Free Guide! The 8 Key Ingredients for Effective Email Marketing
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I'm Nicole, digital strategist and your business's new biggest fan...
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Ah, email. The word alone can conjure up images of an overfilled inbox, a red bubble notification in the thousands, and a general feeling of “Isn’t email dead?”
Or maybe you’re an email fanatic (it’s us, hi)—the ones who worship at the altar of inbox zero, are very selective with the email lists they sign up for, and have a general feeling of “Email is the best kept digital secret, but only if you do it right.”
We’re not shy about our love for email here at Maribloom, mainly for its ability to hit all four pillars of the digital ecosystem. With email campaigns, you can smooth your business processes, increase your online presence, and optimize your digital marketing, all while providing an exceptional customer experience.
Most email service providers offer just about everything you need to take your email campaigns from the beginner stages to full-on automation. But what happens when you’re just a little bit stuck with a problem that’s outside of your platform’s capabilities?
Enter email tools. While an email service provider will be your go-to for sending emails in bulk, email tools can help you enhance one or several aspects of your email marketing, whether it’s writing a subject line, managing a shared inbox, or understanding where your email lands in someone’s inbox. Below we’re sharing seven of our favorite email tools, depending on what your business needs.
Your subject line is your first impression, and you can craft it with precision using SubjectLine.com. This nifty tool allows you to test and refine your subject lines, ensuring they’re attention-grabbing and compelling. Simply enter your subject line, and you’ll get a score from 1 to 100 with results, showing positives and negatives of your subject line. Their AI tool (currently in beta) can also recommend different subject lines if you want to go in a different direction, like creating urgency or making your subject line sound more fun.
At Maribloom, we have a love/hate relationship with AI tools when it comes to content generation. On one hand, it’s incredibly easy for us to spot AI-generated content—it generally lacks authenticity and storytelling, and, frankly, it sounds robotic. But on the other hand, we totally understand how beneficial AI tools are, especially if content generation isn’t your strong suit.
That’s where Jasper.ai comes in. Unlike ChatGPT, Jasper.ai is an AI tool specifically for marketing purposes. You can ask Jasper to write engaging email content, catchy subject lines, and persuasive calls-to-action. What we love most about Jasper is its ability to learn about your brand. You can save your brand’s tone and voice, and also ask Jasper to scan your website so it can adapt its outputs to sound more like you.
Google Postmaster Tools is a not-so-well-known tool that helps you understand where your emails are landing with Gmail inboxes. Through Postmaster Tools, you can track your spam rate, identify potential deliverability issues, and keep tabs on your domain sending reputation. Simply add the required records to your domain, and you’ll be able to track your emails within Gmail inboxes.
Keep in mind that this tool is only to take a look at your emails and the Gmail inbox. This won’t help with Outlook, Yahoo, or other inboxes—but considering there are 1.5+ billion active Gmail users, it’s a safe bet that Gmail is the primary email service provider that your audience uses.
Nothing jeopardizes the success of your email marketing campaigns faster than bounced emails or, even worse, landing in the spam folder. Meet Kickbox, your virtual guardian against inaccurate and undeliverable addresses. Kickbox excels at cleaning and verifying your email list, ensuring your emails land securely in the right inboxes.
What we love most is the simplicity of their tool. Just upload your email list and let Kickbox get to work, searching for valid and invalid email addresses. Once complete, you’ll get a clear results report, showing a breakdown of deliverable, undeliverable, risky, and unknown email addresses.
We LOVE monday.com at Maribloom and have been using it for years to track projects, to-do lists, and our ideas. With a monday.com board, you get a super customizable interface to help you track the details that matter most to your projects, like deadlines, who’s responsible for a task, the status, and more.
Because monday.com is super customizable, we use it to manage our content calendar, which includes our email sending schedule.
With sending all of your email marketing campaigns, you’re bound to get replies from customers. And if you have a shared inbox that more than one person manages, you need Front.
Front is *the* platform to turn an email inbox into a collaborative workspace for multiple team members. Team members can communicate right inside of Front about how to handle a customer request, without the risk of your customers seeing internal communications. You can set up automations to auto-assign certain messages to a team member, and you can save canned responses for those common questions you get.
We stated earlier that we were going to focus on tools outside of your email service provider, but it feels almost irresponsible to not mention Hubspot. While not exclusively an email marketing tool, HubSpot can revolutionize how you manage your leads and how you interact with your customers.
Hubspot’s foundation is based on customer relationship management (CRM), which gives you a very holistic view of individual contacts—think everything from basic info, like name and address, all the way down to detailed behaviors, like the number of visits to your website and which emails they’ve clicked on. Hubspot is one of our favorite platforms to work with and sets the gold standard for small businesses in need of a robust CRM with marketing capabilities.
From ensuring clean lists to crafting compelling subject lines and beyond, integrating these tools can elevate your email marketing campaigns to new heights. While these aren’t the only tools we use for email marketing, these are a few of our favorites that we’ve used many, many times over the years to keep our email efforts running on all cylinders. We’d love to know: what tools do you use for email marketing that we missed?
Nicole is the CEO & founder of Maribloom Digital Studio. When she’s not nerding out over digital strategy, you can find her reading, traveling, doing pilates, or hanging with her husband and corgi.
Hey there! I'm Nicole—founder of Maribloom, digital strategist, and your business's new biggest fan...
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Read more about me
I'm Nicole, digital strategist and your business's new biggest fan...
sign up to receive our digital tips, tricks, and advice
sign up and get our best digital tips, tricks, and advice
THANKS!