best-email-marketing-tools-for-small-businesses-stripo
05 July 2023

31 best email marketing tools for small businesses

Build high-quality emails
Table of contents
  1. Task management software
  2. Image editing tools
  3. Email design tools
  4. Email marketing tools for working with texts, including spell checkers
  5. Video creation tools
  6. Email testing tools
  7. Email verification tools
  8. Tools for building AMP emails
  9. Final thoughts
1.
Task management software

Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels. It helps you build and maintain communication with customers.

Below, I will examine the best email marketing tools that will boost your productivity and the effectiveness of your email campaigns.

Task management software

These are the services that help your company build systemic interaction within the team, and simplify task scheduling and work organization processes, including email newsletters.

1. Asana 

This email marketing software is available on smartphones and PCs. With it, you can easily organize your time and manage projects in teams.

Best Email Marketing Services _ Asana

Key features:

  • prioritizing tasks for each team member;
  • the ability to manage overlapping and dependent tasks;
  • convenient boards showing the progress of a specific task.

2. Notion 

This is a cloud service that allows you to easily manage your workflow. When you open the application, you see a page similar to the one from a real notebook. This email marketing software can be useful for those who work individually or on a team.

Best Email Marketing Services for Small Businesses _ Notion

Key features:

  • adding to the document almost anything: video, audio, tables, codes, and many more;
  • collecting in one place all information related to the task;
  • storage of databases and tables.

3. TMetric

With this tool, you will be able to log the hours you spend working on tasks and projects, track your productivity, and keep a good work–life balance.

Best Email Marketing Service _ TMetric

Key features:

  • tracking time with the timer or adding it manually;
  • user-friendly options for managing projects and tasks; 
  • billing and invoicing based on tracked time and expenses;
  • detailed and clear reporting for any time range.

4. Chanty

A team collaboration tool that integrates with the following third-party apps: Trello, Asana, Zapier, Google Drive, Dropbox, Onedrive, Github, Gitlab, Bitbucket, Mailchimp, Giphy, and other apps.

 Best Email Marketing Services for Small Businesses _ Chanty

Key features:

  • unlimited message history;
  • audio and video calls;
  • task management with a Kanban board.

Image editing tools

Ugh, those moments when you find/create a nice photo that just doesn’t fit right because of its size, shape, or whatever else. In this case, you need a photo editor.

We are not going to talk about such "celebrities" as Adobe Photoshop or Paint, which you undoubtedly know about.

So let's talk about free email marketing tools.

5. Jira

Jira is a project management software tool developed by Atlassian. Jira is often used in companies to create a list of tasks, track the overall progress of the team, and resolve issues that arise along the way. The application is built on the principles of Kanban and Scrum boards, a long-standing practice for organizing tasks.

Jira Email Marketing Tool

Key features:

  • Kanban and Scrum Board;
  • documentation, protocols, and other documents can be maintained using Confluence;
  • user-friendly reporting;
  • support for integrations with many development tools and other services.

The Ukrainian mobile communications giant Kyivstar, which is our client, speaks positively about the use of Jira in their automated workflows.

“The whole team works through Jira, where there is a separate board on which we write all the tasks related exclusively to email marketing. This is a proven process with specific steps:

  • once a week, at the weekly meeting, all plans and tasks for the week are discussed, including what results we want to get and what will happen during the week;
  • urgent unplanned tasks are recorded in the Objectives and Key Results table, which keeps track of all tasks done with links to Jira.”

6. Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is part of the Office 365 suite and is available through a corporate subscription. It’s the true hub of teamwork, built for communication, bringing email marketers and partners together, and includes the tools teams need to collaborate productively. Microsoft Teams allows you to organize chat by conversation so that all team members are involved in communication and stay updated with all the news.

Google Calendar Marketing Tool

Key features:

  • teams and channels;
  • chat function;
  • document storage in SharePoint;
  • online video calling and screen sharing.

7. Google Calendar

The name of this email marketing software speaks for itself. Google Calendar allows you to quickly organize a meeting or event, as well as set up event reminders, so you'll always be in the know about what's next.

Google Calendar Marketing Tool

Key features:

  • contact lists;
  • alerts and notifications about upcoming events;
  • availability management;
  • calendar sync across all your devices to which the account is linked.

Email design tools

Ugh, those moments when you find/create a nice photo that just doesn’t fit right because of its size, shape, or whatever else. In this case, you need a photo editor.

We are not going to talk about such "celebrities" as Adobe Photoshop or Paint, which you undoubtedly know about.

So let's talk about free email marketing tools.

8. Figma

Figma is an online collaborative editor. You can create website prototypes, application interfaces, various layouts, and email designs and discuss edits with colleagues in real time. Figma is the perfect email marketing software for both designers and email marketers, as well as managers and developers.

