Is Your Business Taking Advantage of All Available Email Marketing Tools?

Email marketing is no longer debatable in its necessity to successful digital marketing campaigns. It’s not dying out, and it’s actually considered “a fact of everyday life.”

Now, behind every successful email marketing campaign is usually a singular software that tackles numerous components to deliverability, design, and so on. Take Mirabel’s Marketing Manager as a great example.

However, if your email campaign is falling behind in only one area, you may want to invest in just an extra tool.

We’re covering the most basic email marketing tools that every business needs, from subject line creation and spam scores to marketing automation, analytics, design, and list verification. ‍

Tools for Testing Email Subject Lines

• Send Check It. This email marketing tool is an instant subject line tester. Send Check It ranks your email subject line out of 100 overall. This score is calculated by your subject line’s assessed scannability, reading level, length, sentiment, and avoidance of spam triggers.

As an example, for our subject line, “Join Us on Oct. 1 for the NNA Virtual Convention and Trade Show” regarding The Newspaper Manager’s email campaign, we scored high marks on character and word count, as well as readability.
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Pricing: Send Check It is a free email marketing tool. It also offers a free integration, the Slack Subject Line Tester, to send emails that increase open rates, avoid the spam folder, and stay in the Priority tab in Gmail — not the Promotions tab.

• ActiveCampaign’s Subject Line Generator. ActiveCampaign offers a free email subject line generator. Its process is simple: “Choose a keyword category (Benefit, Topic, or Pain-Point), then enter your keyword. Then click ‘Generate subject lines’ to get a list of ideas for your next great subject line!”
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  If you’d prefer different options, hit “Generate subject lines.” This digital tool aids the creativity in email marketing for a customizable shortcut for your next campaign — no surprise for a multifunctional automation software, like Mirabel’s Marketing Manager, that combines email marketing and CRM.
  
  Pricing: The Subject Line Generator by Active Campaign is a free digital marketing tool.

• Reply.io’s Cold Email Subject Line Generator. While we don’t recommend cold emailing, this Cold Email Subject Line Generator only works to brainstorm ideas for email subject lines. This email marketing tool works similarly to ActiveCampaign’s Subject Line Generator. Reply.io’s subject line drop-down categories, however, are a little different and include Benefit, Problem, Personalized, or COVID-19.

Pricing: The Cold Email Subject Line Generator by Reply.io is a free digital marketing tool.

• CoSchedule’s Email Subject Line Tester. Complementing the popular Headline Analyzer by CoSchedule, a copywriting tool used for content marketing, is the Email Subject Line Tester. For “creating click-worthy subject lines,” this free email marketing tool also scores your subject line out of 100.
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  It calculates Words That Increase Opens, recommending at least three from their tried-and-true Word Bank. It also notifies you if you have Words That Decrease Opens, giving you another Word Bank of limiting writing opportunities.

The Email Subject Line Tester considers capitalization (Case) and the use of numbers (Numbers Present), suggesting capital letters and at least one number are email subject line best practices. It even takes into account word, character, and emoji count.

Pricing: The Email Subject Line Tester and the Headline Analyzer by CoSchedule are free digital marketing tools.

Tools for Checking Spam Score

• MailGenius’ Deliverability & Email Spam Tester. Send your email to Mail Genius’ test email address, and the spam score checker provides a summary of how it fares in several email deliverability tests. For example, it checks your email per inbox provider, reads through the email body copy, scans domain blacklists, and looks through DKIM and SPF records.

After you send your test email to this free email marketing tool, it identifies key email deliverability solutions in order to remove your email from spam folders. This email marketing tool also offers email verification via mailfloss and domain reputation checks.

Pricing: MailGenius’ email deliverability tester is free and works with every major inbox provider: Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Mailchimp, SendGrid, HubSpot, Salesforce, and Klaviyo. You don’t even need an account to use the service.

• Mail Tester. This is a simple spam score checker. Send your email marketing campaign to Mail Tester’s test email address.

