“A man is only as good as his tools”, goes a quote but it may actually be true for email marketing too! Email marketing is not just about sending newsletters when you feel like nor just about picking the perfect day to send emails. Email marketing is a whole ecosystem made up of careful and well-thought strategies based on analytics, set of audiences, endless split tests, and more. Beyond sending basic newsletters, email marketing consists of custom workflows based on activity triggers, or special occasions such as birthdays or anniversaries, which can help you keep track and stay in touch with your audience using automatically generated emails. Other than a lot of experience and trial and error, this seemingly simple world of sending communications to your customer list actually requires a set of great marketing tools and apps that ease, build and optimise the job.
We have rounded up some of the most basic and advanced email marketing tools and apps that we use at Hustler Marketing and that will help with:
- Managing the email marketing program
- Designing and copywriting
- Checking and fixing technical interventions
- Reporting
Let’s start in that order with the email marketing tools and apps you need to install, download, try or buy to offer you a 360 degree email marketing program.
1. Klaviyo: Email marketing platform
There are many email service providers (ESPs) or Email Marketing Platforms in the market, but what we have found to be the best email marketing platform for Shopify stores is Klaviyo. Its features include audience segmentation, performance reporting, pre-loaded templates, dashboard and convenient integration with multiple platforms such as Shopify, Magento, Zapier, WooCommerce, payment processors, and marketing tools that grant users to centralize data from multiple sources.
Users are allowed to send out targeted email campaigns based on their metrics about how customers interact with past emails they have received from you.
Another feature that will help the user track their efforts is the reporting dashboards, where you can measure the performance based on the activities each profile has made, such as refund requests, ordered items, visitor activity, and the conversion by email marketing campaigns and flows.
2. Gmass.co – Email deliverability tester
Gmass that claims to “get you the highest open rates you’ve ever got” is a free email deliverability tester where you can use any email marketing service to send your campaign to a set of email addresses to test if your emails land in the Primary, Spam, or Promotions tab. This is a great email marketing tool to course correct your email marketing campaign before it’s blasted out.
The email addresses use spam filters installed such as Barracuda, Mimecast, and Sophos, which will help you improve your marketing efforts, whether by changing your subject lines, your copy, your Alt Text, etc.
3. GlockApps – Email management solution
In its essence, Glock is a tool identifying potential technical issues with your email and includes some features that help troubleshoot them. For example, we use it heavily to check the “reputation” of the IP address of our clients, and also to check a potential spam score of existing email marketing setup. Further, it helps identify malware, detect phishing, test major ISPs, prevent spam complaints, and more. It’s very easy to use and is as simple as in a test verifies your reputation and authentication, as well as providing comprehensive feedback for common ISPs and corporate filters. If there is a problem, it will explain it to you in real time so you can fix it before launching a real email campaign.
4. Email on Acid – Email previewer
Billed as “the most comprehensive and flexible automated email pre-deployment platform in the world”, Email on Acid is an affordable email QA platform that aims to streamline the email testing process. It helps you preview preheaders, spell check on HTML, fix load speeds, and checks your domain against the most popular blacklists and your email against spam filters. These features help email marketers and developers save time and send more polished emails, leading to better deliverability and open rates. Email on Acid also includes features as email previews on 90+ email clients, Spam Testing, Advanced Analytics, and an Email Editor, and many more.
5. ZeroBounce – Email list cleaner/ email validation tool
Zerobounce does a lot of things but what we love using it for are its two core capabilities: Email List Validation and list cleaning.
Non-functional, scammy or dubious email addresses can affect your email deliverability. Like we have it here, you need to clean up your email list regularly to improve open rates and deliverability. This tool helps you do that.
Bonus apps:
The following tools or apps are not email specific but they will help organize, design and ease your email marketing just the same.
6. Figma – Collaborative, cloud based design tool
“Photoshop but on the Cloud” is how some of our designers like to refer to Figma as. But really Figma is a godsend for an email marketing agency such as ours where multiple stakeholders collaborate on the same project. We mainly use Figma to design the emails as a photoshop alternative. It allows other designers, account managers and copywriters to look at and work on the same file as well as add comments on a specific element of the design file.
7. Airtable – Collaborative Spreadsheet
“A spreadsheet on steroids – clearly we get really creative with naming our tools here at Hustler Marketing! Airtable is a cloud based spreadsheet solution that helps you organize your data and other itemised information much better than a normal spreadsheet. For starters, it lets you upload images within a certain cell so you can post the designs – finished or raw within a certain row on a worksheet. All the row and column headings can be customised according to your need and preference. We use it to manage the content calendar for a lot of our clients as well as our own content.
8. Conversion.ai – Artificial Intelligence Copywriter
“Wooooo, this is nuts!!!” These were our CEO’s exact words after taking this tool for a spin! If you’re facing a writer’s block or just don’t have the resources to generate a lot of copy, let artificial intelligence help you. We’re still in Beta phase of testing this tool, but if you want to quickly drum up a verbiage for email copy and you’ve run out of patience, time or vocab to do that, then Conversion.ai does a wonderful job. Just enter a sentence, and the tool will throw up coherent (sometimes not so) words upon words related to the topic. Don’t fire your copywriter yet, but they might have a reason to be worried.
9. Buzzsumo – Content discovery tool
While Buzzsumo is an overall content marketing tool that helps discover new content based on keywords and other parameters, it’s also useful for email marketing. It tells you what topics are trending, throws up a list of relevant and recent content along with their engagement metrics. If your company or store sends newsletters and is always on the hunt for fresh and relevant content, that’s not generated by your own team, or need inspiration for ideas, to engage your audience, then Buzzsumo is a handy option. It offers a 30-day free trial.
10. Similarmail.com – Email repository website
If you’re running low on inspiration or just need to keep a tab on the email marketing world, SimilarMail is a great website to bookmark. It’s a repository of thousands of emails across niches, themes and occasions. Enter any keyword and it’ll populate real emails related to that keyword.
Navigating the myriad email marketing tools and apps to manage and optimise your email marketing can be time consuming and may need to help of email marketing experts such as us. Book a call with us and see how we can help you use these tools and get the most out of your email marketing.