Figma Email Marketing Tool

Key features:

  • the ability to work both in the browser and in a full-fledged desktop application;
  • can work with vector graphics;
  • functional customization with plugins;
  • collaborative editing.

The company Omnicore, which we recently interviewed, uses Figma in its workflows and speaks very positively about this marketing tool.

“Figma is better and more convenient than Photoshop. We use it to design email templates and even individual banners.”

And as a final touch, we have a little insight for you. Figma will soon be integrated with Stripo. Yes, you read everything right. We are actively working on making email design layouts and transferring them directly to the Stripo advanced email editor quickly and easily. Stay tuned for more to come.

9. Canva 

Canva is one of the most popular graphic editors. It will be useful both for email marketers that are new to the design work and for those who are already experienced in it.

Email Marketing Services for Small Businesses _ Canva

Key features:

  • a large number of templates for diverse banner formats;
  • the ability to edit and add various elements to prebuilt templates;
  • templates are grouped by topics like architecture, advertising, finances, and many others.

Important to note:

Right now, Stripo and Canva are working on the integration together. This means that soon you will be able to export banners from Canva directly to your Stripo account.

In the meantime, you can create chic, multi-layered banners by using our Banner block.

How to Make an Attractive Banner within Minutes with Stripo

Create a banner for promotional emails in no time
Get started

10. Crello 

This email marketing software allows you to create really cool banners, and it only takes a few minutes to figure it out. In addition, this service, like the previous one, provides free access to its gallery of pre-built email templates, fonts, animations, and stock photos.

Email Marketing Services for Small Businesses _ Crello

Key features:

  • access to over 150 million images, videos, and other files thanks to the integration with Depositphotos;
  • convenient tools for introducing edits and changing ready-made layouts.

Important to note:

Crello and Canva are two very similar services, both in interface and in features.

But here are 2 main differences:

  • Canva offers more interactive elements such as buttons, charts, and rare designs from the Getty library;
  • a Crello Pro subscription will cost you $9.99 / mo, while a month in Canva Pro will cost you $12.99.

11. PicMonkey

An effective assistant to develop your own unique banner. The full functionality of the email marketing software is available in the browser but on smartphones — only a simplified version.

Top Email Marketing Services _ PicMonkey

Key features:

  • a sufficient number of fonts, templates, and photo frames;
  • ready-made layouts for any social media;
  • integration with OneDrive and Dropbox.

12. Stripo email design platform

An intuitive and simple, but at the same time flexible email editor that allows you to speed up the process of creating emails of any complexity and easily send the created email templates to a huge number of popular ESPs. Besides that, Stripo has a wide variety of tools for mobile optimization, which all email builders should have as many people check their emails on mobile.

Stripo Email Design Tool

Key features:

  • any design element can be created as a module and saved in a library for further use; 
  • user-friendly email creation with drag-n-drop email editor; 
  • HTML code editor for advanced email design needs;
  • integration with 70+ ESPs for seamless email template transferring.

13. Icons8

This is, kind of, a universal tool. By using it, you build banners, design social media icons, edit photos, etc.

Popular Email Marketing Services for Small Businesses _ Icons8

Key features:

  • over 180K icons in 35+ styles;
  • Lunacy, a next-gen graphic editor for professional design;
  • free background remover;
  • Smart Upscaler for image enhancement;
  • royalty-free music.

14. Brand Guidelines by Stripo

This functionality helps you create emails in the corporate style, adhering to your color palette and fonts, regardless of who builds emails for you.

You can choose any email/ template you like.

Key features:

Within a minute, based on a template/email message of your choice, we create a file with:

  • all your brand identity, including logo and favicon;

  • email design styles, i.e. colors, font size and type, buttons, headings, and more.

How to Get Brand Guidelines and Brand Assets in One Minute in Stripo

Create a Brand Guidelines file for your brand
Create

15. Awesome screenshot

This is a two-in-one tool, as it let you take screenshots and record your screen.

Taking screenshots

You highlight a necessary page area (or the entire page), then draw or write notes on it before saving. You can even "blur" a certain area of the screenshot.

That is, you don't need any additional applications or tools to work with screenshots. Add text or numbers to the resulting images if necessary. 

Email Marketing Software for Screenshots

Key features:

  • allows taking screenshots after delay;
  • allows taking screenshots of entire pages;
  • helps with building instructions;
  • you can upload your own images to "annotate" them.

Taking videos

This email marketing tool allows you to record your screen while you're working to explain anything clearly, and you can add your voice and record your camera, even with a free account. This is just perfect for instructions.

