Maximize Productivity with the Best Email Tools

Long live email. One of the world’s oldest internet technologies is alive and well and helping entrepreneurs and companies make millions in sales every year. And it’s not just about direct sales. In fact, email is one of the best communication channels. And with the rise of email newsletters (something that was considered dead a few years ago), email is making a resurgence.

As of the latest update of this blog post, ProductHunt—the place to find the newest and hottest software—lists 5067 products related to email. That’s a massive number of relatively new software tools that deal with relatively old technology.  According to Statista, 75% of marketers consider email marketing to be an excellent channel for customer nurturing and acquisition.

But for some business owners, email management can be difficult and time-consuming. Pain points include growing a list, improving deliverability, understanding engagement, content curation, and design.

Email marketing campaigns require careful attention to several factors, including the content of the email, the email list, delivery rates, sender reputation, spam check, and outgoing emails. Email service providers (ESPs) play a crucial role in ensuring that your outgoing emails reach their intended recipients and avoid being marked as spam.

Fortunately, there are lots of tools to help you with all of these pain points. And as Artificial Intelligence (AI) tech improves year upon year, it gets easier to be an email pro. Of course, the playing field is leveled for everyone, so it always pays to keep ahead of your competitors wherever possible.

Test Emails For Deliverability

Email open rates, click-through rates, and delivery rates are important metrics used to evaluate the effectiveness of email campaigns. Delivery rates refer to the percentage of messages that actually make it to a subscriber's email inbox without being blocked or marked as spam. A high delivery rate indicates that your emails are successfully reaching your subscribers, while a low delivery rate may signal issues with your email list or email content.

Check for spam trigger words or phrases that might cause your message to be filtered as spam by ISPs or email clients. You can use a spam checker tool to scan your email content and avoid triggering spam filters.

The easiest-to-use tool I’ve found for figuring out problems with the deliverability of your emails is Mail Tester.

The service works like this:

1. You send your newsletter, marketing campaign, outreach email, or simple communication email (remember them?) to a special email address

2. Mail Tester checks what kind of problems you could encounter with your email content, domain, and server configuration could have and displays everything it finds in a simple format. 

3. From there, you make changes to your DNS records, email server setup, or anything else that needs fixing, and retest.

Typical problems include incorrect DKIM or SPF records (very important if you want to keep your communications out of email spam folders).

4. Email authentication protocol DMARC helps protect email senders and recipients from spam, spoofing, and phishing attacks. By publishing a policy in the DNS records for a domain, the owner specifies how messages sent from that domain are authenticated, and what to do if they can't be. It protects users from malicious content by verifying messages' authenticity. EasyDMARC is all you need to identify and fix problems with your email service provider or server setup. EasyDMARC also has specialized tools for SPF and DKIM records, as well as phishing URL checks. It's free for one domain.

Verify Emails with a List Cleaning Tool

While it might massage our egos to grow a huge list of subscribers, not all subscribers are equal. Removing unengaged and fake emails from your list not only improves your deliverability, it can also save you money on your email marketing software provider fees.

Several email verification tool providers compete for your business but I've found these to be the best (out of dozens of competing services):

• Pabbly Email Verification – the lowest-cost email verifier at the quality level I expect. Limited free plan. Accurate, easy-to-use clean service with an excellent user interface.
• Neverbounce – offers a free plan that will give you an estimate of how healthy your email list is. Fast, accurate. Reasonably good pricing (more expensive than Pabbly).
• Email List Verify – The best value service on the list for cleaning up your list of dead accounts, fake accounts, and unengaged readers. API access and integrations with most major marketing tools.

Tame your Inbox

How much time do you spend each day managing your inbox?
Inbox zero is a pipe dream, but SaneBox's A.I. ensures that only important messages remain in your inbox—allowing you to focus on what matters.

SaneBox‘s Artificial Intelligence recognizes and learns from your unread receipts, newsletters, and other emails. It then deletes them from your Inbox, leaving only important conversations where they belong. You'll spend less time managing your inbox and more time generating revenue. You can use Sanebox with any email address (not just Gmail) and there's a 14-day trial and full demo video on the SaneBox website.

Automate data extraction

If you receive reports, updates, and PDF attachments via email on a regular basis, you might have wondered how you can cut down on the time required to process the information. Even opening and examining these messages take up valuable time.

If the information you receive follows regular repeated patterns, you can create templates in Parsio to automatically extract the useful data and present it in a nicer format or pass this information on to another software tool or service.

With Parsio, you can identify patterns in your email content and document attachments (including PDFs) and automatically parse out information such as names, addresses, phone numbers, and more.

The possibilities for using this information are endless.

Create new leads based on patterns that are identified by our system, like “someone who purchased something once” or “someone who's never bought anything.”

Parsio is a powerful no-code tool that lets you save time, work more efficiently, and create databases of information from emails. No programmer required.

Get email subscribers from your blog readers

Convert Box is a pop-up and exit intent form builder. What's that, you say? ConvertBox converts website users into email subscribers. The forms and popups are highly customizable, fast, and definitely not run-of-the-mill.

The “Call Out”, notifications, full-page, and modal popups give you options for every occasion. ConvertBox also integrates seamlessly with Thrivecart, the industry-standard checkout page, and funnel builder.

Collect emails and create funnels to not only build your list but sell products and services on autopilot. You can literally create exactly the look of the form you want. 

Want to add a video to the popup that explains why people should sign up for your email list? No problem. Want to integrate Facebook Messenger bots into the mix? ConvertBox can do that. Do you want to sell access to a list or a special insider email newsletter? Use the one-click setup.

A less expensive solution is Thrive Leads, which boosts engagement and conversions by offering advanced tools that help you build a mailing list faster.

