With several billion email accounts worldwide and around 235 billion emails sent per day, email marketing is still one of the best marketing tools. A good email marketing campaign can get you the attention of millions of people.
Furthermore, according to Litmus, email marketing has the highest return on investment.
For every $1 marketers spend on email marketing, they receive $36 in return.
— Litmus
This impressive ROI and the possibility to scale big with ease is one of the primary reasons every startup should focus on email marketing in general.
There are many email marketing tools that can help you achieve your marketing goals with some effort, but only a handful of them deserve your attention.
Let’s have a look at the most important tools and see how they can add value to your email marketing journey.
What tools do you need for email marketing?
Email marketing is one of the most popular marketing technique; hence you’ll find a ton of product categories, but let’s have a look at which all are useful.
Here are some essential email marketing tool categories:
1/ A platform for sending your emails
2/ Visual testing
3/ Popup tools
4/ Spam testing tools
5/ DMARC monitors
Let’s directly jump into these and see how they are helpful. We’ll also discuss the best tools in each category, which you should have a look at.
1/ A platform for sending your emails
Often called an ESP (email service provider) having the software to send your emails is the most important tool that you’ll need to start your email marketing journey.
ESPs are specialised tools that not only help send your emails, but also help you manage your email list and design your marketing campaigns. They usually come with a ton of other features like automations, open and click reports, and much much more.
EmailOctopus – feature rich, simple and affordable
Most people think that if they require a good email marketing tool on a budget, then they’ll have to compromise on quality or features.
That used to be true. But EmailOctopus is now the exception, with the main goal of providing a simple email marketing tool which comes will all the features without being expensive.
EmailOctopus allows you to easily create and manage your email marketing campaigns with ease. It is simple to use and provides a wide range of features that make it an excellent choice for businesses of all sizes.
With EmailOctopus, you can create beautiful and responsive email templates, easily segment your contact lists, and track the performance of your campaigns. You can also integrate EmailOctopus with a range of third-party applications, making it a great choice.
Overall, EmailOctopus is a great choice for businesses that want to easily create and manage their email marketing campaigns. It is simple to use and provides a wide range of features, making it an exceptional choice for businesses of all sizes.
Some notable features of EmailOctopus:
1/ A drag and drop email editor
2/ Email automation
3/ Landing page builder
4/ Subscription forms
5/ Friendly support
Pricing: EmailOctopus comes with a free plan which allows you to send 10,000 emails to 2,500 subscribers for free. The Pro plan for 2,500 subscribers will cost you $14/mo. which comes with few additional features.
Mailchimp – an expensive offering
Mailchimp is one of the oldest and most popular email marketing tools. They are also the ones who first came up with a free plan that lasted for many years until recently when they restricted their free offering by a lot.
Mailchimp also comes with a few additional features like transactional mails, but you would need to pay extra for that.
Pricing: Mailchimp comes with a free plan which allows you to send 1,000 emails to 500 subscribers for free. The paid plan for 500 subscribers will cost you $11/mo. which comes with all additional features.
MailerLite – a good offering with all the features
MailerLite is yet another popular email marketing tool that’s available today. It offers a wide range of features at affordable pricing (some features are locked for higher paid plans).
One of the best things about MailerLite is that it is easy to use. Even if you have no prior experience with email marketing, you will be able to create beautiful and effective campaigns with MailerLite.
The interface is very intuitive, and the drag-and-drop editor makes creating emails a breeze, but if you want to use HTML emails, then you’ll have to move to their highest-paid plan.
Pricing: MailerLite comes with a free plan which allows you to send 12,000 emails to 1,000 subscribers for free. The paid plan for 2500 subscribers will cost you $17/mo. which doesn’t come with all additional features. To unlock all features like HTML emails and promotional popups, you’ll have to pay $30/mo. for the same number of subscribers.
Email visual testing tools
You must have noticed that your emails look different in Outlook compared to how it look in Gmail. This anomaly is email looks is because CSS for emails is not standard across all email clients.
To make sure your email looks good across all email clients, you need to test them with visual testing tools which replicates the look of the emails across email clients like Gmail, Hotmail, Zoho and many more.
Litmus
Litmus is one of the first and popular email visual testing tool. It lets you easily test your email across 90+ email clients. You’ll also be able to visualise how your email looks on different devices like the iPad, desktop and mobile.
Litmus will also test your email template for issues like broken links so that you can fix them before sending.
Some notable features of Litmus:
1/ Test email template across various clients
2/ Check broken links
3/ Accessibility test
4/ Preview with images blocked
5/ Spam tests
Pricing: Litmus doesn’t come with a free plan, but you can get a 7-day free trial. After the trial you will have to pay $99 per month for the base plan.
