21 of the Newest, Coolest Email-Marketing Tools for Driving Sales
21 of the Newest, Coolest Email-Marketing Tools for Driving Sales
There are myriad new and easy-to-implement tools and technologies to help take your email performance results to the next level. Here are 21 cool email tools for driving engagement, improving deliverability, and increasing revenue that recently caught our eye. If you’re interested in any of these tools, be sure to contact us – we resell some of them and just may be able to save you money!
- AudiencePoint – Pinpointing the best time to send emails to each of your subscribers is an important way to improve open, click-through, conversion, and deliverability rates. AudiencePoint is a tool that helps marketers optimize email send times by leveraging proprietary algorithms, along with subscriber profiles based on engagement with emails in their inboxes. Working with many of the largest email service providers (ESPs), AudiencePoint allows marketers to target each subscriber when he or she is online, ultimately helping to improve performance rates.
- Journey Designer – This tool from IBM helps marketing teams create and collaborate on campaign storyboards for continual improvement of their customer experiences. In addition, this tool helps you define details of cross-channel interactions within the customer journey map, creating a virtual creative brief for teams to execute.
- PowerInbox – Looking for easy-to-implement ways to boost engagement, sales, and revenue from your email marketing? PowerInbox offers real-time content solutions to do just that by providing personalized and dynamic animations, including video, countdown clocks, geo-targeting, and much more. PowerInbox solutions help you easily and automatically target individual subscribers with different content in the same mailing. The solutions also perform on every device, email platform, and ESP.
- Fresh Address – This is one of our favorite tools for building, cleansing, and optimizing email databases. As part of its cleansing tools, FreshAddress has a technology for detecting spam traps. Plus, with the company’s patented Email Change of Address, you can connect your web forms to check and validate new email addresses. Email and Postal Appending, Email Validation, and Email Scoring are among the other services offered by the company. In our experience with list-cleansing tools such as these, you get what you pay for. And Fresh Address is competitive with the best.
- Zembula – Have your email messages come to life and boost engagement with subscribers through interactive content. Use the Zembula platform to quickly and easily build your dynamic content, sending it via your current ESP. Optimized for every device, Zembula makes it easy to create an interactive experience in your abandoned-cart emails, new product announcements, news and updates, receipts, loyalty programs, and more.
- FulcrumTech’s Email Self-Assessment Tool – We recently launched a free email self-assessment tool that takes only about 10 minutes to complete. Tallying your results will provide you with a clear sense of where your email program is currently succeeding and what your next steps for improvement should be.
- Movable Ink – This company’s technology lets email marketers update email content in real time. In other words, based on their location, time of day, and device used, your subscribers get the most up-to-date information in each email that they open. The company’s new platform, agileEmail, integrates with your ESP and has powerful capabilities to quickly produce fully responsive HTML templates, pull real-time content from your website and embed it in emails, test and optimize, hyper-target, provide advanced tracking reports, and much more.
- Open to Give – This is an email-marketing tool that can help you increase email opens and drive engagement by committing to donate to reputable charities for every email opened by your subscribers. The program works by having participating companies include Open to Give’s unique ②¢TM symbol in the subject line, indicating that the company will donate two cents to a charity for each email opened. Companies also include a subscript within each email to confirm that a donation was triggered by the subscriber’s open. Open to Give facilitates the donation process by integrating with the company’s own ESP and automatically triggers donations with a pay-per-open–type model. In addition to increased subscriber engagement, the ability for brands to present themselves as charitable activists is also of great added value.
- RealTime Email by Liveclicker – Bring your emails to life with RealTime Email by adding embedded video, dynamic slideshows, live timers, in-email polling, package tracking, and much more. RealTime Email capabilities help you create content that’s relevant and responds in real time to each subscriber’s personal content. Using such subscriber data as geolocation, local weather, email client, and language settings, you can also add targeting rules to your email sends. Plus, use RealTime Email’s LiveOptimizer to run automated A/B testing by combining real-time data from your ESP or customer relationship management platform to drive engagement and conversions.
- BEE Free – This is MailUp’s free online editor for creating responsive design emails. Thanks to its drag-and-drop interface, you can quickly and easily design a beautiful email message that automatically adapts to small screens. Once created, you can preview, test, and download the email to be sent through your own ESP.
- Inkbrush – This is a free web-based email design and coding tool from Movable Ink. Its rich features allow you to quickly build fully responsive emails – and no coding experience is required! Simply upload your design, define your layout and customize the content, and then export it to ESPs, web services, or download an HTML file.
