Tag Archives: email marketing tools

Article first published August 2017, updated April 2020

Brands are paying more attention to digital marketing than ever before. By 2021, digital marketing spend is predicted to hit $120 billion, according to research from Forrester.

As demand for digital marketing increases, it’s getting harder for teams to find the time to manage each channel. Marketers are now juggling websites, blogs, emails and multiple social sites. They’re writing articles, editing posts, finding images, writing captions, researching hashtags, scheduling content, monitoring metrics, the list goes on.

Thankfully, there are marketing tools that can help. We’ve compiled a list 14 free digital marketing tools that can ease your workload while keeping you on top of your digital marketing game.

Tools for email marketing

1. Email Marketing Scorecard

Do you ever wonder how your emails stack up against others? Wonder no more. With the Email Marketing Scorecard from Campaign Monitor, you take a simple quiz that explores how you use email to market your brand. This tool gives you a scorecard as well as actionable tips to improve your email marketing game.

Cost: Free

2. Email Template Builder

When you’re tired of using the generic email templates that are supplied by your email service provider, switch it up and design one yourself. Don’t worry– you don’t need any coding skills. Just use Campaign Monitor’s Email Template Builder with its drop-and-drag feature to create original, mobile-friendly templates that you can use again and again.

Cost: Free

3. Headline Analyzer

Whether you’re writing headlines for a blog post or a subject line for an email campaign, the Headline Analyzer from CoSchedule can help. This tool scores your headline based on its type, choice of words, and length. You’ll get tips to improve your headline, and it even keeps track of all the headlines that you enter so you can see which one is the most effective.

Cost: Free

Headline Analyzer from CoSchedule

4. Kickbox

On a regular basis, you should perform email list maintenance. In other words, you should remove invalid and inactive subscribers from your email lists. It’s not always easy to know whether or not you should remove inactive subscribers, but Kickbox can help. This tool can scrub your list of contacts that are only bogging down your delivery rates and increasing bounces.

Cost: Kickbox is a “freemium tool,” which means it offers some services for free but charges for more advanced tools.

5. Hello Bar

Your email list is one of your most valuable marketing tools, but you have to constantly add to it if you want to be successful. Research shows companies should average a 3.2% list growth per month to stay ahead of the game, according to MarketingSherpa.

Make sure you’re hitting this benchmark by giving potential customers a chance to sign up for your emails on your website via a Hello Bar. This tool helps you install a small bar across the top of your site to encourage visitors to sign up for your emails. All new contacts will automatically be added to your Campaign Monitor account.

Cost: Hello Bar has a free trial, but after that, it costs $15/month.

6. Inbox Tester

Before you send an email campaign, you should always send a test to ensure everything is on point.

Research shows 92% of marketers send tests, but many aren’t confident in their testing skills, according to OptinMonster.

The Inbox Tester from Litmus takes the guesswork out of testing. With this tool, you can send an email to your inbox and see how it looks on 50+ devices. Take the time to proofread the content, see if the images look right across different devices, and test the links. By taking an extra 10 minutes to review your email, you could spot credibility-dropping errors.

Cost: Free

Tools to keep copy flawless

7. Grammarly

Even the best writer makes mistakes. Catch grammatical errors before you send an email or publish that next great blog post by running your copy through Grammarly. It will spot punctuation errors and misspellings that you might miss. You can type your content right in the platform or copy and paste it when you’re ready.

Grammarly

You can even install the Grammarly plug in to help evaluate every piece of copy you create, from blog posts to social media posts, to email copy.

Cost: Free for basic use. More advanced features are available in the premium membership for as little as $11.66 a month.

8. Editsaurus

If you’re writing large blocks of content, try Editsaurus. You can paste text into this tool, and it highlights problem areas. It can spot areas that are tough to read, identify improper English, and catch grammatical errors. If you’re creating a blog post, website content, or a newsletter, it’s a good tool to use before you hit publish or send.

Cost: Free.

Tools to enhance social media efforts

9. Landscape

Imagery is key in social media marketing, but every platform requires images that are sized for the platform. Rather than resizing an image half-a-dozen times to fit each platform, use Sprout’s Landscape tool. Just upload one image and get multiple versions of it, each with a unique dimension that fits the social media channels that you select.

Cost: Free.

Sprout's Landscape tool

10. Feedly

It’s not easy to keep feeding the social media machine. To keep relevant content on multiple channels, use Feedly to curate content that’s interesting to your audience and share it quickly. By selecting different topics, blogs, or publications that you trust, you’ll always have access to a feed full of content that’s ready to share.

Cost: Free

11. Ripl

To stand out on social media, posting a sentence or two won’t do. You need videos. But who has time to create and share videos? With Ripl, making an animated video is simple. Create a video from still images, add text, and share it on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram with one click.

