Email remains the best digital channel for ROI. However, like everything else email can be spiced up for a better user experience and to drive more conversions.

Thankfully there’s been a growing number of tools out there that have been created to solve our collective email nightmares. Best of all, many of them are free.

In this post, we’ve curated a list of awesome email marketing tools for the savvy marketer. 

Quick Note About Email Service Providers

The following are not email service providers, but tools to boost conversions, email lists, and more. If you’re searching for a list of Email Service Providers, Mark O’Neill has compiled a fantastic compilation here.

We will do our best to add more email marketing tools to this list as we see fit. In the comment section below please add any you think we missed.

With that out of the way, let’s dive into our list of top email marketing tools:

Owletter

Owletter is a free tool with an easy-to-use dashboard to track and store your competitor’s newsletters. This email marketing tool allows you to compare newsletters and screenshots to see how your competitors are marketing their product, what copy they are using, and how their newsletters compare to your own. After you’re done researching you can convert those findings into a downloadable document to share with your team. Did I mention it was free?
Try: Owletter 

BriteVerify

BriteVerify is an email-marketing tool for validating email addresses before you send to them. Plenty of email service providers will stop sending to certain addresses after being notified that they are coming back as hard bounces, but this tool is proactive. It lets you determine whether they are invalid before sending, drastically improving their deliverability.
Try: BriteVerify 

Full Contact’s Person API

Email personalization is great, but what if we only have our customer’s email address? The FullContact Person API pulls in publicly-available social profiles, photos, basic demographics and social influence so that you can get to know your customers a little bit better before sending.
Try: Full Contact’s Person API

Emailium

Emailium presents you with a database of over 1,000,000 email messages. Using this email marketing tool we can grab interactive source code and gain inspiration from others campaigns. Have a competitor? Search their emails and see how yours stack up.
Try: Emailium

Hemmingwayapp

This easy to use editing app is not directly inherent to email but could provide a lot of help to tired email marketing copywriters. The Hemingway app uses an algorithm to flag problems in your prose. Overly long sentences show up yellow, purple means its too complex, and green indicates the need for the passive voice.
Try: Hemmingwayapp

Litmus

Sign up with Litmus and you’ll get a fast and effective email testing software equipped with comprehensive analytics and spam filters. For more information on Litmus check out our personal love affair with this wonderful product. 
Try: Litmus

PadiAct

PadiAct believes popups drive visitors into leads, but only if those leads are ready. In order to make sure that your visitors are ready to be “popped”, PadiAct gives you the ability to set predetermined rules. The rules are based of the visitors previous interactions such as new visitors vs returning visitors, recency, referrers, time spent on site, number of products viewed or articles read.  This way you can tailor your message for the right time, test it, and then alter your approach.  Oh, and your first 50 leads are free.
Try: Padiact 

Scratch-it

Scratch-it is an enterprise class cloud based platform for increasing traffic and sales. Intrinsic to the mobile experience Scratch-it leverages the principles of psychology, touch & design to create effective interactive experiences.
Try: Scratch-it 

Autosend.io

Autosend.io offers triggered messages for SMS, push notifications, and email. While not free, they do offer a 14 day free trial.
Try: Autosend.io

Contest Domination

The concept behind Contest Domination is simple: reward readers for sharing your message. When a friend enters the contest from a link, the referrer earns more entries creating a more “viral” email message. This marketing tool integrates with Aweber, Mailchimp, Infusionsoft, etc.
Try: Contest Domination

Touchstone

A newcomer, Alchemy Worx’s email marketing tool Touchstone uses a proprietary algorithm to predict open, click and bounce rates of a given subject line by studying the past performance of similar lines. You also can compare your subject line against their entire email database of over 300 million emails and against trends in your industry or sector. While we are big fans of A/B testing, Touchstone as a subject line database might be worth testing out… pun intended. Still in beta, and currently free.
Try: Touchstone

Parse Emails by Zapier

This 100% free email marketing tool by renown app makers Zapier allows you to easily pull out information buried from the auto-generated notification emails in your inbox and place that data anywhere you want. Zapier says “It’s time to finally stop your copy-and-paste routine.” The tool looks a little janky but works really well. A no frills, no thrills solution from some very talented people.
Try: Parser

Bonus:

Email Marketing ROI Calculator

This free email ROI calculator takes away the pain of planning out your next email marketing campaign. The tool, which is very straightforward asks you to put in a few key variables and then immediately shoots out your projected conversions, profits and margins. Understanding your cost per conversion is essential for email marketers – this tool makes all that easy.  

As you can see, there is a growing number of fantastic resources for email marketing. So what email marketing tools are you using? If I’ve missed an awesome tool let me know in the comments below.

Reminder: for a list of Email Service Providers, Jordie Van Rijn has compiled a fantastic list.