Email Marketing Services for Small Business _ Video Recorder

Key features:

  • ability to record both camera and screen;
  • instant sharing;
  • storage of your items.

Email marketing tools for working with texts, including spell checkers

Spelling errors can ruin even the nicest design. So don’t hesitate to use these email campaign tools to double-check all those tricky words.

16. Google Docs

It’s an office suite and the most basic email marketing tool developed by Google that helps users create and edit documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in the cloud. It is part of the Google Workspace office suite, along with Google Sheets and Google Slides.

Google Docs Email Marketing Tool

Key features:

  • wide range of text formatting options;
  • spelling and grammar checker;
  • collaboration on documents and access levels;
  • document version history.

17. Grammarly

Keep in mind this email marketing software is also available as an extension for various browsers — Safari, Firefox, and Chrome — that simplifies the copywriter’s life, at least in my case.

Email Marketing Service _ Grammarly

Key features:

  • checks everything you write in your browser, social media posts, product reviews, articles, etc.;
  • a convenient pop-up window when the service notices an error in your text;
  • offers a number of error correction options;
  • identifies the tone of your message. 

18. Phrasee

The standard functions of the service include help with choosing different subject lines for an email and recommendations for improving it.

Free Email Marketing Service _ Phrasee _ Subject Line Generator

Key features:

  • simplifies the marketer's workflow;
  • helps with building a strategy for sending PUSH notifications;
  • builds a style of communication with customers by optimizing the brand language.

19. LanguageTool

LanguageTool is a free and open-source online proofreading service for English, Spanish, and 30 other languages. It instantly checks the text for errors and suggests a solution depending on the context.

LanguageTool Email Marketing Software

Key features:

  • simplifies the email marketer's workflow;
  • helps with building a strategy for sending PUSH notifications;
  • builds a style of communication with customers by optimizing the brand language.

Video creation tools

Sometimes there is a designer on the staff who helps you draw pictures and a videographer who creates the necessary videos for your newsletters.

And sometimes you have to do it by yourself. And then again, our list of tools for email marketing comes in handy.

20. Movavi Video Editor

Movavi Video Editor is a user-friendly video editing software that allows you to create and edit videos with ease. This tool offers many features to help you create professional-looking videos for your email marketing campaigns.

Best Email Marketing Service _ Movavi Video Editor

Key features:

  • intuitive drag-and-drop interface for easy video editing;
  • AI editing capabilities;
  • templates, video effects, transitions, and filters to enhance your videos;
  • support for adding text, titles, and captions to your videos;
  • tools for cutting, trimming, and merging video clips;
  • export your videos in various formats for easy sharing and embedding in emails.

21. Veed.io

Veed.io helps you both create videos from scratch and edit existing ones.

Best Email Marketing Service _ Veed.io

Key features:

  • add images to existing videos;
  • add subtitles;
  • apply various effects to videos.

22. Vidyard

This small business email marketing tool is renowned for allowing you to create personalized videos. And this, according to Vidyard, increases conversion by 5 times.

Best Email Marketing Service _ Vidyard

Key features:

  • analytics of your videos;
  • video hosting;
  • video personalization.

23. Ezgif

Ezgif allows you to convert animations to videos. And vice versa. Yes, it's really simple: all you have to do is upload the file.

Email Marketing Service _ Ezgif

Key features:

  • video cropping;
  • file converting;
  • changing colors and frames;
  • if necessary — compression of video and animations;
  • you can add text to the video.

24. Giphy

A popular service to create animations. Also, you will find a huge number of ready-made GIF images that you can use in your activities or just get inspired when creating your own GIF.

Giphy _ Email Marketing Service

Key features:

  • quickly and conveniently convert your pictures to GIF format;
  • a panel where you can apply various inscriptions, stickers, filters, and more;
  • converting video files by uploading them in MP4 / MOV formats or by pasting a video link from the network (for example, from Youtube).

25. Makeagif

Makeagif allows you to convert any video to GIF. Download videos from YouTube or Facebook or just paste links. If you need an animation of under 10 seconds, you can use the service for free.

Best Email Marketing Tool for Creating GIFs

Key features:

  • no need to download videos, just paste the link;
  • you choose which part of the video to convert;
  • converting to HD format (for premium accounts).

Email testing tools

We strongly recommend that you preview email marketing campaigns before sending them. Check the correct display for all possible devices and email clients so that your email marketing efforts won't go down the drain.

26. Email on Acid

Email on Acid shows screenshots of emails on more than 90 devices and email clients. This gives you the opportunity to look at emails through the eyes of a client.