Cost: Free, but a Ripl watermark will be in the bottom right corner. If you upgrade for $9.99 a month, you can customize your watermark.

Tools to keep you informed

12. Google Alerts

This tried-and-true tool tracks all mentions of your brand or product on websites and social media. Set up keyword alerts that include your company and product name and get an email report that shows where your company was mentioned and what was said. Simply add a keyword in the search bar to set up an alert.

Cost: Free.

Google alerts

13. Clicky

If tracking metrics is a bit overwhelming to you, try Clicky. It’s an easy-to-understand analytics tool that gives you the information you want to know without all the metric-mumbo-jumbo. It lists every visitor and tells you when they visited, what they looked at, where they came from, how long they stayed on a particular page, and what actions they took.

Cost: Clicky is another “freemium tool” that has a free plan but starts charging for access to more metrics.

14. UTM Builder

For the advanced marketer with a love of Google Analytics, check out Google’s UTM Builder. This tool helps you dig into your referral traffic and see exactly where website visitors are coming from. Referral traffic typically just lists the platform that drove a visitor to the site like Facebook or Twitter but doesn’t say which post drove them to your site.

To get down to the granular level, use Google’s UTM Builder to add a little text to every URL that you use to make them trackable. By doing so, you can see which email campaign or Facebook post referred traffic to your site. See what it looks like below. If you are unfamiliar with UTM codes, read this post.

Cost: Free

Google's UTM Builder

Tools to keep you connected

Teamwork is dreamwork. That means you need to maintain a stable connection between you and your entire digital marketing team. This can be hard, especially if your teams aren’t all located in a singular location or if they work remotely. That’s why you’ll want to consider these tools to help you stay connected to everyone on your team.

15. Zoom

This is a video conferencing software that allows you to talk face to face with your team members, no matter where they are. While video conferencing software may not seem all that important, it’s a great tool for online meetings, especially in a time when working from home is becoming the new normal.

Zoom offers several membership options, including:

  • Free/Personal
  • Business
  • Educational
  • Meeting rooms

Each membership has access to video conferencing, an online phone system, instant messaging, and more.

Cost: Free for one-on-one video meetings. Meetings with more than two individuals are limited to 45 minutes for free members. However, their paid memberships offer several additional features, plus unlimited call times depending on membership type. Paid memberships range in price from $149.00 to $1,999.00.

16. Asana

This is a work management platform that allows teams to not only stay connected with one another, but stay organized as well. With this tool, teams can work together to get projects done on time, keep each other updated with frequent status reports, and plan out campaigns down to the last detail. Moreover, everything is presented in a checklist or calendar format, which makes it easy to quickly digest for all those involved.

Asana Preview

Source: Asana

Cost: Asana has a basic free membership for those looking to get started with organizing their projects and campaigns. It also offers Premium, Business, and Enterprise options, starting at $10.99 per user, per month. For larger enterprises, you’ll want to contact the sales team to find the best option to suit your brand’s needs.

Wrap up

Having the right tools in your digital marketing arsenal will make all the difference when it comes to streamlining your day-to-day activities. Each of these 16 tools can help marketers save time and connect with more customers. While all the tools are useful, it’s best to start by adding one or two to your routine. Once you master a few tools, add another. By slowly implementing these tools into your marketing routine, you’ll be able to see their effectiveness for your brand and won’t get lost in a sea of shiny new tools.

Not sure where to get started? You’ll want to start by deciding which type of tool you need the most. Break it down into the categories covered above:

  • Tools for email marketing
  • Tools for flawless copy
  • Tools to enhance social media efforts
  • Tools to keep you informed
  • Tools to keep you connected

Maybe having the right tools isn’t where your brand is struggling—maybe it’s your strategy. If so, be sure to check out these email marketing strategy challenges to see how best to overcome them.

Article first published December 2015, updated March 2019

It can be easy to forget how important each of the different pieces of your marketing structure is. Our three newest integrations can help to reinvigorate your efforts and engage your customers in different ways.

Changing it up every once in a while can give your customers a renewed sense of interest, and may target different segments of your audience base.

What is email integration?

Your marketing structure is operating on several different fronts.

Marketers often focus on growing these fronts separately, which can be a beneficial tactic, in some cases.

However, if you want to grow all areas of your marketing structure at once, it can be helpful to focus on multiple facets of the process so they can build upon one another and generate more interest in your campaign.

Email integration involves the leveraging of other aspects of your marketing structure within your emails. For instance, this could involve something like a “Share to Facebook” button.

When someone clicks this button, the content of your email will gain a considerable amount of organic views, depending on the list of friends from the sharer.

Email integration could also be referring to other aspects of an email that draw upon external sources.

In the era of connection, emails don’t have to stay emails, so it makes sense to utilize every part of the marketing machine.

They can become something more.

