This article has been contributed by Kevin George.
With 87% of marketers using email marketing to distribute their content, it surely has emerged as a popular distribution channel. Moreover, with 49% of consumers looking forward to receiving promotional emails from their favorite brand, it becomes critical for marketers to adopt email marketing strategies and have an edge over their competitors.
However, email marketing can be a cumbersome activity if you do not have the necessary resources in terms of manpower and software tools to manage its functioning. Therefore, it is important to have a thorough knowledge of how to make the most of the email marketing tools to make the intricate process of running email campaigns easier.
Here’s a look at 25 email marketing tools that can help email developers carry out their campaign seamlessly.
Email list building tools
Email list building tools help you create email lists in a strategic and efficient manner. Simply put, you use such tools to develop sign-up forms and build quality prospect lists organically. Take a look at the various email list building tools that can help you generate leads.
1. OptinMonster
OptinMonster is a plugin that helps you create pop-up forms for your website. You can set it up easily and create your first opt-in form without any coding skills. Further, OptinMonster also has the ability to check your conversions and analyze which types of forms are doing the best. It also helps you create exit intent popups. Such forms appear on the website when a subscriber is about to leave your website.
With a variety of design options available, OptinMonster facilitates easy creation of forms that work in sync with the design of your website. There are three types of opt-in forms available: lightbox, footer bar and slide-in.
OptinMonster works seamlessly with email marketing providers and CRM services such as Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, Campaign Monitor and Infusionsoft. It also allows you to automate your list building process, thereby removing the task of manually transferring data from your website or CRM service.
2. Optin Architect
Optin Architect helps you easily create lead capturing forms. With its flexible design editor, it has the ability to return high conversions. Also, it is completely customizable. From position and size to custom colors and text, you can tailor it all.
Further, it assists in keeping your website mobile-friendly by creating responsive forms so your forms look great on all the major browsers. It also comes with the feature of exit intent technology that transforms your visitor into your loyal customer by deploying a pop-up the moment a visitor is about to close the page or click on the back button.
3. Sumo
Sumo consists of a suite of tools which work towards increasing your traffic and building a following while tracking your success at every step. Sumo offers 12 tools under three broad categories: email, social sharing and analytics. Out of these 12 tools, the list builder is the flagship tool of Sumo. It comes with a variety of advanced features and helps you convert visitors into loyal readers and customers.
Apart from helping you build your email list, it also helps you in creating professionally designed pop-ups. These pop-ups are triggered the moment a subscriber clicks back or is about to leave your site.
4. MailMunch
MailMunch gives you the tools to grow your email list while converting your website visitors into customers. It comes with a lot of free website pop-ups and sign-up widgets to help you grow your email list.
Its visual editor allows you to create impeccable signup forms, exit intent pop-ups, scroll boxes and embed forms. MailMunch is compatible with WordPress, Shopify, Weebly and Squarespace as well other platforms.
Email newsletter apps and autoresponders
Email newsletters are critical for keeping your subscribers up to date with relevant information about your business. Perhaps most importantly, they allow you to nurture your leads and convert them into customers.
An email newsletter tool can help you create a beautiful newsletter complete with features such as A/B testing and smart content. A good tool can monitor and analyze how the newsletter performs. Here’s a list of such tools that can help you create high-end newsletters and drive customer engagement to the next level.
1. ConvertKit
ConvertKit makes email marketing simple by helping you grow your email list while building your business and creating content that resonates with your subscriber base. It makes use of attractive forms, trackable data and high-end automation to help you use your email list for growing your business.
Whether you are working on a one-off broadcast or going for an automated sequence, ConvertKit helps in making the whole email writing process smooth, clean and instant.
In summary, it lets you send the right message at the right time to the right person with the help of simple yet powerful automation tools. It has a subscriber-centric approach that can easily organize your subscribers from one list with the help of various tags and segments.
2. Inwise
Inwise gives you access to dozens of free and professionally curated newsletter templates. You can edit them to suit your theme or the topic of your choice and send it to your subscriber’s inbox.
Inwise makes use of ISP management and information security managing systems and facilitates higher open rates. It does so by taking into account the automatic addition of unsubscribed users, treatment of incorrect emails along with compliance with spam laws. All in all, Inwise helps you create engaging newsletters through professional newsletter templates, thereby helping you have higher engagement rates while driving your sales rates.
3. Constant Contact
Constant Contact offers great email marketing services. From a free trial to a user-friendly interface, it has everything to craft a strong email campaign. With its easy-to-use tools and affordable plans, it has become a go-to name for small businesses. It allows you to send an unlimited number of emails and charges according to the number of subscribers in your contact list.