Email Marketing Service for Testing Your Email Marketing Campaigns Before Sending

Key features:

  • they check your email on 1 600 machines (impressive!);
  • you will see screenshots of the email on about 70 different devices and email clients.

The check is carried out for desktop and mobile devices, as well as web applications.

These services only check HTML emails, their static version. Interactive, AMP, and dynamic content cannot be tested with them.

Important to note:

Email on Acid is integrated with Stripo.

Now you can check your emails right in Stripo without leaving the editor.

How to test emails with Email on Acid in Stripo

Look at newsletters through the eyes of your subscribers
Test emails

27. Mail-tester 

A simple service for checking your message for getting into the "Spam" folder. Send your email to the address indicated on the main page of the site, and within a few seconds, you will receive detailed information about errors.

Best Email Marketing Service _ Mail-tester

Key features:

  • by registering, you can check up to 20 emails per day;
  • the service checks the six points of email production — from evaluating the text, image, and HTML layout to the presence of broken links and server authentication;
  • stores a history of previous tests of your emails.

28. MxToolBox 

The service checks your DNS and your entire domain for errors and performs a complete analysis.

Best Email Marketing Service _ MxToolBox

Key features:

  • 15 different sets that check DNS settings with their configuration;
  • provides a prompt response to web server problems, checking and searching for errors occurs every 5 minutes;
  • displays warnings regarding your domain by checking over 100 blacklists.

29. Mailchimp

Trusted by millions of people for their email campaigns, Mailchimp is a great choice if you need to test your emails. It has many A/B testing email marketing features to optimize your campaigns for maximum conversions. 

Mailchimp Email Marketing Tool

Key features:

  • detailed email performance tracking;
  • A/B testing of subject lines, from names, send time, and much more;
  • contact lists segmentation for better testing.

This is a great set of email marketing features for Mailchimp, which is the best email marketing tool for email testing. However, If you want to learn more about A/B testing and discover best practices and pitfalls to avoid, check out our dedicated article.

Email verification tools

Of course, now that we use Double Opt-In, i.e. you send the user an email with a request to confirm the subscription/registration, the likelihood that an incorrect email address will be found in your contact database is significantly reduced. However, if the database is collected manually offline, errors are still inevitable.

And precisely in order not to send emails to non-existent email addresses, it is necessary to check/clean the contact base.

You might also like

Best Practices and Common Fails of Email A/B TestingAB Email Testing_Cover Image

30. NeverBounce

It is one of the most popular platforms. It was originally created as an internal instrument.

Email Marketing Software _ NeverBounce

Key features:

  • possibility of a single address check, instead of not an entire pool of addresses;
  • verification of addresses in real-time. That is, checking the address at the time of registration on the site;
  • integration with sites through applications.

Tools for building AMP emails

AMP content, which is also known as dynamic, increases the conversion of email marketing campaigns. We have already covered the stats of AMP emails on our blog.

But only a few companies are ready to start working with AMP emails, as this usually requires deep technical skills. That's why we at Stripo are aimed to provide a useful, handy email marketing service for building AMP emails.

31. Drag-n-drop AMP blocks

The Stripo email design platform provides 3 AMP blocks:

AMP Email Campaign Creation _ No Code Development _ Build with Stripo then Push to Your email marketing platform

Key features:

  • does not require any coding skills;
  • significantly saves time and money spent on AMP email production.

32. Data Service and Data Source

To build emails with real-time and dynamic content or an ability to collect feedback from users directly in the email you need to connect the latter either with the data storage or with the data source. Sometimes with both.

How to Use AMP Lists in Emails with Stripo

Stripo provides:

  1. Data Source — content is pulled directly into emails without your direct participation. Used for real-time content in emails.
  2. Data Service — users’ responses from your forms are stored in it.

Key features:

  • you don't need to create sources and storage manually. Also, no help from your developers is required. This saves money and time;
  • we automatically create the Cors Headers required for emails with dynamic content for you;
  • only you have access to the data.

Final thoughts

In this post, we've provided a quick overview of the most used and, in our opinion, top email marketing tools for small businesses. We hope that using them will help you improve your future marketing campaigns and save you time.

I sincerely wish you good luck!

Build high-quality emails with Stripo
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4 comments
Sabrina Johansson 1 year ago
So Canva is better than Crello?
Anton Diduh 8 months ago
Hello. It depends on the needs of your designers. As a result, all designers have their own personal favorites among designer tools. So we can't say 100% that Canvas is better than Crello.
Akiko Topps 1 year ago
Canva is actually good, hope the integration will be successful! 
Hanna Kuznietsova 8 months ago
Hello, Akiko. Thank you for your comment. Sorry for the delayed reply. Yes, the integration will take place this year in a few months. We're anticipating it. Thank you.
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