In the era of connection, emails don’t have to stay emails, so it makes sense to utilize every part of the marketing machine.

Source: Really Good Emails

Why do you need email tools?

Free email marketing tools can take a lot of pressure off the email marketer and achieve things that would otherwise be impossible.

It’s also a cost-effective way to get specific tasks done in a time-effective manner.

In the past, email marketers had to take care of everything themselves. However, with the rise of increasingly impressive artificial intelligence, performing large, tedious tasks can be passed on to tools.

Another useful aspect of the best email marketing tools is their ability to produce accurate metrics.

With the use of email tools, you can easily determine open rates, click rates, and revenue per subscriber, then take this information and apply it in a way that will benefit your brand.

Email tools are also less likely to make mistakes than a human. When it comes to sending out a large number of emails, you need to make sure that all of them are the same, and this is something that could easily be overlooked without the help of email tools.

How Can Email Marketing Be More Effective?

LeadsBridge

Facebook Lead Ads are one of the newest ways that you can target and engage your social media audience.

Facebook takes all of the work out of subscribing to newsletters and lists by pre-populating forms with a user’s Facebook profile information and allowing them to subscribe with a single click in the place of traditional ads.

Facebook only allows you to export these contacts as a CSV but, with LeadsBridge, you can export directly to the subscriber lists in your email service provider, such as Campaign Monitor.

Then you can create automated workflows that trigger after someone subscribes for maximum marketing efficiency.

Tidio Chat

Live chat is one of the most requested support features across companies both large and small. Customers love to speak to us in real time, whether it be over phone or chat, and Tidio makes it super easy.

With this new integration, give those same customers an option to subscribe to your lists via a checkbox on the chat form and receive updates about your product or special information pertinent to their needs.

Tidio also allows you to keep track of what pages certain customers have visited and how much they spent on each, for further segmentation purposes. Engaging customers across multiple mediums has never been easier!

Paldesk is also a popular option with WordPress users looking for an easy live chat plugin.

Nifty Images

Personalization is an excellent way to get customers feeling like you are speaking directly to them, and that they should care about what you have to say.

But, why stop at personalizing the text when you could create personalized header images with any of the custom fields you have available for your subscribers?

You can even include countdown timers. Nifty Images makes it easy to pull fully customized images right into the templates you use to build your emails and have them dynamically populate with information for each customer.

Let your customers know you care by going the extra mile and customizing each email especially for them.

Wrap up

Using emails tools is both easy and effective.

While some old-school marketers might be hesitant to hand over the reins to AI, it’s hard to pass up on the benefits of using it.

Whether you’re utilizing Facebook Lead Ads, live chat, or images, email integrations are a fantastic way to boost engagement rates and centralize your marketing structure.

Start with these 3 new integrations:

  • Leadsbridge
  • Tidio Chat
  • Nifty Images

With over 250 integrations, we make it easy for you to pick and choose what works best for you and your audience. Visit our Integrations page to see all the possibilities

If you enjoyed this blog about email marketing, you may be interested in this blog that tells you everything you should know about spam.

This is a guest post from Matthew Fritschle, a content writer at Aumcore.

AI (artificial intelligence) is nothing new. In fact, the field of AI research technically began in 1956, meaning we’ve been advancing AI for over sixty years. However, as we continue to advance, AI does provide a constant stream of news and concerns.

For example, programs now have the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed to do so, as we’ve seen with machine learning.

Although this development has many positive results, many have voiced concerns over AI. For instance, what if dependable positions are taken by AI? What if we create something that mirrors hateful human behavior (as was the case with Microsoft’s Tay)?

While these concerns are valid, AI is all around us, largely making life more convenient.  AI is often used where you shop (Amazon comes to mind) and programmed into binge-watching platforms like Netflix. We use AI constantly to improve otherwise inefficient situations.

Still, depending on your profession, you may not embrace the changes AI brings with it.

As mentioned above, we’re already seeing automation take jobs away from human workers in factories and fast food locations worldwide.

This begs the question, what’s next?

What does the future of design look like with AI?

A lot of the talk surrounding AI recently has been around machine learning and whether algorithms can shape the future of design.

For example, as design technology gets smarter, it’s gaining the ability to generate templates. Programs can even use inputted information, like content and colors, to generate very specific designs. Because of this, many fear the possibility of a machine taking over the role of a designer.

And then there’s the introduction of AI-powered web builders (e.g. The Grid), which promise convenience: machines doing everything with algorithms that take shapes, colors, and text into design consideration.

And then there’s the introduction of AI-powered web builders (e.g. The Grid), which promise convenience

But as we saw with The Grid, these promises of the future are still very much a work in progress. So, even if AI feels a bit threatening to some design professionals, there’s still quite a lot of improvement that needs to happen before AI becomes a true threat.

