Email Marketing Automation Tools That Will Save You Time and Money

Copywriter for the Snov.io blog.

WWS contributor

When it comes to finding and reaching out to leads, marketers often rely on email. Doing these and a few more business tasks manually is out-of-date already and takes too much time.

To become the best in your niche and not spend time in vain, you need tools to support you. For this, there are email marketing automation tools.

Email marketing automation tools save you time, money, and make you more productive. But how do you choose them, and are they worth your money?

Is Email Marketing Automation Worth Your Money?

According to numerous researches, email marketing automation helps professionals save time, generate more money, reach out to targeted people, personalize user experience, improve customer retention, and scale the email marketing strategy performance. So, investing in email marketing automation tools is worth every cent spent.

The numbers and stats also prove that email marketing automation is worth trying as shown in the infographic below:

How to Choose an Email Marketing Automation Platform

You’ve made your choice and are ready to select an email marketing automation platform. But the digital world is full of different tools and each of them promises something useful.

So how do experienced professionals select email marketing automation tools? What do they take into account? What makes them refuse one tool and opt for another one?

The checklist below will help you make the right choice.

Select the tool with a free trial. It’s vital to have an opportunity to test the tool and discover if it fits your needs. For this, a free trial is the best option. Note that only a few platforms offer a forever-free trial. Most often, this is either a 14-days or monthly period that in some cases can be not enough.
An easy-to-use instrument is a must-have. If the tool takes too much time to get the way it works, test another one. Choose the software or platform that is easy-to-use and aligns with your preferences and needs.
Discover the provided features and/or tools. The more is the better. If within one email marketing automation platform, there are all the tools you need for a successful campaign, it is worth your attention.
Analyze if you will have browser extensions. Add-ons lighten our work life. With them, any process flows and you spend less time on important tasks.
Follow the customization and personalization options. When choosing an EMA tool, it is vital to have an opportunity to personalize your approach to every potential client.
Learn what details on the email campaign performance you will receive. Not every platform provides their users with all the possible statistics. The more information you will have, the more productive you will be.
Pay attention to pricing and limits. It’s all about money. Always. We want to get the best thing at the lowest price. Moreover, for an entrepreneur or a solopreneur, money is of the highest priority.
Follow integration opportunities. Sometimes, you may need to make two instruments work together. This is where integration plays an important role. So choose an email marketing automation platform that has integrations with other tools you use.
If necessary, choose the platform with the API access. Not everyone needs API. Still, you may need it to automate a few processes. So it’s always better to have this opportunity than to not.
Discover how the support team works. You may say this point is not of the greatest importance. Yet, if any issue occurs, you need to have someone to lend you a helping hand fast.
Look through reviews. Whether you are choosing a new pair of shoes or an email marketing automation tool, you read what other people say. This gives you the assurance that you are making the right decision.

Best Types of Email Marketing Automation Tools to Consider

Some examples of useful email marketing automation tools that will give you an idea of the power of email automation, which you should definitely check out, include:

I. Email finder

An email finding instrument is a specially developed tool for searching for email addresses. The tool helps professionals fill in the sales funnel with targeted leads.

There are many similar tools on the web, yet, all of them differ due to the version and search opportunities. For example, you can find web apps and browser extensions.

Surely, the prior reasons to choose the best email finder is to generate leads in a matter of minutes. You only need to create a buyer persona, choose a respective tool, and get their email addresses.

Additionally, an email finder will help your recruiter find stuff.

Finally, if you are a startup or are simply looking for investors, an email finder will support you. You can use them on websites like AngelList to get their email addresses and reach out to them.

Among the most popular and affordable options are: Snov.io Email Finder, Hunter, FindThatLead.

II. Email checker

Even if the email list is compiled, it’s still not the time to launch an email campaign. You firstly need to check if the list is 100% safe. For this, you need an email checker. This email marketing automation instrument allows you to perform an email analysis and get rid of invalid addresses.

Email verification is the process of discovering email addresses for being real, active, and valid. Depending on the set of provided features, you can find not only invalid, but also catch-all addresses and delete them (some of the tools delete the invalid emails by default).

Also, the instrument can have single or bulk verification options (or both). Note that not all the platforms provide the list upload feature, so if you need it, select the tool that offers that opportunity.