Once you send your email, the email marketing tool gives you a spam score assessment based on your email body copy, IP address, and mail server. The scores are visibly denoted by the following drawings:

The goal is to get a 10/10 spam score, which matches the boat at the island. The worse spam scores see a shipwreck.

Pricing: When using Mail Tester’s free version on the web, you can check the spam score of your email within a maximum of seven days. The free version shows you a detailed analysis on the configuration of your email and explains how your spam score was calculated.

If you create a Mail Tester account, you will receive your score within 30 days.

• Mailtrap. Mailtrap simulates the work of a real SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol), also known as a protocol for email transmission, server so you can test staging emails. By isolating the test emailing from production, it eliminates the possibility that a test email might accidentally end up in inboxes.
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  Crafted by Railsware, Mailtrap distributes your email to test inboxes in its simulated SMTP for testing and produces a spam score. It checks your domain reputation and scans blacklists to avoid the spam folder.
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  Pricing: Test up to 500 emails for free with Mailtrap, if you’re a new user looking for the best email spam score checker. Mailtrap also charges monthly for larger email lists. The Individual plan, which tests up to 5,000 emails per month, costs $9.99. The Team plan offers 15,000 emails per month at $24.99; the Business plan offers 50,000 emails per month at $49.99 per month; and the Premium plan offers 100,000 emails per month at $99.99. Mailtrap’s largest plan is the Enterprise plan, which tests 10 million emails per month at $299.99. As you upgrade across plans, you can increase the number of inboxes, team members, emails sent per MailTrap’s ten-second sending rate, email size, and more.

• Email Preview Services’ Online Spam Email Tester. Email Preview Services offers email deliverability tools to uncover where your emails could end up, marketed on their site for inbox placement, domain reputation, and spam checkers.
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  This spam checker tool by Email Preview Services compares your IP address’ deliverability to at least 50 of the most common email marketing blacklists to determine your email deliverability.

According to their website, “By tracking delivery to major ISPs [internet service providers], we show, in real-time, where your marketing emails end up: Inbox, Spam or Updates?” They also “compare several tests sent through different email providers in order to see which email provider delivers the best rate,” so you can see which platform is best for your email marketing campaign.

Pricing: The Online Spam Email Tester is free for seven days with a credit card required. This email marketing tool offers tiered pricing, starting with the Standard plan. This plan is $25 per month and includes unlimited email previews, five email spam/inbox tests, a simple HTML editor, and HTML optimization.

The Business and Professional plans are $45 and $160 per month, respectively, and include the above-mentioned features but with an advanced HTML editor, more email spam/inbox tests, and advanced email analytics. (The Professional plan also includes 10 users as opposed to one.)

The Enterprise Email Preview Services plan is $399 per month and includes everything plus a white-label API.

Tools for Email Marketing Automation 

• Mirabel’s Marketing Manager. Mirabel’s Marketing Manager offers a full suite of email marketing automation tools. The Email Builder has drag-and-drop templates for newsletters, drip campaigns, and more. With a built-in email verification tool, Clean Your Lists, and spam score checker, this marketing automation software ensures a high domain authority and email deliverability.
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  You can also optimize sending times, preview mobile versions, A/B test emails, automate workflows, and view extensive email analytics.

Pricing: Mirabel’s Marketing Manager begins at 10,000 contacts and 120,000 emails per month at $299 monthly. The subscription varies based on number of contacts and emails per month.

• SendPulse’s Automation 360. SendPulse has a robust email automation tool called Automation 360, which also offers email workflow automation, triggered by actions on your website. Automation 360 works well for ecommerce and events and includes features such as conversion count, data filters, and data visualization. This helps you understand the exact impact of your automated email marketing campaigns.
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  Pricing: Automation 360 is free for up to 500 subscribers and 15,000 emails. Check out its subscription pricing here to determine price based on number of subscribers and when to be billed: annually, biannually, or monthly.
• Sender’s Email Automation Tool. Sender’s Email Automation Tool lets you design and schedule workflow automation email campaigns with ease. This free tool helps you visualize your email marketing strategy to send follow-up, response, and reminder emails to your segmented contact list of up to 2,500 subscribers.
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  Pricing: Sender’s free plan includes all Sender features without a credit card required. If your email list is larger, purchase a monthly subscription or prepaid credits.