It even comes with contemporary, mobile-optimized templates with a drag-and-drop editor, thereby helping email marketers create, customize and send emails that resonate with their customer base. It lets you engage your subscribers on any device without having to code.
4. AWeber
With its ability to drag, drop and edit, AWeber can help you craft perfect messages. You can either build a design from scratch or use one of its professional mobile-optimized email templates.
AWeber is great for engaging subscribers with high-resolution images. It has a collection of 6,000+ royalty-free stock photos to select from. Apart from this, it allows for segmentation of your email list based on engagement and works towards re-engaging inactive subscribers.
The program allows you to track your success by giving you insights into open, click-through and sales rates. As a result, you will get a solid idea of which of your campaigns are performing well and which aren’t.
5. GetResponse
GetResponse, as the name itself suggests, brings you a response from your subscribers by delivering personalized offers to your most active subscribers. It allows you to send one-time email broadcasts with the announcement of updates and offers. It also works as an autoresponder and nurtures subscribers based on automated follow-up emails. Further, it makes extensive use of automation to trigger emails based on customer’s purchases, cart abandonment, website visits and more.
To sum up, from highly targeted recipient groups to perfectly timed emails, it has all the tools to increase your email reach and deliverability.
Drip email marketing tools
Drip emails work seamlessly in giving your customers the right information at the right time. Drip campaigns are a set of automated emails that are sent out on the basis of specific customer action and a particular timeline. That’s the reason relevant and targeted emails bring 18 times more revenue than the ones that are globally broadcasted. In short, it becomes easy to move your warm leads closer to conversions if you can nurture them successfully. The drip email tools discussed below come in very handy here.
1. ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign makes use of a standard flowchart to create a drip email that determines which email gets delivered to whom. It takes into account simple questions with yes/no answers and funnels your contact list on the basis of the actions they have taken. From emails that they have opened to the pages they have visited, it takes into consideration everything and sends your subscribers drip emails accordingly. Simply put, it helps you create an extensive drip campaign that fits in with your regular email newsletter.
2. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a great tool for running your drip campaigns. Recently, new automation features have been added to the product. It comes with pre-built drip campaigns for welcoming new subscribers onboard, sending follow up email after sales and more.
It has an easy to use email designer to help you create Mailchimp templates for your drip campaigns. Further, it leverages subscriber profiles to extract data regarding email open and other subscriber activity.
3. HubSpot
HubSpot makes use of automated workflows to assist you in managing your contacts and content simultaneously. With the help of HubSpot, you can pull out the content from your blog post and include it in your drip campaigns. Further, you can schedule your campaign in accordance with changing buyer behaviour.
HubSpot also allows you to change your site’s content for individual users. It will facilitate consistent marketing even when it is being personalized for varied customer segments.
4. Drip
Drip is an app created specifically for sending drip campaigns. It comes with a simple tool that allows you to collect email addresses via your website. It can also extract your subscribers’ email addresses from a variety of other sources too.
Drip, with the help of blueprints, can help you create drip campaigns instantly. All you need to do is replace the filler text with relevant info about the product or service you are selling. Once you do that, you need to schedule a timeframe for sending the emails and see how those simple sign-ups transform into real customers.
5. Keap
Keap is an email marketing software that streamlines your email strategy by incorporating it with your CRM, sales and marketing automation software into one platform. From helping you create professional-looking emails and analyzing the performance of your campaign to working as an impeccable deliverability tool, Keap does it all.
It has an email broadcast builder which lets you create emails and broadcast them from within the app itself. It has several templates to help you design emails and personalize them with merge fields.
Another feature that makes Keap stand out is its campaign builder function. It works towards creating sequences of follow-up campaigns that are triggered by behavioral actions of customers such as a subscriber opening an email or an employee calling a name. It also automates tasks like sending birthday emails, cart abandonment emails, and event purchase follow-ups. Take a look at an email drip sequence created through Keap.
Apart from this, it also keeps you updated with deep analytics that give you insights into email engagement, email deliverability, click-through and open rates, and much more.
6. Bomb Bomb
Bomb Bomb is all about sending video powered drip emails. All you need to do is shoot a video of your product and introduce yourself or your product to your subscribers. Further, the designer at Bomb Bomb will work towards making those videos look appealing in everyone’s inbox while beginning your email automation. Once subscribers start watching your videos, you will get a real-time alert about it.
In addition, Bomb Bomb also allows you to include PowerPoints, mp3s and other files in your emails.
Integrated marketing automation tools
While many marketers use drip email marketing and automation cohesively, many don’t – but you don’t have to be one of them. Drip emails are just a series of messages sent to the subscriber over a period of time. On the other hand, automation is based on the action taken by the user and triggered at that particular time. Here are some tools that offer these services.