EmailOnAcid
EmailOnAcid is a notable Litmus alternative, which more or less offers the same features. Like Litmus, you can use EmailOnAcid to test your email in 90+ email clients across various devices.
Some notable features of EmailOnAcid:
1/ Test email template 90+ email clients
2/ Check broken links
3/ Accessibility test
4/ Preview with images blocked
5/ Spam tests
Pricing: EmailOnAcid doesn’t come with a free plan either. Like Litmus you can get a 7-day free trial and after that their base plan starts at $99 per month.
Popup tools
Some years back, popups had a very bad rap due to all the spammy look and poor UX they provided, but in recent years they have improved a lot and are making a comeback.
Popups have been known to provide a nice jump in the number of emails you capture, as they can be triggered on various occasions, like when the user is leaving the page.
Harry from Marketing Examples shared that 50% of the subscribers he got were because of his exit intent popup.
Now that we know that popups are beneficial, let’s see the best solution out there.
Poptin
Poptin is a popup tool that was founded in 2017 that helps you improve your website’s conversion rate by using their various popup templates.
They have popups for multiple use cases like SaaS, E-commerce and much more. You can explore all their templates by visiting their gallery.
Furthermore, Poptin has native integration with email marketing platforms like EmailOctopus, so you can directly push the contacts you collect via popups to your email list.
Pricing: Poptin comes with a free plan which provides you with all the basic functionalities and allows you to show the popup to 1,000 visitors. Their paid plan starts at $25/mo. and allows you to serve 10,000 visitors.
Popupsmart
Popupsmart is another popular popup tool which includes all the features that Poptin has plus some extra features like gamified and social sharing popups.
Other key features include the ability to show different content in popups based on geolocation or the device being used.
Popupsmart also has a native integration with EmailOctopus, so you can send across users who subscribe straight into your email service provider.
Pricing: Popupsmart comes with a free plan, which provides you with most of the functionality and allows you to show your popups to up to 5,000 visitors. Their paid plan starts at $32/mo. and allows you to serve 100,000 visitors.
Getsitecontrol
Getsitecontrol is a great Popupsmart alternative and comes with all the features. The key benefit of Getsitecontrol over other tools is its affordability.
Pricing: Getsitecontrol doesn’t have a free plan, but a paid plan starts at $9/mo. in the US and £8/mo. in UK. The price can significantly go down if you are from a country like India, thanks to their parity pricing.
Spam testing tools
Landing in spam is probably the biggest issue among email marketers. There isn’t a hard and fast way to completely skip this, but there are tools that will help you check and see if your email has chances to land in spam or not.
Email inbox tester by Glockapps
Glockapps is a popular name when it comes to email deliverability tools. They have a suite of free and paid tools which helps email marketers achieve better deliverability.
One such tool by them is their “Email Inbox Tester”, a completely free tool which helps you identify where your emails would land.
You simply need to send your email to the unique email id they share and then they share their analysis in couple of minutes.
Pricing: Completely free but they have a paid version too, which provides automated testing and a few other features for $10/mo. and comes with 18 inbox insight tests.
Mail-Tester
Mail-Tester is yet another newsletter spam tester which test you email on various parameters. It checks the domain DNS, blocklists, HTML in your email and then collectively gives a score to your email.
It’s a great free email marketing tool everyone should consider trying.
Pricing: Completely free for most use cases.
DMARC monitors
Before understanding what DMARC is, you need to understand about 2 DNS records that are essential for your marketing emails.
So to email clients to authenticate your email, they check for 2 DNS records – SPF and DKIM. These records make sure that your domain is only used to send emails that you have authorised it to send. If set incorrectly, your emails are likely to land in spam.
Now that you know about SPF and DKIM, let’s understand DMARC. So DMARC stands for “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance” which is nothing but a check of all the emails you send is authenticated with SPF and DKIM or not.
Now let’s see a few that help you track your DMARC results.
DMARC Digest by Postmark
DMARC Digest by Postmark is a very simple and basic DMARC monitoring tool provided by Postmark. To use it, you simply need to add the DNS record they share, and once done, you’ll be receiving a weekly DMARC report in a very simplified form.
Pricing: The basic DMARC report, which is limited by entries and is only delivered via mail, is free. For the pro plan you need to pay $29/mo. to get access to unlimited entries and get access to their dashboard.
Glockapps DMARC Analytics
Glockapps DMARC Analytics is similar to Postmark’s solution but has much more in-depth reporting and access to a dashboard is free too.
Pricing: Free plan is available for 1 domain group and 10,000 monthly DMARC messages. Paid plan starts at $15/mo. and includes 1,000,000 DMARC Messages and 15 domain groups.
Conclusion
These were just about the tools you should be using to kick start your email marketing journey. Each category serves an important purpose and hopefully, you’ll start learning and using them.
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