People assume that email marketing is dead as social media marketing has grown so incredibly over the years and allows for crazy levels of personalization. But having said that, if you look at the real numbers, email marketing still contributes a big number and it's life is far from over. Obviously the preference of the users as well as the way they engage with content has changed with time. To be a successful email marketer you have to get the customers pulse right, and ensure your content is of value to the receiver. It also becomes super important to gather as much data as possible and constantly analyze trends and patterns, to be able to quickly adapt and respond to data pointers. Now it is equally important to have good content and having the right tools and resources. I have compiled a list of top tools for email marketing that includes both paid and free options to help you optimize performance. Free & paid tools necessary for email marketing 1. Testing Emails Before you send out email campaigns it is essential that you test out how the content renders for your recipients and also to ensure optimization. There are tried and tested tools out there helping you perform render testing and making sure that your content creative is optimized for popular devices. The paid and free options listed here allow you to test many clients and devices with the ease of a click. Paid email testing tool : Litmus Free email testing tool : PutsMail 2. Landing Pages A successful email campaign depends on creating a good email journey with valuable touch points for the recipients. Hence is it important that you have campaign specific landing pages to help in conversions. The options listed here don't require you to be a programmer. You can easily setup landing pages quickly choosing from the wide range of templates and integrates well with many of the emailing software systems. Paid landing page creator : Leadpages Free landing page creator : MizoAI 3. Image & Banner Creator It is a given that you need eye catching as well as meaningful images whether it is an email, landing page or a website. A powerful tool that can help you create your own images/banners without being a Photoshop expert, does help. The tools listed here help you create your own graphics using images, templates from their repository or even upload your own. Image and Banner creator : Canva , Stencil Both these tools provide enough functionality within the free tier to help create your own graphics. But you can also make use of their premium images and paid tier, to have enhanced capabilities. 4. Email Automation Email sending software have evolved from transactional email sending to a more sophisticated triggers based automation. In simple terms it means you can configure rules for your campaign so that emails are triggered based on recipient actions like email open, clicks, attachment download etc. There are many players in this space now with differentiators of their own. I have listed out the most prominent two that gives you the email sending core and a bit of everything else Email Automation Software : Mailchimp , MailerLite 5. Email Address Health Check Irrespective of how good your campaign content and plan is, it wouldn't amount to much if you have a bad emails database. Hence it becomes decisive to detect temporary emails and validate emails to remove invalid ones from the list. Some of the services also help to track IP health to weed out spam and scam users right at the source. Email and IP Health Check Tools : Antideo API, Verifalia To sum things up, the core components going into a successful campaign are a clean email list, laser focused messaging, optimized layout and an effective email automation strategy. There are a number of other tools and API's that would let you go pro when it comes to email marketing, but the tools listed above would get you started on the right note. Read the full article