- CoffeeCup – This computer software development company had its beginnings in a coffee shop, where the founders developed one of the industry’s most popular web design tools: the HTML Editor. The company’s latest focus is on providing a series of apps for designing mobile-friendly websites, email campaigns and newsletters, slideshows, fully automated web forms, and more. For example, CoffeeCup’s Responsive Email Designer (RED) includes a custom breakpoints tool, width slide, and flexible layouts, all supported by a powerful email code generator. Plus, CoffeeCup also offers a selection of free web design software, such as Free HTML Editor, Web Calendar, and Shopping Cart Designer Pro.
- Rebelmail – Thanks to Rebelmail, both large and small e-commerce brands can build and send interactive emails that allow subscribers to take immediate action in their emails. Such elements as drop downs and photo galleries, for example, let customers add products directly to their shopping carts within the emails. In addition, Rebelmail integrates directly with all major ESPs.
- Exit Intelligence – This full-service marketing software company uses behavioral tracking to help e-commerce businesses increase their sales conversions. As defined by Exit Intelligence, exit intent is the “ability to know when a website visitor is going to leave a web page and then re-engage that visitor to encourage them to purchase.” Automatic Sales Generation System (which generates new email subscribers to whom to market), Mobile Reengagement System (which directs web visitors to best-converting pages), and Instant Cart Recovery System (which reduces abandoned shopping carts) are among Exit Intelligence technology offerings.
- Litmus – This web application works with major ESPs, increasing your email performance by testing across all of the applications and devices that your subscribers are using. Litmus can help you optimize every email you send by getting it scanned by major spam filters; making sure your subject line, from name, reply-to address, and preview text are optimized; confirming that your links work; and previewing your landing pages. Plus, Litmus can also help improve your email read rates by providing a breakdown of open rates by device to determine whether subscribers read, skimmed, or deleted your emails.
- Email on Acid – Do your emails look great no matter which email client your subscribers are using? Email on Acid can help you answer that question. In mere minutes, you can preview your email in 53 different email clients and mobile devices. Plus, discover deliverability problems before you hit Send by checking your email campaigns against the most popular spam filters and blacklist services. With Email on Acid’s tools and technology, you can build, edit, preview, and optimize your emails all in one place.
- eDataSource – This company’s web-based platform can help you get more revenue from your email program by providing email-marketing intelligence based on what’s happening in consumers’ inboxes. With the help of eDataSource, you can see activity in real time from nearly 100,000 brands and 25 million daily emails, including coverage across all major Internet service providers.
- EmailInsights – This email-marketing research tool can help you see what emails your competitors are sending and how often they are sending those emails. In addition, you can also access industry-specific subject line analyses, including the most frequently used words. Armed with this type of valuable information, you can discover new ways to effectively connect with your subscribers and improve engagement.
- Balsamiq – This company’s software app, Mockups, is an exceptional tool for creating email wireframes – the first stage of designing an email. Mockups is easy to use, giving users the speed and feel of sketching with a pencil. But it also offers the advantageous features of a digital medium, including drag-and-drop for resizing and reshaping elements and making changes without having to start over.
- Email for President – Finally, if you’re wondering how this year’s two primary presidential candidates are doing in terms of email marketing, check out Return Path’s interactive tool: Email for President. The data are updated daily by Return Path and are based on the activity of more than 2.5 million consumers. Compare such metrics as list size, email opens, and spam and complaint rates between the two primary candidates to get some interesting insight into what voters are thinking – and perhaps some strategies that would be successful for your own campaigns. Plus, be sure to check out Return Path’s other free tools, such as Sender Score for information about your email reputation and Unsubscribe Calculator, which tells you how many subscribers you’re losing annually.
- Who’s Mailing What! – Membership with this company provides access to a huge library of email and direct mail samples to help you keep track of the creative, trends, and offers of many of the hottest brands. To give you an idea of the scope of the library, more than 20,000 promotional emails are added monthly. Plus, you can stay on top of competitors’ activity on social sites, as well. Covering eight major industries with more than 200 subcategories, competitive intelligence on multichannel campaigns can be readily accessed with the help of refined searches and multiple filters.
Looking to improve your email performance results and ultimately increase sales and revenue generated through the email-marketing channel? Contact FulcrumTech today and we’ll help you determine what strategies and tools you need to get the most out of your email campaigns.