5 Top Email Marketing Tools For Campaign Success
Every day, close to 300 billion business emails are sent all around the world. In terms of internet history, emails are an “old” technology. Yet they are still considered one of the most effective tactics to reach, convert and retain more customers.
When you’re talking about B2B marketing, the numbers are impressive. B2B marketing emails get 47% higher click-through rates than B2C emails, and close to 60% of B2B professionals consider email to be the marketing channel that generates the most revenue.
If you’re in B2B (like we are at Outbrain), then email marketing is something you are probably already doing. As a conversion optimization manager at Outbrain, a good part of my day is spent creating, analyzing and optimizing marketing emails. Over time, I’ve come to rely on a bunch of email marketing tools to help me do my job better.
There’s loads of software products on the market but there’s a few that I consider my everyday go-to tools for email marketing. Check out my top 5 favorites:
Stripo.io
We recently discovered this email template builder and we love it! It uses drag-and-drop HTML interface, so we can develop great looking emails fast and with no special coding skills.
Everything you create in Stripo will be mobile responsive by default so that’s one less worry on your shoulders.
We’ve had great results from our Stripo campaigns and we’ve also saved time and resources because it is so quick and easy to use.
Verdict: Love!
Drift for Email
As B2B marketers, we all want a faster sales cycle. And one way to achieve this is via drip email campaigns. We use Drift for Email to create a seamless email-website conversation with our customers. When a prospect clicks on a link to our website from one of our marketing emails, we can show them a personalized popup message, a live chat conversation, or they can schedule a meeting with our sales rep via Drift’s chatbot, directly on our site.
What’s more, with Drift for Email we can exclude prospects from our marketing lists if they are already engaged with our sales team.
Want to leverage your email marketing to shorten the sales cycle? Then Drift for Email is a great choice.
Verdict: Conversation’s flowing!
Litmus
It’s one thing to build a great marketing email; making sure it arrives in the customer’s inbox in one piece is quite another. Emails with broken links, missing images, or emails that go straight to the Spam folder are not going to get the results you are looking for.
You want to be able to test and monitor the emails you send, and thankfully with Litmus, you can. This is a great tool for pro marketers, probably the best one out there to see whether your email lands in the inbox or spam box. You can preview how your email looks in every type of device, and watch for broken links. You can also get great insights to improve segmentation, like how many just skimmed your email, versus how many really took the time to read it.
Verdict: Passes the test!
Phrasee
Writing subject lines that get high open rates is one of the hardest parts of email marketing. Coming up with new, exciting subject lines on a regular basis is challenging and time consuming. Plus, if you want to pinpoint the highest performing subject lines, you’re going to need to do a lot of A/B testing and research to make sure you hit the right note.
The average open rate of marketing emails across all industries is 37%. Want to grab another 30%? If you write dozens of emails every week, or if you’re spending hours phrasing subject lines, that you should check out Phrasee, an AI machine that will help you create high converting email subject lines in seconds.
Why rely on human skill alone when you can get a bit of help from AI?
Verdict: Robots rock!
Fluent Express
OK, so now we’re going back to humans. When it comes to proofing emails, and making sure we’ve got the punctuation and grammar down pat, we like to use Fluent Express. It’s a quick fix done by real people, not machines.
As a non-native English speaker, every now and again I need extra help making sure my emails are perfectly polished. And sometimes I just prefer to get it done by a person. Fluent Express is a nifty service, providing proofreading done by actual people, with a really fast turnaround and human-level accuracy. And, your first text is proofread for free!
Verdict: Power to the proofreaders!
The process of building, sending, analyzing and optimizing email marketing campaigns is complex and time consuming. That’s why it’s a good idea to choose and use the software tools that will make things easier for you. The 5 tools listed above are our tried-and-true favorites – what’s yours?
