By Abhishek Talreja
Source: Digital Agency Network
Email marketers have a variety of tasks on their platter. From building email lists to crafting and scheduling newsletters to measuring the results, there never seems to be enough time in the day for the ambitious email marketing specialist.
But as they say, it’s smart-work that wins over hard work when it comes to achieving the desired outcomes.
Let’s look at some must-have tools for email marketers that make their life just a little bit better and allow you to squeeze the most out of your email marketing program.
1. Review of Free and Cheap Email Marketing Tools
Effective email marketing begins with the right email marketing software. Identifying a tool that meets specific business requirements can be a big pain in the neck. Browsing through all of the features of so many tools and then realizing that it is very tough to see the real differences – that’s not how smart professionals work, right?
This concise list of email marketing tools puts all cost-effective and valuable email marketing tools on one page. I liked this one over others because:
● It doesn’t have a flat (often misleading) star rating but a guide
● Includes a price comparison table
● Offers discounts(!) on a number of tools
● Lists the key features, and pros and cons
2. Email Marketing ROI Calculator
If it was only about running email campaigns then anybody could be a successful email marketer. Unfortunately, that’s not true in real life. It’s the returns (profits, conversions) which will tell you if any marketing effort is successful. Email marketing is said to have stellar ROI (like 3800%). We have to track the results and compare them to other tactics.
Here is a handy ROI calculator that lets you calculate just that. The tool can give you a quick overview of your ROI and you can vary your email volume, click rate, conversion rate, cost, conversion value in the tool and know what happens to the ROI, profit, and revenue, etc. in real time.
3. Email Client Market Share
Knowing about popular email clients and devices can help email marketers to choose the right way to design and plan their email campaigns. Over 50% is mobile opens these days. The resource is a monthly leaderboard of the top ten email clients. You’ll find the latest data every month.
The market share stats show that you must optimize your email designs to render best on mobile and Gmail as these are the top two on the list.
4. Subject Line Tester From Moosend
The subject line is at the heart of email marketing effectiveness. Great subject lines are essential for the success of your campaign. It’s about emphasizing the value or teasing curiosity from your audience.
While you can improve the subject line by experimenting and trial, this resource from Moonsend will give you instant suggestions. For instance, the Subject line recommendation tester will tell you to personalize your subject line or add an emoticon or your brand name to get more opens.
5. Email Accessibility Tools
Accessibility and usability are two essential aspects of any email campaigns. Email accessibility ensures that people with disability can view and interact with email content. Worldwide, over one billion people live with a disability. Don’t discount temporary disabilities either. Ever had a broken arm?
Besides, those accessible emails are more logical and user-friendly for everyone in general. Such emails take care of email usability such as structure, colour contrast, responsiveness, link text usage, email optimization, and including a plain text version, etc.
This free email accessibility tester provides email marketers and developers an HTML editor and an accessibility report to make their campaigns user-friendly and effective.
6. Newsletter Templates
The content and design of a newsletter is where the magic happens. It’s a big differentiating factor in getting active opens from your existing subscribers. Designing a newsletter from scratch is one way to start, but it is time (or money) consuming.
This template gallery features an assortment of ready-to-use newsletter templates: welcome emails, contest emails, company news, and monthly newsletters.
7. Email Marketing Checklist
The best way to ruin your brand reputation is to send a sloppy newsletter with a lot of errors. That’s something that no email marker wants, but to err is human and that’s why a checklist is what we want!
The email marketing checklist is made by email marketing expert Jordie van Rijn who gives a peek into what he looks for in the ultimate email.
Go through all the essential elements and improve them or fix the errors before you schedule your campaign. The resource helps professionals to check the functional as well as marketing aspects of emailers to ensure a kick-ass user-experience.
Some of the topics from the checklist are:
● Text and content
● Focus
● Analytics and reporting
● Your subscriber list
● Action orientation
● Functional testing
● Value-added email, and more.
You can download it for free, (no registration) and refer it whenever you run a campaign.
As an email marketing professional, you’re looking to get a thumbs up on your newsletter. Using the right resources doesn’t guarantee success, but it sure helps in saving time and boosting results.
Using the right tools will give a much-needed platform for doing email marketing the right way.