Finally, when choosing an email verifier, analyze the verification steps the instrument takes to guarantee the highest quality of your list. Here are the most popular and most reliable checks:

Syntax check to discover mistyped addresses
Domain check that guarantees the domain exists and is real
Catch-all check allows you to discover catch-all addresses that can potentially spoil your sender’s reputation
MX-record check identifies garbage emails
Email address ping detects if the email address is active and can receive emails

Among the most popular and affordable options are: Snov.io Email Verifier, ZeroBounce, NeverBounce.

III. Email campaigns sending software

For email marketing, especially, for cold outreach, it’s vital to have a tool for sending email campaigns. This is the key tool for email marketing automation.

Email campaigns sending tools help professionals get in touch with leads, contact investors, and reach out to influencers. So, what are email drip campaigns or drip emails?

Drip emails are messages sent to people over a certain period of time automatically, without your direct participation. You build an email drip campaign with schedules, delays, and triggers, and launch it. Depending on the recipient’s interaction with the first email, they will get this or that message.

Email drip campaign tools are also important for professionals. They give you an opportunity to:

Send different kinds of email campaigns. Cold outreach and welcome new clients, onboard, warm-up and educate them, remind of the forgotten shopping carts, re-engage customers, improve the customer experience and the retention rate
Control the email performing and improve the email sequences
Save time as the sending process is set on autopilot

If you need to send different types of email campaigns, want to follow the campaign stats, and save time, an email drip campaign is the thing you need. My own piece of advice: when choosing an email drip campaign tool, select the one that provides a drag-n-drop campaign builder. It will be easier for you to work with it and you will have more opportunities to create personalized individual email sequences.

Here’s an example of a multi-level sales cold email campaign created with Snov.io:

Among the most popular and affordable options are: Snov.io Email Drip Campaigns, Drip, Woodpecker.

IV. Email testing tools

In this category, I’ve combined three types of tools. Group #1 helps you see how your emails display on different devices. Group #2 checks whether your email will land in the Inbox or the Spam folder. And the last one, Group #3 allows you to perform A/B tests.

If you are sending plain-text emails, there’s nothing to worry about except the email length. The optimal email length is up to 250 words. However, if you are reaching out to people with beautifully crafted HTML-copies, you need to be sure they look perfect on all the devices. There are automation tools that display 2 to 40 examples of your email on different devices.

For an email marketing professional, it’s vital to have the emails delivered to the inbox. One of the bad scenarios is when your message lands in the spam folder. There are different reasons for this happening. And one of them is the email content.

If your message is suspicious to the spam filters, it will hardly reach the inbox. Which is why use an email spam checker to identify the quality of the email content.

Finally, the A/B testing tools let you analyze the email performance. This allows you to see which of the two messages is more convincing and converting.

Among the most popular and affordable options are: Litmus; GlockApps; CakeMail.

V. Email tracking solutions

How do you know your email got opened once sent? How do you know whether the time to send a follow-up has come? What do you do in case you need to send a message early in the morning to be the first in the person’s inbox?

Without a special tool, there’s no chance to give answers to all the questions above. Which is why you need another email marketing automation instrument, an email tracker. And here’s why.

An email tracker allows professionals to follow your sent emails right in Gmail or any other email client depending on the provided features. This information notifies you about the email performance. Thus, you know whether the time to send a follow-up has come. Supportive? Yup.

Additionally, you can use the send later feature to always be the first in the recipient’s inbox. Also, you can activate trackers for a few accounts. So you’ll be aware of both personal and professional emails.

Some of the tracking tools are forever free, while others provide only paid versions. Some of them only track the email opens, while a few others identify if the link in the email was clicked.

A few trackers let you only know when the email was opened, while the others allow you to send scheduled emails and get notifications if the email wasn’t opened within a certain time.

Moreover, most free tools add some kinds of logos or brand names to your email and only a paid plan can disable this feature. On the other hand, you can find a tool that is forever free.

What to choose is your choice. Yet, remember that even such a tiny add-on like an email tracker can lighten your professional life a lot.

Among the most popular and affordable options are: Unlimited Snov.io Email Tracker, Mailtrack, Docsify.

In Conclusion

When it comes to choosing tools for email marketing purposes, it’s always a good idea to select all-in-one platforms. The reasons for that are simple and rather obvious: all the necessary tools within one platform will save you both time and money.

You don’t have to switch between a few tools and migrate data from one platform to another. You have everything you need in one place. And, for email marketers, saving time and money while achieving their marketing goals are the top priority tasks.