Why should you care about lesser-known tools?
Chances are, you already have a tool for most of your email marketing, since email is still one of the most versatile tools in any marketer's toolbox.
You can use email to send out newsletters, drip campaigns, or even to do some old school cold outreach.
When looking for an email marketing tool, it's tempting to go for the mainstream software like Hubspot, AWeber or MailChimp.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with these tools, but for every one of these mainstream products there are other email tools you should consider.
Lesser-known tools typically have one or more of the following advantages over mainstream tools:
- More intimate customer support
- More willingness to collaborate on specific requirements and find an appropriate solution
- Better value for your money
On the other side, some lesser-known tools are less reputable. To check their reputation, I suggest you do the following before buying:
- Check off-site reviews on sites such as Capterra, G2Crowd or GetApp.
- Check Domain Authority and Spam Score via Moz Open Site Explorer.
- Contact their Customer Support: This lets you test responsiveness and quality of support.
Below is a list of 10 email marketing tools worth trying:
1. Elastic Email
Elastic Email is an all-in-one email delivery platform specialized in delivering transactional and marketing emails. You can create your own designs or pick from their template gallery. Access to fast and intuitive API allows you to integrate Elastic Email with nearly any system you use.
Elastic Email offers one of the better quality-to-price ratios on the market. They also offer 24/7 customer support.
You can send up to 150,000 emails per month for free. After that, pricing is $150 per month.
2. Email on Acid
Email on Acid is an email testing platform that allows you to preview your email on more than 70 email clients and devices. Ensure your email looks good in every inbox and increase your email marketing ROI.
They also offer spam testing, to check your email deliverability and a robust set of email analytics to track subscriber engagement.
Email on Acid is an email testing platform, not an email sending provider (ESP). This means they don’t send out emails. Instead, they allow you to test and render your email code before you send it to your subscribers. And although they are not an ESP, they do work well alongside every ESP with their auto-process testing.
Email on Acid is also one of the most affordable and robust email testing platforms on the market which offers unlimited email testing for paid subscriptions.
They offer a 7-day free trial, afterwards, pricing starts at $44 per month.
3. Robly
Robly is an email marketing system that’s a bit more expensive, but it gives you a couple of novel features in return: OpenGen and Robly AI.
OpenGen will resend your campaign with a different subject line than the one sent to those that did not open the first time.
Instead of sending your email campaign all at once, Robly AI sends each email one at a time, at the exact moment your subscriber is most likely to check their inbox.
With an easy-to-use drag and drop editor in combination with these features they promise to boost open rates to 50%. Additional features include Autoresponders, A/B Testing, Exit Intent Popup Forms, Device-Specific Reporting, and outstanding 24/7 customer support.
They offer a free 14-day trial to make getting started as easy as possible. After, pricing depends on the number of emails you send. Price starts at $19 per month.
4. Moosend
Moosend is an affordable email marketing and automation platform used by companies of all sizes.
One of the advantages of Moosend is that it offers unlimited email campaigns for free for the first three months, but you are limited to 5,000 subscribers. Sufficient to say, it’s perfect when you’re starting out and just began building your list. They offer a large collection of premade email templates as well as a couple of unique automation features, from cart abandonment to triggered emails, Moosend can be a great fit for your business.
Support is available to all customers by phone, email and live chat with no additional fees for any level of support. Users have access to 100% of the features regardless of the size of their account, this includes the free trial.
Apart from a large list of pre-designed emails templates, there’s also a library of pre-made workflows to help make marketing automation easier.
You can choose for one of their monthly plans, starting at 10$ per month, or pay as you go with their credit system if you only send out emails occasionally.
5. Mailify
Mailify is an all-in-one marketing tool which lets you create and send both text messages and emails. This email builder is a great solution for sending out newsletters, especially for small and medium-sized companies. The flexible interface makes it possible to design emails and SMS text messages quickly at any time.
It's also one of the few mailing tools which shows you the reading time of the delivered newsletter.
Plus, Mailify has a phone and email support in English, German, Spanish and French.
They offer a free trial and pricing starts at $19 per month for 2,000 emails.
6. Mailshake
Turn your email marketing into a machine with Mailshake. This awesome tool allows you to set up, schedule and follow up on your cold outreach campaigns with metrics to evaluate them.
The offer a large selection of template emails and give you advice while you edit your email.
This email tool will set you back $9/month per user, which makes it a great addition to your list of SME marketing tools.
7. LiveIntent
LiveIntent is a people-based marketing technology platform for email that maps together and enriches customer data through performance campaigns. The platform unlocks the full potential of email, optimizing offers to customers in brand emails as well as making it possible to reach those same customers when they are engaging with emails sent by over 2,000 other publishers and brands, driving superior performance, reach and match rates.
Just like Email on Acid, LiveIntent doesn’t send just any email. The platform is designed to augment, not replace, any part of an email marketer’s existing tech stack, and their technology has an overlap with both advertising and marketing technology platforms.
*No pricing information is publicly available for LiveIntent.
8. Omnisend
Omnisend is an email marketing automation platform built specifically for ecommerce. Whether you need to set up single campaigns or a full cart abandonment automation workflow, you can make it happen in Omnisend in just a few minutes.
Emails are created in Omnisend using a visual drag-and-drop builder. Creating automation workflows uses this same visual builder, so you know exactly what’s going out to which customers and when. Emails and workflows also come with ecommerce-specific templates to
make set up even quicker.
However, Omnisend’s biggest advantage is that you can add other channels to your automation workflows. In the same workflow, you can use email, SMS, push notifications, Facebook Messenger, and more. This means that you can add channels as you need them, allowing you to scale your online store without adding extra apps or switching platforms.
Omnisend offers a free plan for basic email marketing, and automation is included in their Standard plan, starting out at $16 per month. You can try any paid Omnisend plan free for 14 days.
9. MailUp
MailUp is similar to Mailify. They offer a simple and scalable solution to create, automate and customize email and SMS marketing campaigns, great for lead generation, database building, and collaboration. You can easily create those campaign with their intuitive drag and drop email editor. They focus primarily on deliverability (avg. in 2017: 98.5%).
Multichannel marketing automation features, bespoke consultancy, training resources and extensive expertise -- MailUp offers companies of any size everything they need to create effective email strategies.
The pricing depends on the size of the contact database size. It’s $37 per month for the cheapest plan, which covers 1,000 contacts.
10. Pikwizard
Pikwizard is the latest addition to the stock photography family. It has over 100,000 high-quality images, with 20,000 of these completely exclusive to Pikwizard. There is also no attribution required on any of its images.
What makes Pikwizard stand out from its competitors is its high-quality images of people, which are few and far between on stock photography websites.
It also features a great graphic design tool called "Design Wizard". You can take any image from Pikwizard and edit or personalize it in Design Wizard in seconds. The resizing tool in Design Wizard will also allow you to change the size of an image in seconds.
Pikwizard is completely free and a perfect visual library for all your newsletter or communication images.
Stefan Debois is the founder and CEO of Survey Anyplace, an online software tool to create engaging surveys, quizzes and assessments. Besides kitesurfing, Stefan is passionate about the use of technology to build professional relationships with people, at scale.
Connect with Stefan on Twitter.
