Email marketing is not dead.  While the technologies and rules have changed from 10 years ago, email marketing is still a highly effective medium for communicating your brand’s message via the internet.  Research indicates that 91% of consumers check their emails at least once a day and 44% of email recipients made a purchase last year based on a promotional email. 

One of the key challenges facing email marketers is how to tailor a campaign to a younger audience who are likely to access their email via mobile devices.  In order to do this effectively, it’s wise to have the latest tools at your disposal.  Here are 10 awesome tools to help you supercharge your email marketing campaign. 

Probably the most renowned email marketing platform out there, MailChimp has a multitude of useful features.  MailChimp’s Subject Line Researcher is particularly powerful and enables you to craft effective subject lines based on performance data from every other email campaign logged in MailChimp’s history.  MailChimp’s reporting features, aesthetically pleasing templates and social media integration also makes this a highly comprehensive tool for email marketers. 

This innovative tool allows you to reduce the size of images without reducing their resolution before adding them to an email newsletter.  Since internet access is typically slower on mobile devices, it’s important that your subscribers don’t have to wait any longer than is absolutely necessary to see the visual elements of your newsletter.  Although this might make your newsletter construction process marginally longer, to neglect your mobile audience would not be wise in 2016! 

Legendary marketer and entrepreneur, Neil Patel, is a strong proponent of Hello Bar.  This easy-to-use WordPress tool allows you to gather emails using a variety of opt-in forms on your website.  It also sends your subscriber data straight to MailChimp, making the process of orchestrating a campaign infinitely smoother. 

It’s no secret that running a contest is one of the best ways to rapidly grow your mailing list (the more competitive the contest, the better).  This tool allows you to generate a code for the contest which you can paste onto your website – no coding or advanced technical knowledge required! 

There’s nothing worse than spending hours crafting an excellent newsletter that your subscribers will certainly resonate with, only to have it rejected by their spam filters.  Email Spam Test analyzes the content of your newsletter and determines whether it has spammy characteristics.  This valuable feedback enables you to edit your newsletter accordingly to improve its outreach.  Interestingly, different spam tests have different results so it’s worth double-checking with a similar tool such as Mail Tester. 

It’s been reported that the average human now has a shorter attention span than a goldfish, which is one of the reasons that visual content is essential in order to break through the noise and get your message heard.  Bomb Bomb allows you to send personalized video emails to anyone, from any device, anywhere – and track the results!  This is particularly useful for sending thank you messages to customers or responding to queries that emerge from your email newsletter. 

In order for your email marketing campaign to be as effective as possible, it’s highly desirable to funnel your subscribers to unique landing pages tailored to their particular requirements.  While this sounds time-consuming, it isn’t when you use Instapage.  This awesome tool allows you to create mobile-friendly landing pages in a matter of minutes, is fully integratable with WordPress and even features an A/B testing functionality so you can learn which landing page performs best. 

Mailzinger enables you to schedule when responses to your email campaigns hit your inbox.  This means you can set aside a daily time slot to deal with all your campaign mails rather than being continually interrupted throughout the day.  Mailzinger also has a powerful email aliasing feature that lets you create a unique email address for each campaign so you never have to guess which campaign a customer is responding to.  Mailzinger works with all email providers, doesn’t require a download and generates some really useful statistics that help you to assess the efficacy of your campaigns. 

Canva is a powerful tool used for generating original visual content, particularly for branded images that are perfect for sharing via social media.  For email campaigns, Canva is particularly useful for adding your logo to images, applying photo filters to improve the ambiance of the image, creating unique images which tie-in with promotional content and creating awesome email headers to grab attention. 

Although Canva is very effective for creating original images, sometimes you need a realistic shot of something specific which you can’t take yourself.  In order to avoid copyright infringement or expensive purchases from stock photo sites, it’s best to source your newsletter images from free galleries.  For an abundance of high quality free images, check out Pixabay, Morguefile, Photo Rack and the aptly named, Death To The Stock Photo! 

Dave Milton is chief digital marketer for Privacy By Default, an online lobby group that campaigns for the privacy settings of all software to be configured, by default, to gather no personal information about the user.