1. Contactually
Contactually is all about working smarter and not harder by simplifying and automating your personal communication with the whole network. It allows you to connect your email account in one click by automatically syncing your contacts and communication history.
It also allows you to prioritize your relationship with your contacts. From old colleagues and former clients to new prospects, you can organize them into segments known as buckets and set how often you would want them to hear from you.
Moreover, with its custom templates and market-driven content, you can add value to your email interaction on a personal level.
2. Marketo
Marketo is known as one of the best marketing automation tools on the market. It comes with a full suite of features that not only helps marketers manage email campaigns but also provides an impeccable team for driving sales.
Marketo basically works as a cloud-based platform that lets marketers create, automate and analyze their marketing campaign. From multi-channel campaign management and inbound and search marketing solutions to customer analysis and behaviour tracking, Marketo does it all like a pro.
All in all, it works seamlessly with other applications your business uses including email marketing, social marketing, marketing management, analytics and sales insights.
3. Salesforce
Salesforce ESP is a leading cloud-based CRM software. It provides a plethora of automation tools to automate your company’s repetitive business workflow with the help of tools like Workflow, Process Builder, Flow Builder and Approvals.
While Workflow is used to automate basic processes that can be summarised with an if/then statement, the Process Builder works towards automating all your business processes in the background.
As far as visual workflow is concerned, Salesforce works on solving complicated automation tasks that need user input along with multiple levels of branching logic. Further, the approval process in Salesforce automates all the necessary steps required to approve.
4. Sugar Market
Sugar Market (formerly Salesfusion) has a curated set of marketing automation tools such as a campaign builder, advanced automation and superior reporting. It allows you to engage with your audience in an effective way while measuring the success through the buyer journey.
From attracting web traffic and gathering engagement insights to streamlining campaign creation and driving conversions, you can do it all through the marketing automation platform of Salesfusion.
5. Omnisend
Omnisend is an omnichannel marketing automation software tool that drives sales on autopilot. It helps you reach your customers through email, text messages and more through a single automation tool.
It helps you provide a personalized experience to your customer base by combining multiple channels through a single platform. It also has a pre-built automation workflow which launches your cart abandonment or welcome series email within minutes.
Email testing tools
An important aspect of email marketing is testing whether the emails are rendering well on every device and email client. The most popular tools that can take care of this task are:
1. Litmus
Litmus allows you to test your email template across more than 70 clients and devices within seconds. From identifying broken links to detecting images or other bugs, this automated testing tool does it all.
Litmus works in 4 simple steps:
- Start by sending a test email.
- Litmus makes the email client open it.
- Further, it takes a screenshot of your email to know how your email looks like across various devices.
- It brings these screenshots to you in a few seconds.
2. Email on Acid
Email on Acid works in a similar way to Litmus. However, it offers email testing across 59 email clients and devices. It comes with a free trial of a week and supports a plethora of email clients. In summary, it saves your time while driving value and helping you connect with more subscribers. You can deliver error-free emails with just a click on the button.
Email tracking and monitoring tools
Without tracking the performance of your email campaigns, your email marketing strategy will just be a futile mechanical task of creating and deploying emails. To take it a step further, you must monitor the actions taken by your subscribers with the help of email tracking and monitoring tools.
1. Campaign Monitor
Apart from helping you design instant personalized emails, Campaign Monitor assists you in optimizing your campaign by taking the help of advanced analytics and detailed reports. It offers interactive analytics that gives you clear insights into how your email is performing in real-time. From witnessing how your readers are sharing and engaging with your content to analyzing the effectiveness of your calls-to-action, it gives you information about everything.
Its strong analytics and reporting components give you an opportunity to see who opened your email and what elements of your content appeal your subscribers the most.
2. Zoho Campaigns
Zoho Campaigns helps you create, send and track email campaigns, thereby helping you build a strong customer base. From helping you build targeted email campaigns to increasing your reach, this software aligns your marketing efforts in a way that can take you to the top.
In addition, it also gives insightful and detailed reports telling you about the performance of your email campaign including unique open rates, click-through rates and shares.
3. Square
Square works as a set of tools that allows for effective tracking of your email campaigns. It lets you design customized, automated emails while you watch how your marketing efforts affect your overall campaign using your Square dashboard.
Wrapping Up
Whether you are in the ecommerce sector or the SaaS industry, using these email marketing tools meticulously will completely upgrade your strategy and help you achieve your email marketing goals.
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About the author: Kevin George is the Marketing Head at Uplers Email.
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