Essential Toolbox for Email Marketing

Let’s assume you have a website or a landing page where you already collect your subscribers. That’s where the email marketing starts. I’m pretty sure, I’ve already talked about that in the previous article - Collect your user base in the right way (check it).

Let’s also assume you have a database with your subscribers. How many “bad” subscribers do you have there? Try to guess! BTW “bad” subscribers are typos, spam traps, fake emails, etc. The exact number is not important. The way they get there is what really matters. So, your visitor decides to register an account on your website and enters its email. And makes a typo. You don’t want to have such a subscriber in your base. How to avoid it??

Use email validation services! There are plenty of them. I personally know three of them: Neverbounce, Freshaddress, Zerobounce.?

They are easy-to-use and simple to adjust. The principle of how validation services work is simple: the subscriber types-in its email address, the service checks it for spelling mistakes (gmeil.com, yahoa.com, etc.), spam traps, bounce history and calculates the probability of the hardbounce. Then it shows you all the information about the email address and that’s where you decide what to do with the “probably bad” email address - include in your mailing list or not. How to decide?

Depends on your daily new registered users. If you run an email marketing for the small startup and your daily registrations are between 100 and 200 users you probably should avoid the risky subscribers. They can cause a lot of troubles for your domain reputation.?But if you have a 200+ daily registrations the amount of “good” emails far exceeds the “bad” ones. Therefore your filter criteria can be softer so you could have more emails in your subscribers base.

Moving on! Now you have the subscriber list which includes only good emails. Now it's time to make the email itself.?

You see beautiful emails everyday in your inbox. They come from different companies and they look good, yeah? My point here is you have to design your email template from the scratch. Like create header, body and footer. All three elements should be distinctive for the user. Because that's how design works. Okay, you decided what information will be in your email and even allocated it into the structure. What tools will help you in creating the design for your emails: Figma. That's it, the only one tool I can recommend for making the template from scratch. Why I love to use figma: it shows the whole structure of the template so you can easily navigate between different elements, it is web based (!), several team members can work in one workspace, it's really easy-to-use, and it's FREE! I personally didn't take any courses on how to work with figma, for me it was two-three weeks of just using it. But there are plenty video's and how tos which can help you.

But what if you need to make the email template ASAP? That's where you can make a great use of email template builders. Usually, all good ESPs have such functionality built-in. And if yours don't - go to Stripo. I found out about Stripo only a couple of months ago. Because I'm not a fan of email builders, I try to make all my email templates in figma and HTML coding. But if you don't have a HTML coder, who is familiar with the email building, you can build your email using Stripo. The principle of work is simple: you just drag & drop content blocks and arrange them on the template. And after that - download the template in an HTML file.

Let's talk a little about the text contents of the email. Guess what tool I'll recommend for grammar and spelling checking. Correct, it's Grammarly! Not sure if you need more info regarding this awesome app. Just visit this page if you still don't know about Grammarly and start using it!

Now you have a tool for creating design and content for your email template. It is a good practice to see how email templates look in different email clients or Email Service Providers (ESP).?Fortunately, there are some services, which collect good-looking emails. One of them is Reallygoodemails, it contains thousands of examples of good email templates. So you could take references and inspiration while creating yours. The collection is updated on a daily basis and every template is explained why it is amongst the good emails.

If you're deep into design (as me), I can recommend another useful resource - Dribble. It's a playground for professional designers. There you can find designs from various industries and talented creators. Just visit the site and click ”Explore”, you'll see how cool dribble is!

Okay, you checked the good email templates for reference, done your design, created content and forged your own email template. So it's time for sending, right? Well, not yet.

The next part is truly crucial for every email marketer - you must adjust your verification protocols: SPF, DMARC, DKIM, BIMI. The last one is the youngest, the other are older and have a lot of credibility in the industry. I don't feel experienced enough in this area to tell you step-by-step instructions on how to work with those caps-locked words. But I can't just leave you without something useful. So here are my favourite articles on the topic:

• E-book from Litmus - needs to register but it is worth it;
• Email Deliverability: What It Is and Why It Matters - another one from Litmus but more wide and easy-to-read;
• Email deliverability: Everything you need to know - the name fully describes the content;
• Email Deliverability - article from Validity. It's the most technical-terms-stuffed article from this list. Validity knows the topic very well.

If your email grid has a proper verification with at least SPF, DMARC, DKIM protocols and your domain is warmed-up (another big topic) you can be sure that your emails are delivered to your subscribers. Talking about this can't be wrapped-up in "long story short", you have to read a lot, try a lot and track results. Or pay a lot to experts in industry for adjusting such an essential thing in email marketing.

My practical advice here - start with adjusting Google Postmaster. It's relatively old but really effective tool to track your domain reputation, IP reputation, spam rate and deliverability. It's simple to set-up and easy-to-use.

By this point let's assume you've already prepared your toolbox and templates for sending. It's not the sending time, not yet. It will be soon, I promise :) Now it's time for testing your emails in the wild.

Always test your email before sending. Especially new templates. What services help us in this field: Litmus, Mail-tester, GlockApps.?They're all great, I use all of them. Because it multiplies your chances for success. Don't trust only one testing tool, ever!?

Litmus - a comprehensive service, it will show you how your email template renders in different email clients and devices. It has a great use when we're talking about the design of the template. Also litmus checks the domain, IP reputation and bunch of other technical aspects, which affect deliverability. Mail-tester - much simpler than litmus, but still very useful. It calculates the overall rating of your email based on several metrics: mistakes in HTML code, proper authentication, spam traps, broken links, etc.?GlockApps - I think it’s the most detailed and comprehensive tool for email testing. It has built-in tools for testing domain authentication, blacklists, HTML code errors and a bunch of more aspects. But it has one serious downside - you must pay to use it. Sure, you can try it for free and decide whether you need it permanently or not.

We’ve come to the last step of making the email sending - the sending itself! Tools used for this are called Email Marketing Services (EMS). The number of such services is too big to just briefly mention them here. Every EMS has its strong and weak points. I still want to help you though, so I’ve found a pretty cool article from Maropost -?Does Your Email Marketing Platform Have These 10 Essential Features?. BTW Maropost has a lot of useful content for email marketers, check it from time to time. And it’s an Email Marketing Service, what a coincidence!

As for the other services for email marketing, I am personally familiar with SendGrid, SendPulse, Mailerlite, Mailchimp and the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Will give you no advice on what service is better. Simply because every one of them has a better use in different situations. But you could read these two overview articles: from HostingFacts and from HubSpot. It will help you to decide which EMS will be good for your scope of work.

SUMMING-UP! Every good email marketer has its own favourite toolbox. My personal choice is “fueling” with the good designs on dribble, giving the references to the designer in my team, making the design itself in Figma and coding the whole template with the help of HTML coder.?You can start on your own without the help of the designer or the coder. Just as I did! I hope this article makes your Email Marketer’s path a little easier.