Tools to Track Email Marketing Campaigns

• Email Preview Services’ Email Marketing Analytics. This tool from Email Preview Services was modeled after Google Analytics and gives you deeper insights on the impact of your email campaigns. After you embed their tracking code, you can see real-time data, including opened emails on a world map, unique clicks, IP address, device used to open the email, open rates, and how many seconds the email was opened.

Pricing: This tool is priced the same as Email Preview Services tools previously listed.

• MooSend’s Reporting & Analytics. MooSend offers a holistic reporting and analytics tool that translates email campaign data into a digestible visual overview. With this email marketing tool, you can track daily and hourly open rates, top recipients and locations, most clicked links, devices, and recipient activity.
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  MooSend even includes a click heatmap, so you can see where your recipients click, paused/hovered, and scrolled on your email.

Pricing: MooSend’s free plan includes this reporting and analytics tool for your email marketing tracking. It is available for unlimited emails.

Tools to Design Effective Emails

• MailerLite. MailerLite’s drag-and-drop editor allows you to build eye-catching, professional newsletters. It also includes a rich text editor, custom HTML editor, newsletter templates, ecommerce campaigns, built-in photo editing, a file manager, and mobile-friendly designs. This email marketing tool even includes analytics to visualize and understand the impact of your emails’ customized design.
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  Pricing: MailerLite is free for up to 12,000 emails per month and 1,000 subscribers. Check out its subscription pricing here to determine price based on number of subscribers, when to be billed, and what features you get.
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  Benchmark’s Email Marketing Tools Suite. Benchmark has a variety of tools to use to design email campaigns. It combines drag-and-drop features with an HTML editor to flexibly design emails. It also includes a built-in photo editor, color palettes for text and color blocking, and multiple layout tools. You can also personalize or add your own features to one of Benchmark’s many email templates.

Pricing: Benchmark’s Free plan sends up to 250 emails per month with access to email design, limited automation, simple lead generation marketing, and basic reporting.

Tools to Verify Email Addresses and Segment Lists

• Clean Your Lists. Invalid, mistyped, or improperly formatted addresses can harm your email marketing sender reputation. Because of this, workflows and digital newsletters can get sent to the spam folder or auto-blocked by popular inbox service providers. This email verification tool by Mirabel’s Marketing Manager helps catch invalid and unknown email addresses, increase open and deliverability rates, update CRMs, and more.
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  Pricing: Clean Your Lists offers 1,000+ free credits to verify individual emails or bulk lists. After that, it offers pay-as-you-go or subscription options.
• Email Checker. This is a free and instant email address verification tool. It checks an individual email address one at a time, so skip on the bulk list cleaning here. This simple tool checks for email address format, domain validity, and a valid inbox.

Pricing: Individual email address verifications are free. For bulk email list cleaning, check out their subscription pricing after signing up.

• NeverBounce. This bulk email verification tool verifies your email lists with a variety of identification methods: Hosts, role accounts, network, domain, and MX records. It also gives you a summary of your contacts, each with a rating on a five-category scale: valid, invalid, accept all, unknown, and disposable. Once your email list is categorized, you can then filter your list for bulk scrubbing.
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  Pricing: NeverBounce offers a pay-as-you-go pricing structure. It begins at .008 cents for up to 10,000 emails and decreases the more emails you submit.

Most full-suite email marketing software, like those in Mirabel’s Marketing Manager, offer analytics dashboards, personalization tokens, send time optimization, and other features we mentioned in a single platform.

However, if your campaign is faltering in one area like design or email deliverability, this comprehensive list of email marketing tools can help. These tools are designed to address singular aspects of your email campaigns and to ensure their long-term success.

Download and sign up for these reliable digital marketing tools to discover what works best with your needs, and start creating incredible marketing campaigns today!

For more information on email marketing, download our popular white paper by clicking on the button below.

 

Kelly Jacobson contributed to this blog.