Email Marketing Tools: Which One to Choose
Email marketing tools are extremely useful to make your work run smoothly or to achieve the best result and optimum return from the email marketing channel. If you are busy with email marketing every day or considering starting with this, then the following 7 email marketing tools will help you become a more effective and productive email marker.
Mailchimp
With Mailchimp you can already send emails relatively easily. You can import your contacts, click and send an email together. The use of Mailchimp is free. If you want to send more than a certain number of emails or you have more than 2000 contacts in your database, you have to take out a paid subscription. Of course, when you take a paid account you also get more functionalities and you have the option to remove the Mailchimp logo at the bottom of every email. Mailchimp is ideal if you have not used email marketing before and want to test what this channel does in terms of results. But you can also do this if, for example, you make a change to your company or prices, to easily email this to all customers at once.
Litmus
If you are more active with email marketing, and you regularly send email, and you want it to look good in every e-mail client, such as Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail and on the iPhone and iPad then Litmus comes in very handy as an email marketing tool. You can easily test your email template, so you can immediately see how it arrives in every e-mail client. On this basis you can make changes to the html again to optimize the email. In addition to testing emails, you can also check pages via the cheapest version of the account in Litmus. This means that you can also view the landing pages you create in all browsers (like Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome) and the mobile devices. The costs for an account on Litmus range from $ 349 per month to $ 79 per month for the simplest account. Here too, the more you pay, the more functionalities you can use from Litmus, such as a spam filter test, with an account starting at $ 149 a month. An alternative to Litmus is the use of Email on Acid.
Sublime
Creating an e-mail in Mailchimp can be done easily via the drag and drop editor. But if you have some more html knowledge you can also create or tweak the html code of an email yourself. A handy tool to work with, so that you maintain a good structure in the html is Sublime . Sublime is a simple text editor for html, and also free. Nice to take with you when you do not want to purchase an expensive editor like Adobe Dreamweaver.
Lipsum
The preparation of an e-mail is most efficient when you have all the content available immediately. But if you are working on a set-up and the content is written later, placing lorum ipsum text is often useful, so that at least you know how all elements are in relation to each other. You do not have to think of Lorum ipsum text yourself, you can generate it via the Lipsum website . This can be done on the basis of the number of words, number of paragraphs and more. In the meantime, there are also various addons / plugins for Firefox and Chrome that allow you to easily load lorum ipsum text with a simple click of a button.
Google URL Shortener
Do you work with many links and do you want to use short links that are practical? Or do you have links in your email that can be shared on social media such as twitter, then it is essential to keep the links short (you have only a limited number of characters). You can use Google URL Shortener to shorten the long links (with possibly UTM measurement data for Google Analytics). Cut and paste the long URL into Google URL Shortener and you will get a short link back. Ideal. Right?
Mail-Tester
When you send out emails, you obviously do not want them to end up in the recipient's spam box. To counteract that, your sender's reputation is important, but also the html coding of your email. To test the extent to which the email you have created is spammy, it is advisable to test the email in Mail-Tester. Mail-Tester is a free tool, to which you send your email to a unique email address. Based on this, the email is checked at various points. On this basis you will receive a score and instructions on the points for improvement of the e-mail. Very handy!
Brite Verify
Email marketing is not just sending out emails, your database also needs to be in order. For example, Mailchimp applies strict rules with regard to bounce rate (max 3%).
To keep this bounce rate as low as possible and the delivery quality as high as possible, it is good to test all email addresses before emailing them by importing them into Brite Verify.
Through Brite Verify you get an export of all email addresses with statuses of the email addresses. The statuses that you can get back are divided into 'valid', 'invalid', 'unknown' and 'accept all'. It is recommended that you only email the valid email addresses with a maximum bouncer rate of 3%. You can delete the other email addresses. It's a shame, you might think, but these email addresses only cause higher costs in sending and probably never get delivered. At Brite Verify you pay an amount per valid email address that is returned. The amount is calculated in British Pounds. A free alternative to Brite Verify is freebulkemailverifier.