Email Marketing Tools

As far as content marketing is concerned, email continues to reign supreme as the communications medium of choice. Getting your marketing and mailing sorted also happens to be one of the things we enjoy doing most here at The Digital Studios.

As email communication is set to stay, we thought it might be useful to highlight the most widely used and best email marketing tools available to you right now. So without further ado, and in no particular order of preference, here they are:

1. Sender

Sender is one of the best free email marketing tools on the market and that’s largely due to the wide range of features available, which promote deliverability. Sender lets you create email newsletters without advanced knowledge or experience of usings html. You can choose from a variety of templates and customise elements such as images and text. You can even personalise your newsletters for individual recipients.

Once your mailing is out there, Sender allows you to track your subscribers’ activity such as who has opened your emails, who has clicked on the links within your mailing/s and how long it took your subscribers to open your message/s.

2. Sendinblue

Sendinblue is a marketing communication platform which features both email marketing tools and additional functions such as the ability to link to a customer relationship management (CRM) tool, from which you can automate and tailor your mailings to whole subscriber lists and / or specifically tagged groups. They also offer a landing page creation feature and there are a large number of design templates which are freely available and easy to use.

After you’ve put together the design element of your mailing/s, you can use features like A/B testing and segmented recipient lists. A/B testing is a method of testing two different variations of an email campaign and how they perform with your recipient list, so you can really get a detailed insight of what appeals most to your target audience.

3. Omnisend

Omnisend is a sophisticated Ecommerce marketing platform which offers the ability to integrate all your communication platforms in one place. At the moment, Omnisend’s free plan only incorporates the ability to email but it does allow you to automate your email delivery using triggers. If you are at the point of wanting to do more (push notifications and SMS), at the moment, you will need to pay for these services.

Within the free package though, you are also able to use Omnisend’s ‘audience insights’ to send out more relevant email marketing messages to individuals within your subscriber list/s. You can include incentives such as scratch cards, discount coupon codes and gift boxes to further entice your audience and optimise your email marketing strategy.

4. SendPulse

SendPulse brands itself as a “Multi-Channel Marketing Automation Platform” and its email marketing feature is incredibly popular. SendPulse also offers a number of clever features such as customisable email templates designs and the ability to automate your emails so that they are sent out at exactly the right time,all based on user behaviour.

5. MailChimp

MailChimp is undeniably one of the leading lights in email marketing. MailChimp’s free plan provides you with pretty basic email marketing features but it’s the simplicity and ease of use which is where MailChimp comes into its own. MailChimp allows you to automate your emails at each key step of a buyer’s journey so you can very easily send out welcome emails, order confirmations, abandoned cart reminders and more.

MailChimp is a favourite with us at The Digital Studios and it is for this reason we have gone into more detail here on everything Mailchimp has to offer.

6. MailerLite

MailerLite’s key features such as landing page builder and pop-up customiser make it a stand out tool amongst its nearest competitors. There is also an incredibly simple drag and drop email builder and you can also create super responsive landing pages to compliment the emails you are sending out.

MailerLite also offers an in depth campaign report which can throw out stats such as click rate,  number of requests to unsubscribe and email open rate,

7. HubSpot Email Marketing

Hubspot is most widely known for provision of CRM systems however they have recently launched a free email marketing tool. The beauty of HubSpot’s free email tool is how easy it is to use. The tool features a handy drag-and-drop visual editor and also has ready made templates to get you started.

As you would expect, the newer email marketing feature has the ability to fully integrate with all other HubSpot products which is a bonus if you are already familiar with their systems.

And finally…

We recommend doing your homework and getting some understanding of  the email marketing applications we have listed above. It’s worth knowing which are more likely to suit your needs and ultimately, which will best support you in putting together really polished email campaigns. All of the tools we have listed offer free plans, all encompassing different features and options, and if you do reach a point where you feel you might need to upgrade to a paid plan, it is worth checking out now which of these would match with your budget (in theory), so you can be prepared ahead of time.

As we may have said previously, we are passionate about great comms and we have experience of using many of the tools we have outlined (and more). If it’s still feeling a bit like gobbledygook, or you think you’d like a helping hand with any aspect of email marketing, don’t hesitate to get in touch to discuss this further with us.