showing the performance of SEO changes you’ve made? Find templates for all of those activities—and many more—below.
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There’s no need to spend hours or days collecting data and formatting it when you need to report on the outcomes of your efforts. When it’s time to deliver a report to your boss or a client, just use one of these templates to build beautiful reports quickly.
Databox lets you build beautiful, shareable, real-time reporting dashboards that consolidate data from 100+ tools, including Google Analytics, HubSpot, Google Ads, Facebook, Twitter, Shopify, SEMrush, and Mailchimp.
Our template directory contains more than 300 templates, and each template is designed for a specific type of report—email marketing, website analytics, content marketing, sales, project management, etc.
Each dashboard is also pre-built, so all you have to do is select your data source to build your report in seconds without touching a spreadsheet or grabbing a single screenshot.
Related: 15 Google Analytics Dashboards That Have Helped Over 1 Million People
If you want to discover how visitors engage with your website, and which content drives the most engagement and conversions, there are several on-page events and metrics you can track from Google Analytics 4 that will get you started:
And more…
Now you can benefit from the experience of our Google Analytics 4 experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template showing the most important KPIs for monitoring visitor engagement on your website. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in marketing reports, and best of all, it’s free!
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your Google Analytics account with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
If you’d just prefer building your reports in a spreadsheet, check out these Google Sheets > Google Slides and Excel > PowerPoint reporting templates from HubSpot.
Each spreadsheet comes pre-designed with the data and calculations you need to create visually engaging and clear reports that feed into their respective presentation tools, so all you need to do is plug in your data to build a full reporting deck quickly and easily.
Every email marketing tool comes with its own set of pre-built templates, but if none of those templates works for you, you don’t have to resign yourself to building (and writing) your own emails from scratch.
Check out the collections of email marketing templates below to find the perfect ready-to-use designs and/or copy for your newsletter, transactional emails, or drip campaigns.
Really Good Emails is a curated list of 4,000+ product and transactional emails. Community members submit their favorite emails for consideration, and only those that are selected by the site’s six curators are added to the collection.
While the emails featured on Really Good Emails aren’t templates per se—you’ll have to recreate any email you’re interested in using in your email marketing tool—it’s a great way to get inspired by the best emails sent by companies like Lyft, Starbucks, Intuit, Apple, and more.
If you’re looking for inspiration for the content of your email, you’ll want to check out Good Copy. Good Copy features the text sent in transactional emails (thank you, welcome, renewal, apology, etc.) by companies like Slack, Trello, Basecamp, Pinterest, Evernote, and more.
You can sort by type of email to see examples for the transactional email you’re trying to write, then use the content in the templates to craft your own good copy.
Related: Email Subject Line Examples: 42 Marketers Share Their Very Best
Maybe you’re trying to create a proposal, ebook, white paper, or lead magnet. And while you’re an excellent writer, designing isn’t your strong suit.
With these document templates, it doesn’t have to be. Just plug your content into these templates to build beautiful documents quickly and easily.
PandaDoc’s proposal templates help freelancers, consultants, and agencies who want to create and send beautiful, branded proposals to their clients. You can download any of the templates as PDFs for free to edit them on your computer, or you can edit them directly in PandaDoc (from $9/month per user).
Need to create an ebook, build a checklist to use as a content upgrade, or transform your blog post into a downloadable PDF? Beacon has dozens of pre-designed templates you can use to do all three—or to create any type of lead magnet you need for your business.
Just create a free Beacon account, select your template, and either auto-populate it with the content from a blog post or copy and paste your text in manually to build an eye-catching and professional lead magnet that doesn’t require any design work.
In one of our recent surveys, marketers said that creating a video takes significantly longer than writing a blog post. But that doesn’t have to be the case.
If you’re willing to use a video template, you can shave off a significant amount of the time it takes to create videos for your social channels, blog posts, and landing pages.
Related: 3 Examples of Marketing Videos You Can Film Right From Your Desk
Biteable makes it easy to create product and explainer videos using your own images/clips, Shutterstock images/clips, and/or custom animations created by Biteable.
With a free account, you can use Biteable’s templates to create videos quickly and then either share them on social media or embed them on your website.
With Renderforest, you can arrange a series of animations to create explainer videos, whiteboard videos, Instagram stories, and more.
Renderforest’s animations gallery features hundreds of pre-designed animation packages, some with as many as 1,000 different scenes you can use to build your video.
Need to build a pitch deck or a slideshow to share during a presentation or keynote speech? You could use the default templates in Google Slides or Powerpoint, but the presentation templates below make it easy to create something that’s much more striking and engaging.
Marketing presentations are just a small portion of the marketing assets you can create using Canva. Basically, Canva has templates for just about everything you might want to design: presentations, infographics, social media headers, resumes… even offline materials like brochures and posters.
But I’m placing Canva in the presentation templates section because their presentation templates are impressive. You only pay if your presentation uses one of Canva’s premium assets, and you can easily swap out premium assets with free ones if you’re looking for a fully free option.
Related: 22 Design Tools That Top Marketers Use To Quickly Create Beautiful Things
If you’d rather build and edit your presentation in PowerPoint or Google Slides, SlidesCarnival might be a better option. All of SlidesCarnical’s deck templates are free to use, and you can choose to edit them in your tool of choice (though select templates are only editable in Canva).
While there are templates for pretty much any marketing task you need to complete, using a template isn’t always the best decision.
Sometimes, using a template can be like using stock photos on your website. If lots of other people are also using the same stock photos—or the same templates—it can actually dilute your personal or company brand to use something that’s easily identified as unoriginal.
The question to ask yourself is “Does it matter if I use a template for this asset?”
Just like using a stock photo on your homepage is potentially much more damaging than using a stock photo on a blog post, using a template in certain cases can be fine, and using the same template in other cases can be an issue.
Does it matter if you use a template for the presentation you’re going to give at Inbound 2020? Probably not. People are there to listen to your talk. Your deck isn’t all that important.
Does it matter if you use a template video on your homepage if you’re a video marketing consultant? It probably really does. If you’re an expert, your work should be obviously better than anything that an average marketer could create with a template.
But if it seems harmless to use a template when creating new marketing assets, it’s definitely a great choice. In many situations, templates can save you a lot of time, and if you don’t have the design skills needed—or budget to hire a designer—it can also help you present yourself and your business more professionally.
You Might Also Like: 24 Free-Forever Marketing and Sales Software Tools
Originally published in August 2017, this post had been updated to remove templates that are no longer free and to add new template sources and examples.
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Tamara Omerovic is a marketing consultant with 8 years of experience in content marketing and SEO. She specializes in leading high-performing teams and developing effective marketing processes for B2B SaaS brands.
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