In the marketing niche, Thrive Leads is a well-known product with a long history. And that might give you a hint as to its effectiveness. Marketers are not going to use sub-par tools for lead generation. The intuitive drag-and-drop editor is the icing on the cake.

Email Marketing & Automation Software

Every serious business needs a good email marketing tool to not only manage their subscribers, but create email campaigns, and understand what’s working and what’s not. 

ConvertKit is the go-to product for creators, marketers, and bloggers.  And it's more than just an email management tool. It's one of the best email management software products in 2022.

ConvertKit is a fully-featured email automation platform that lets you manage your contacts, create and customize email templates, and send emails to the right list of contacts: the kind of software that will help you build your audience and monetize it. The customer service team is also highly respected in the industry so you'll always have help at hand.

Aweber is another option for serious marketers. Aweber is one of the most trusted and longest-established brands in the marketing space.

Extract Emails From Websites

Need to get someone’s email from a website? It’s easy with Hunter's Chrome extension. Install from the Chrome Extension Store and whenever you visit a website, just click the Hunter icon to get a list of known email addresses matched to people and the list of sources the data was collected from. 

If you do email outreach, link building, networking, or even if you just want to email a company about something, this email lookup tool is a huge time-saver. It’s also 100% free. 

Keep your domain off Blacklists

Hetrix offers a suite of tools for monitoring your domain and IP addresses. By keeping an eye on these lists automatically you can make sure your domain reputation (sender reputation) remains good. Hetrix allows you to monitor internet blacklists, improve your sender score, and alert you if your email-sending domain or email provider's IP addresses inadvertently end up on a list that negatively impacts your email deliverability.

The reputation of your sending domain (essentially your business's domain name) and the IP address from which the emails are sent play a crucial role in determining whether an email will be delivered to the recipient's inbox or marked as spam.

Very useful for improving your email sender's reputation.

Copy.ai – Write Faster Emails

Looking for inspiration for writing great copy? Do you struggle to come up with catchy email subject lines or fun replies? Copy.ai aims to solve that problem by harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to give you email subject lines, confirmation emails, email notifications, conversation starters, thank-you notes, and follow-up email sequences—all delivered in your browser.

This killer copywriting tool, based on OpenAI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3), comes with a suite of tools for speeding up the writing process. Create newsletter email sequences, and email signup landing pages quickly with the power of AI.

Email Grammar and Spell Checker 

Bad grammar is a signal of poor attention to detail. Sloppy writing is unjustifiable, especially in the business world, but there's no excuse for bad writing in your personal emails either. But it doesn’t have to be this way. The gold standard is Grammarly and I use it every day.

Optimize Landing Pages for email signups

Some email tools give you landing page software, but if you’re looking for something customizable and more professional, try OptimizePress for one of the best value landing page builders for WordPress. 

If you’re not using WordPress, or prefer to use a landing page builder, try LeadPages.

Grow your list with giveaways

Growing an email list can be hard. However, incentivizing people to give you their email addresses and join your email list can be a great way to get new subscribers. Giveaways and competitions have proven to be effective.

Remember to periodically scrub the list for unengaged subscribers and fake email addresses. 

WooRise lets you create contests and giveaways, quizzes, forms, and landing pages to help you get more subscribers faster. 

Email / CRM integration

The free Hubspot CRM lets you manage your clients, contacts, suppliers and leads through one tool that integrates with your email. Track email opens, clicks, visits to your website, and interactions with the people you communicate with. It's a full-purpose customer management tool that works with your email address book.

Sales professionals and people who send promotional emails will appreciate Hubspot's AI-driven email management apps that streamline the process of creating effective and targeted email campaigns. You can also track open rates, and click-through rates, find customer information, and track sales. The AI automation features for all kinds of email activities are impressive.

Email Newsletter Tools

You might have heard of the Substack email newsletter platform. It’s good, but there are better alternatives (cheaper, more customizable, better and more advanced features, etc.).

ConvertKit offers a set of features at a price that’s hard to beat.

For most bloggers, entrepreneurs, or small or medium-sized businesses, Beehiiv is a great choice. This i s a new platform but it has raised the bar for all other newsletter platforms and email marketing tools. It's a beautiful but powerful email list management software with advanced features and a free plan no other tool can beat.

MailPoet is the perfect solution for anyone who wants to create newsletters without compromising on features or power, and who loves the WordPress ecosystem. With MailPoet, you can send newsletters directly to your subscribers without having to use third-party email marketing software.

Email Sending Reputation Tools

WarmBox helps you reach the inbox of your subscribers and helps you avoid landing your messages in the spam folder. Get detailed reports and monitor your deliverability with WarmBox.

The cheaper, but no less worthy, alternative to WarmBox is Warmup Inbox (these companies name their apps in the most imaginative and clever ways). Warmup Inbox also has a 7-day trial and costs $9 a month. Used by companies like Cisco and T-Mobile, this email-sending reputation tool is proven to be effective at keeping your emails and email notifications out of the spam folder. Warmup Inbox works with Google Workspace, Outlook, Amazon, general SMTP servers, and more.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do you need to manage your email list?

Avoid having emails rejected by ISPs or individual email accounts by keeping a list of clean, engaged email subscribers. Your email list is the foundation of your marketing efforts. By managing your list you can ensure that your emails are reaching the right people at the right time and that those people are interested in your products. 

What to look for in a good email marketing tool?

Look for the ability to grow your list without the price increasing exponentially, good list management features, plenty of integrations, and a good reputation.

How often should I scrub my email list?

According to Sendgrid, the ideal frequency for list scrubbing is once every six months. This can be increased to once every 3 months for larger lists.

How do you keep your email list healthy?

Email list management is important for maintaining a healthy email list. Remove unengaged subscribers and fake emails, avoid sending messages with words that might trigger spam filters, and deliver value to your readers every time.