Social media gets a lot of attention but email is a worthy competitor when it comes to communicating directly with your audience (and that’s coming from someone whose job revolves around social media!). As long as email remains a primary communication channel, email marketing will continue to be a key part of any marketer’s life.

Which is why it’s great to come across nifty tools that help make said marketers’ lives a little easier. Between design, spam control, compelling CTAs, and subject lines that get noticed (and clicked), there’s a lot to think about with good ol’ email. Here are 5 tools that will save you time in your email marketing endeavors so you can focus more on growing your business than testing subject lines and designing buttons.  

MailChimp’s subject line researcher

MailChimp is great for a lot of reasons (one being their cheeky mascot and his hilarious one-liners) and their subject line optimization tool is just another one to add to the ever-growing list. I’m sure many marketers would agree that the perfect subject line is the Moby Dick to their Ahab, and MailChimp has set out to bring us that much closer to it through keyword ranking.

Their subject line researcher lets you put in specific terms you may want to include in your subject line and compares them to all of the subject lines ever used in their platform. What you then get is each term ranked on a scale of 1-5 stars based on how likely it will result in an open — no more guessing games about which words work better than others.

LinkedIn’s Rapportive Gmail plugin

This is more for personal use, but it’s still a great tool to have. Rapportive is a Gmail plugin bought by LinkedIn in 2012 that displays people’s contact information right inside your email. I downloaded Rapportive a long time ago when I was working at a startup in an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink role that included a dash of “business development” and was trying to get as much of a person’s contact information as possible, and have used it ever since. 

It gives a nice little snapshot of someone’s publicly-available (no creep factor here) contact information, including their picture, title, and social feeds to give you further context around who you’re speaking to. It’s particularly handy for anyone working in sales, business development, public relations, marketing or...really, any job where you’re communicating with people a lot over email. And it’s free! Download it here to try it for yourself.

Lyris’ ContentChecker for spam

Like MailChimp taking the guesswork out of subject lines, Lyris, a digital messaging automation software, is doing the same for “spammy” content. There are certain things we know for sure about avoiding spam but when it comes to more subtle offenses, the waters can still be tricky to navigate. Lyris’ ContentChecker “tests your email content against rules widely adopted by receiving domains to provide you with a spam score which indicates whether your emails will arrive in your recipients’ inbox or junk folder.”

All you have to do is pop in your sender email, subject line, and body copy to receive a “spam score” for your content. So you can rest easy knowing that your emails won’t be banished to that dreaded spam folder.

Scope by Litmus

Ever had a slick-looking email appear in your inbox and think, “Damn, I wish I made that?” Well now you can! Scope is a free bookmarklet that gives you the code behind any email you choose so you can have a beautiful foundation to craft your own e-masterpiece. Simply install the bookmarklet in your browser, open the email in a supported webmail like Gmail, and click the “Scope It” button to have the source code revealed to you. 

While Scope itself is free, it’s only available to non-Litmus users for 15 days before a Litmus ID is required to keep using it. So you can either sign up for Litmus and take advantage of all of their other features, or “scope” as many emails as you can in 15 days and have an archive of beautiful email code. :)

Da Button Factory button creator

If the name itself didn’t already give this away, Da Button Factory lets you create CTA buttons super quickly and super easily online. Plus, it’s fun to play with.

With the ability to customize text, button shape, size, color, shadowing, font, and more details — for free — you can create buttons all day long in as many different ways as your heart desires. That sure beats combing through Google Images for usable images or bugging a designer to stop what they’re working on to make a button for you.

We also made a visual package for marketers with not just buttons, but icons and a handful of blog images as well. Download it for free and, between that and Da Button Factory, you’ll be almost buttoned out.

What cool email tools have you come across? Share them in the comments!

Grab “The Complete Guide To Email Marketing” eBook to get your email working for you.