A perfect mix: The future of design with AI

“At its heart, AI is computer programming that learns and adapts. It can’t solve every problem, but its potential to improve our lives is profound.”

Above is a quote from Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, about the search engine’s AI principles. In short, AI helps us, but it also continues to experience limitations.

In terms of design, this means AI—at least the AI of today—is not going to take any design jobs soon, but it will be found in the workplace.

For instance, think of what design really is and the purpose it serves. Design is more than aesthetics—design evokes emotions and even actions, which is why it’s so crucial to businesses.

While the more technical elements of design can be handled by various programs, it ultimately takes a human touch to ensure quality.

Lack of human touch is the biggest problem with leaving everything to algorithms and machines—even those that learn automatically.

While AI can take a variety of inputs like colors and shapes into account, it fails to assess the complexity of an audience. This makes designing for emotional appeal too advanced for contemporary programs. It’s largely still up to marketers, designers, and advertisers to create that specific connection between brand and audience.

Because of this, the future of design with AI looks more like a partnership between designer and machine. In this partnership, the machine lends its (artificial) intelligence to human designers through tools, leaving higher-level tasks to the designers.

For example, a set of algorithms can take over mindless tasks, like searching and rating thousands of templates against set criteria. This allows a designer to spend their time conceiving and creating designs for their clients’ needs.

In other words, while AI can parse and analyze data, resize images, and color correct photos, it ultimately can’t determine how to create a better picture.

The tools

If you’re a designer, you can rest easy knowing AI isn’t taking your job any time soon, but rather helping you to streamline your processes.

Let’s discuss some of the AI-backed tools you can integrate into your process:

1. Let’s Enhance

Let’s Enhance is a platform that “uses cutting-edge image super resolution technology based on deep convolutional neural networks” to increase photo or image size without losing quality.

Let’s Enhance is a platform that “uses cutting-edge image super resolution technology based on deep convolutional neural networks” to increase photo or image size without losing quality.

In other words, Let’s Enhance uses AI and machine learning to learn common features on physical objects. After recognizing those features on uploaded images, the program can then add extra details based on recorded data.

With this ability, Let’s Enhance comes with three main functions, a JPEG noise remover and two additional processing options, Magic and Boring:

  • JPEG noise remover: if an image with a .jpg or .jpeg extension is detected, Let’s Enhance automatically applies a noise reduction system based on neural networks
  • Magic filter: the Magic filter truly seems like magic, as it does the impossible. It “hallucinates” additional details and adds them to images to improve their quality (perfect for photos and complex pictures)
  • Boring filter: the Boring filter is best for illustrations, art, logos, etc. because it can keep colors, details, and edges sharp while enlarging the whole image (up to 4x its size), essentially allowing you to upscale and clean your designs

2. Select Subject

And then there’s Select Subject, a new tool in Adobe Photoshop that uses Adobe Sensei, Adobe's machine learning technology, to memorize shapes and allow users to make subject selections with a single click.

And then there’s Select Subject, a new tool in Adobe Photoshop that uses Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s machine learning technology, to memorize shapes and allow users to make subject selections with a single click.

As Photoshop Essentials explains,

“Photoshop, in the past, has looked at images as nothing more than a collection of pixels…It had no idea that there was a person, an animal, a tree, or any other type of object in the photo.”

With Adobe Sensei and Select Subject in tow, this problem is a thing of the past as users can now select prominent subjects in images without the fuss of dragging around the cursor (the struggle of the previous tool, Quick Selection).

3. Prisma

Prisma is a photo-editing application that uses neural networks and AI to transform photos into “paintings” with artistic effects.

More on the design side is Prisma, a photo-editing application that uses neural networks and AI to transform photos into “paintings” with artistic effects.

This program allows images to mirror existing art styles, like sketches or impressionist paintings.

4. Deepart

Deepart turns your images into artwork, but this one also allows you to upload your own style image to further tailor what stylistic elements you use.

Another site that leans heavily on the design and artistic side is Deepart. Like Prisma, Deepart turns your images into artwork, but this one also allows you to upload your own style image to further tailor what stylistic elements you use.

As to the how, Deepart uses “a neural algorithm of artistic style” that was developed by several of its creators. This algorithm allows the program to separate style elements from a piece of art.

Wrap up

Artificial intelligence is creating great change, but many fear that the change will be too great, eventually outperforming humans and taking on the worst of their traits.

While this is a valid concern from some, the world of design is still safe from the effects of AI automation. This will remain true as long as design requires an emotional element and the human touch.

Luckily, we’re seeing streamlined processes and empowered designers thanks to AI. In short, designers use technology to enhance what they do best.

 

Bio: Matthew is a content writer for Aumcore, a digital marketing agency based in New York City. He writes on a variety of topics that range from digital design to crafting the perfect creative content marketing plan. You can find him on Twitter or on Gravatar (mfritschle(at)aumcore(dot)com).