While you already have the best email marketing partner platform (in us), there are a wide array of tools that can help you improve the quality of the email campaigns you put out. Some of these tools are free.

A little disclaimer from our side: We cannot guarantee the efficacy and performance of these tools and only offer recommendations that you can investigate.

Content and Design related tools

Content and design are two major elements when it comes to setting up your email campaigns. Content ensures that you are sending relevant targeted content out to your subscribers that they will be interested in. Whereas well designed email campaigns help you deliver your messages effectively and grab your subscribers attention.

Canva

Canva is one of the most popular graphic design tools and offers a free and a paid-for version. With Canva you get access to a drag and drop graphic design tool that allows you to create assets for use in various marketing campaigns.

One of the great advantages of Canva is that there are thousands of templates you can access as well as different image (and even animated) file formats you can download your design in.

Canva is also very easy to use and does not require a high level of training or much learning to get started.

Did you know? Mail Blaze has a built-in Canva integration within our platform. You can access this integration in the Mail Blaze File Manager.

Grammarly

Let’s be honest, we’re not all the best at spelling and grammar and that’s okay. Grammarly is a fantastic tool if you don’t have access to a copywriter or actually just want to improve your overall communication.

All you need to do is download a browser extension and Grammarly will scan the content within the platform you are using and check any text for grammar and spelling errors.

One of the best parts of this integration is that it is free and can improve your writing across the board.

Reviews

Although you’ll want to investigate a variety of review sites that are most frequently used within your industry, reviews within your email campaigns can be fabulous additions to your campaigns. Reviews from external sites are powerful trust cues that can help nudge a subscriber from the consideration phase to the buying phase in the buying cycle.

We recommend looking at Hello Peter (for our South African clients) and Trust Pilot (for our international clients). Both sites are a good starting point when it comes to reviews. Ideally, if your business is not purely based online but has a physical storefront that your customers can visit, you will want to set up a Google My Business page and get reviews through that too.

Trello

Trello is a stripped down task management tool. A great way to look at Trello is to literally just think about it as a list with sticky notes, but in a digital form. Trello is a great way to prioritize tasks, capture ideas on the fly AND plan out content.

We’d recommend looking at using Trello with its calendar view and planning your campaign sends via Trello to ensure you are staying aligned with your content goals and content pillars.

Stock photography

Images are great design elements that add emotion and context to your messaging at a glance. Unfortunately though it can be time consuming and expensive to set up photography shoots to create unique custom images or graphics for your business. That’s where stock photography comes in, stock photography offers you the opportunity to access millions of images that you can use free of charge or at a fee depending on what you need.

If you’d like to explore stock photography a bit more you can look at our comprehensive article Free Stock Photography Resources.

Fun fact: Mail Blaze has a built-in Pexels.com integration available to its clients. This means you can access images from the stock photography giant without needing to log in or open a new browser.

Google Analytics

Did you know that Google Analytics can help you improve your campaigns? Not only can you keep track of how your campaigns are performing if you use UTM tracking but you can also use the insights you gather from how different content pieces are performing to improve your email campaigns.

You can incorporate some of the learnings you gather from your data into the content that you use in your email campaigns.

Campaign URL Builder

Campaign URL Builder is Google’s UTM tracking builder. UTM tracking allows you to place additional tracking on your links to give you more visibility in your Google Analytics account.

Learn more about UTM Codes and Email Marketing

Answer The Public

If you’re feeling uninspired and need some help coming up with ideas, Answer The Public could help you. Answer The Public allows you to input a topic of interest which then pops out related phrases and questions all in a bid to “help you discover what people are asking about. It’s a great way to get some more content ideas.

Notepad or TextEdit (Mac)

Have you ever noticed that when you try to copy text over from Microsoft Word (or other Word processing software) that there are sometimes extra unusual characters or that the words seem to come out in a jumbled mess? This is because Word processors like Microsoft use formatting that isn’t visible when you use it and gets transferred when you copy and paste text out of them. To avoid this from happening you can use Notepad (Windows) or TextEdit (Mac) to get rid of this extra unwanted formatting. Another solution is simply to type your text in our text editor.

Other useful tools

Email subject line grader:

Email subject line grader is a tool that helps you see how your intended subject line fares. Although it can’t guarantee that your subject line for example will flag spam filters, it can help you optimise your subject lines better.

Whatsapp link

If you’d like to add a link directly to your Whatsapp business account, Whatsapp Link generator is exactly what you need.

Colour Converter

Colour converter is a great tool to convert and get colour equivalents for RGB, HEX, CMYK etc. This is particularly useful if you need to quickly find out what codes a specific colour is so it’s all matched.

Resize images

Figma and Paint3D are two great tools you can use if you need to resize and crop your images.

Convert your downloaded HTML

HTML2PDF helps you convert your downloaded HTML copy from VIEW WEB VERSION. Once you’ve opened the web version of your campaign you’ll be able to save the HTML completely. This tool will enable you to then convert the downloaded HTML and images to a PDF document.

And that’s a wrap. We hope you’ve enjoyed these complementary tools that can help you enhance your email marketing campaigns. Are there any other tools that you love that we haven’t included in our list? Tell us in the comments below.