There are a lot of email marketing tools that can help you grow your business. Often, new entrepreneurs handle everything involved in launching their business, including all of the marketing.
To support those efforts, I’ve compiled some of the most helpful email marketing tools I recommend to help develop a loyal following and turn your email list into raving fans.
Email Service Providers
Sending email newsletters to prospects and clients is one of the most popular uses of email marketing. Utilizing an email marketing service provider is a worthwhile way to reach potential customers and stay in contact with existing clientele. Email service providers are companies that send your newsletters and marketing message in bulk by offering an email marketing platform or software.
As examples, these are just a few of the many email service providers available. You should research what each email provider offers worthwhile solutions and tools that best fit your email messaging needs and level of coding knowledge.
• AWeber
AWeber is another email service provider that is only free to use in the beginning. Their free trial period is for 30 days, then the cost increases from $19.00 a month to $29.00, to $49.00, to $69.00, to a high of $149.00 per month before you need a quote for a list size greater than 25,000+ subscribers. AWeber’s marketing automation features are why a lot of large marketing companies like this email service provider.
Constant Contact is only free to use for the first 60 days, then the cost goes up substantially from there based on the size of your list. For example, a subscriber list of 0-500 is $20.00 a month, a list of 501-2500 is $45.00 a month and the monthly cost grows as your list reaches targeted thresholds. Constant Contact offers one of the largest free template libraries available which new email marketers like to use when first building their lists without having to learn HTML.
• Drip
Drip is popular with eCommerce businesses and they offer interfaces with both WooCommerce and WordPress platforms. Drip provides a lot of great email marketing tools to fully automate your marketing while being easy to use, but their service is also pricy starting at $41.00 a month. OUCH. What I don’t like about their website is that a business has to schedule a demo to get pricing details, while other email marketing review sites share Drip’s pricing model. I never understand marketing that places an extra step or wall in front of an interested customer who is price conscious. So that you are informed, Drip sells plans that start at $41.00 per month.
GetResponse markets its platform as “marketing software for small businesses” but I think it costs too much for businesses with a small, growing list. I have personal to automate your marketing while being easy to use fully using GetResponse and many features I like about the interface, like it’s simple ability to integrate with WordPress and the site is easy to use, but the price … OUCH. GetResponse advertises a $15.00 monthly for up to 1,000 subscribers and an unlimited amount of emails, but you don’t get much in the way of bells and whistles and the tools you need for that price. You really have to start at the $49.00 a month level to access what you need and that’s pricey for a list under $5,000 subscribers. Once you purchase at the $49.00 level, you cannot downgrade your plan without leaving their service and I find their backend confusing and counterintuitive.
• iContact
iContact starts at $14.00 a month for 500 subscribers with unlimited sending and the cost increases as your list grows. A lot of small business owners like iContact because they don’t want to deal with or learn to code from scratch. iContact’s Message Builder offers users flexibility with newsletter layout and design.
MailChimp is free to use up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month. This includes almost all of their features like drip automation and landing pages. MailChimp is easy to use but their basic email sign-up subscription forms and interface leave a lot to be desired. But as a simple email provider solution, it’s perfect.
Email Coding Design Tools
• Brackets
Brackets is a source code editor with a primary focus on web development. Created by Adobe Systems, it is free and open-source software licensed under the MIT License and is currently maintained on GitHub by Adobe and other open-sourced developers. (Source: Wikipedia)
• Canva
Canva is a graphic-design tool website that offers a drag-and-drop format and provides access to photographs, graphics, fonts, email newsletter templates, and marketing templates. Canva for Work costs $12.95 per month. I use Canva but I often find the site speed frustrating when working with a design.
CoffeeCup is one of my favorite services on the Internet. They offer a free HTML Editor, CSS Editor, and Quick-start Templates. The HTML Editor from CoffeeCup Software has it all! And with the free support, it is my default choice for a design editor.
HTML Formatter is a free online tool to format an ugly HTML code, making it readable and pretty, with the proper indentation so you can check your email marketing templates once they’re complete for any mistakes or bad code.
When you join Litmus Community for free, you also receive access to free, modern HTML email templates and templates you can use for all kinds of automated marketing. The community itself is great with active email marketing discussion boards.
Copywriting Help
• Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer
This free tool will analyze your headlines to determine an Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) score. Reaching customers in a deep and emotional way is a key to successful web content and copywriting, and headlines are unquestionably the most important piece of copy used to reach prospects. EMV analyzes and scores headlines based on the total number of EMV words it has in relation to the total number of words it contains. This will determine the EMV score of a headline. In addition to the EMV score, the analyzer shares which emotion a headline most impacts, either intellectual, empathetic, or spiritual.
Google Trends is a website by Google that analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages. The website uses graphs to compare the search volume of different queries over time. (Source Google) Google Trends is a great tool for checking your keywords for popularity over time or to see if there is an upcoming trend that you might want to provide articles about to catch an online wave of visitors.
Grammarly is an online grammar checker, spell checker, and plagiarism detection platform that can be used both on the website and with a browser extension. Grammarly’s proofreading and plagiarism-detection resources check against more than 250 grammar rules to help you catch your copywriting errors. There’s a minimal free version or the premium subscription at $29.95 per month.
The Hemingway Editor is a word processor and proofreading tool designed for writers. Hemingway Editor detects the presence of adverbs, hard to read sentences, complex words or phrases, and passive voice within a text. The interface believes in a minimalist writing style. Hemingway Editor offers an online version that you can use for free or you can purchase the desktop app for $19.99.
Slogan Generator is a slogan creator to advertise or market your company, organization, business or product. Slogan Generator provides free slogans and taglines for your business or branding needs. Play with some keywords and watch Slogan Generator translate them into slogans. This is a fun tool for getting your creative juices flowing for advertising copy, titles, headlines, and email newsletter subject lines.
• UnSuckIt
UnSuckIt is a free online dictionary for translating awful business-speak into plain English.
Anybody can create a website using WordPress, but not everyone can get their site to rank in search engines. The Yoast SEO plugin, together with the SEO knowledge Yoast shares on the website Yoast SEO for Everyone, enables small entrepreneurs to compete with larger companies in search. The Yoast plugin for WordPress analyzes keywords, readability level, internal linking, and is a great SEO training tool. There is both a free and paid version for $89.00 per year.
Image and Illustration Help
• Pixabay
Pixabay is an international website for public domain photos, illustrations, vector graphics, and film footage that can be used to add graphics to email marketing campaigns or web content.
• Unsplash
Beautiful free images and photographs that can be download and used for any project.
• Picfont
Picfont is a quick and easy free online image editor to add text to photos. The text editor can be used to make a cool photo statement from their library of images, add graphics and effects or upload your own images. With all the fonts and models, create beautiful images to complement your email marketing or web content.
• Lunapic
LunaPic is a free online photo and image editor for editing, cropping, rotating, resizing, adding effects and transparency, creating slideshows, animation, and much more for email marketing or web content development.
I hope this list of email marketing tools will assist you with your email marketing. I am passionate about helping businesses improve their web content and online marketing efforts. If you feel overwhelmed by the idea of handling your email marketing or web content development, please contact me. I can help you get started, design a template that is customized for your needs, train you on how to use any of the tools listed here, or handle your email marketing and web content development for you with regular updates and reports on the progress. Please fill out my contact form here or feel free to email me at ch[at]catherinemhughes[dot]com.
I love helping businesses succeed!
