6 Email Marketing Tools To Take Your Performance To The Next Level

There are lots of great tools out there that can help you maximise your email marketing.

Do you want a 1000% lift in subscribers? A massive lift in deliverability? The knowledge that your campaigns will look great on your recipients’ screens?

These six tools are tools we’ve come across working with customers and maximising the success of our own email marketing campaigns. If you’re looking to get the edge, take these for a spin.

1. Zapier

Zapier lets you connect any web app to any other web app with the click of a few buttons. With over 250 connections, a raft of great guides and a ton of useful applications, Zapier is a great weapon in any email marketers arsenal.

One of the greatest success stories comes from a testimonial Zapier published that outlined how KISSmetrics were able to increase webinar subscribe rates by 1000%.

The secret?

Rather than using GoToWebinar’s rather basic landing pages and email templates, they connected their own, optimised, landing pages to their email marketing platform for huge conversions and powerful automation.

Without Zapier this sort of task would be a nightmare. You’d have to code the landing page, code the API connection to your email marketing platform and setup some form of automated task to manage the email series. With Zapier this task becomes ridiculously easy.

What you can use it for: Webinars, automated lead follow up, connecting your CRM to your email marketing software. We’re using it right now to replicate KISSmetrics’ success with our webinar on 5 Game Changing Tactics To Lift Your Email Conversions.

2. Trello

Trello is a task management tool that puts the power in your hands. Rather than forcing you to use strict calendars or other opinionated rules you can setup your workflows just as you’d like.

With awesome team management Trello lets you get more done, quickly.

We have used Trello at Vero over the last four months and it has contributed drastically to a 450% increase in our email marketing conversions.

Managing exactly what campaigns are going to go out each and every day and planning ahead means we’re not scrambling to get campaigns completed and have the proper time to think about who we want to target.

The power of segmentation is only possible if you are have the time to strategise and plan out what you’re going to send. Trello gives you this power.

How you can use it: Plan out the next 2-3 weeks worth of email marketing campaigns at any one time. We recommend you setup your Trello board as below:

This gives you the chance to really focus on each campaign and, hopefully, get ahead so you can learn from and iterate on each and every email you send.

3. Gmail

Gmail is obviously no secret.

…but using it to power your email marketing campaigns is something you might not have thought about.

One of the best sources of great email marketing ideas is inspiration from other great companies selling to your target market. Getting a feel for the sorts of campaigns that are being sent and the way customers respond is imperative if you’re going to develop a backlog of ideas to test.

The best way to do this is to manage your own research. Signup to a heap of sites using variations on your email address.

For example, rather than using chris@getvero.com, I sign up to many SaaS newsletters or services with chris+saas@getvero.com. I do the same thing for online retailers with chris+ecommerce@getvero.com and so on.

The beauty of this system is that it makes it easy to setup automated filters that automatically label each of the email types.

When you need inspiration you can then dip into the saved campaigns: anything from SaaS email examples to webinars to eCommerce cart abandons – whatever you sign up for.

How you can use it: Setup labels in your Gmail account like this:

It’s easy to do, it’s free and you’ll never run out of inspiration again!

4. MailMonitor

MailMonitor helps you solve your deliverability woes.

If you’ve ever wondered whether your emails are reaching the inbox this is your go to. Using a seed list you can send a new template design or some email copy you’re sceptical about to a range of inboxes from Gmail to Yahoo and even local providers across Europe and the US and see whether your email arrives in the inbox.

MailMonitor can also run your campaigns through SpamAssassin and other tools to determine their SPAM score.

All of this gives you very actionable information and you can adjust your copy/template/campaigns to ensure they improve going forward. Being in command of your deliverability early can save you huge pains in the future.

How you can use it: add the seed list from MailMonitor to your email marketing software and ensure your campaigns run through it. Leave it running and check back regularly to see where you’ve gone wrong and how you can improve.

5. Litmus

Litmus is software that makes it easy to see what your email campaign looks like in a raft of different email clients.

Responsive email is a massive deal with up to 60% of email opens happening on mobile devices these days.

With Litmus you can quickly see how your email will look on iOS, on BlackBerry, in Mozilla with Gmail: you name it, they have it.

Litmus are constantly blogging about the wins to be gained if you spend time optimising your campaigns: to name just one, Tsubo were able to lift click rates by 10% using a responsive design tested with Litmus.

That’s massive.

How you can use it: Run your campaigns through Litmus! Particularly if you’re using HTML templates or doing anything fancy. Even running a new template through Litmus once will be hugely beneficial.

6. Vero

Vero is email marketing software with a difference. It tracks your customers actions and helps you turn these actions into targeted email campaigns that convert.

The focus is on trigger-based email automation and segmented newsletters.

By using customer behaviour as a means of segmentation you can send emails that are much more targeted. You can email customers that have used a particular feature, or purchased a certain number of times. You can test out email campaign ideas and, when they work, turn them into automated campaigns that are triggered each and every time a customer takes that same action in the future.

The great thing about this sort of email marketing is that it works to permanently lift conversions whilst you’re working on other things!

Better yet you can A/B test and optimise your campaigns without any input from IT, which will naturally help your campaigns perform better over the long term.

How you can use it: If you have any online business then Vero can help you turn your email marketing into a channel that matters. You can send newsletters and automated campaigns and tracking your customers is simple using Vero’s Javascript snippet.

Kickstart your emails today with these 9 tips!

Conclusion

We could go on and on with the great tools we use every day!

What tools do you use to manage your email marketing?