100+ Free Helpful Email Marketing Resources Every Marketer Will Find Useful: From Tools to Communities

What to read: best blogs about email marketing

Educational email marketing resources both for professionals and newbies.

• Selzy — a wide range of the most relevant email tips and tricks, how-tos, and step-by-step guides. All that explained in a simple friendly manner without any big words.
• Really Good Emails — email marketing articles to help you and your business show off your best to the world. Every Friday they publish conversational videos with top email marketing people or attention-worthy industry updates.
• Mailchimp — a well-designed blog with numerous “how-to” pieces of content. A wide range of how-to articles on starting, running, and marketing your business from the veterans of email marketing.
• Campaign Monitor — the content ranges from email marketing strategy to social media and comes in multiple formats: infographics, videos, webinars, comparisons, etc. — you are unlikely to feel bored when exploring this blog!
• GetResponse — it’s not a blog completely focused on email marketing best practices: they produce content on different topics like landing page design, chatbots, etc. They also prepare handy cheat sheets, presentations, and reports to keep you updated with the latest industry trends.
• Vertical Response Blog — the articles are divided into several sections based on the level of your expertise. Beginner, intermediate, or advanced — no matter what level you are currently at, you’ll find something useful in this blog.
• MarketingProfs — if you’re more into watching and listening, check out this blog. It’s not just about text posts! The resource also offers master classes, podcasts, video tutorials, and webinars.
• HubSpot — worth your time due to an ever-growing collection of over 300 case studies by industry, company size, and location.
• Email on Acid — this blog focuses on the correct usage of scripts in emails or, as they call it, rules to code by.
• Email Marketing Rules — researcher and author Chad S. White’s blog on email marketing. Article topics include Black Friday marketing insights, testing and marketing optimization for website performance, accessibility, and more.
• Word to the Wise — a blog of the eponymous email advisory company. In general, the articles are no-nonsense email advice and tactics focused on the changes in the industry.
• Email is good — a blog of Chris Coyier, web designer and developer. Each week the author publishes something that helps him and his readers better understand the world of email marketing.
• EmailMonday — the blog is curated by Jordie van Rijn, an email marketing consultant with 13 years of experience. Contains a lot of practical email marketing tips, and strategies & tactics explained in the tiniest detail.
• Litmus — check advanced tips on HTML and CSS to see how your email campaign can benefit.
• The Big Book of Ecommerce Marketing — a five-part guide to brand growth with email and SMS by Drip. From planning and tracking to segmentation and automation.
• Webbula — tips, opinions, news, and advice from email marketers.

What to study: books about email marketing

Add these to your library if you haven’t already!

• Email Marketing Mastery by Tom Corson-Knowles
• Magnetic Words: The #1 Email Marketing System To Build Lists From Scratch & Craft Irresistible Copywriting by Alina Swanson
• The Email Lifeline by Anik Singal
• Email Marketing Rules: Checklists, Frameworks and 150 Best Practices for Business Success by Chad S. White
• Master The Essentials Of Email Marketing Analytics by Himanshu Sharma
• The SaaS Email Marketing Playbook: Convert Leads, Increase Customer Retention and Close More Recurring Revenue With Email by Étienne Garbugli
• Holistic Email Marketing: A Practical Philosophy to Revolutionise Your Business and Delight Your Customers by Kath Pay
• Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing for Business by Susan Gunelius
• How To Write Emails That Sell: Secrets From The Most Profitable Emails Ever Written by  Matt Bacak
• Email Marketing That Doesn’t Suck: Have Fun Writing Emails Your Subscribers Will Want to Read (and That Will Actually Make You Money!) by Bobby Klinck

Where to talk email marketing: communities/groups to join

Places to chat about everything email marketing-related. 

• Email Geeks — the Slack community where email marketers, designers, and developers meet to talk work.
• Women of Email — a professional network aimed at promoting leadership among women within the email marketing niche. Here you can get answers to any email marketing-related issues (no stupid questions policy!), share your thoughts, or simply chat with like-minded people. They do a lot of job posts too. Warning: girls only! 👯‍♀️
• The Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches — a closed Facebook community that helps you become the email marketing hero of your business. Get practical tips from professionals on how to build a value-driven, psychology-based email marketing strategy.
• Email marketing discussion on Reddit — discuss various email topics and meet other professionals.
• Litmus’ community — a good choice if you have an email design or coding question, or are looking for a template or snippet.
• Blogmail forum — a new and very active forum where you can chat and ask for help with an email marketing-related question.

What to listen to: smart email marketing podcasts

Some podcast recommendations to expand the minds of email marketers like you. Audio shows that hit on all the relevant topics of the industry!

• Email’s Not Dead — expert insights on how developers and marketers can get better at sending emails. You’ll be entertained and educated all at the same time 🙃
• The Email Marketing Show — two British guys with humor discuss everything you need to know to email more and sell more.
• Do The Brave Thing™ Podcast with Kate Doster — a podcast run by Kate Doster, a course creator, and content producer. It focuses on practical email marketing tips that help people grow their businesses using email marketing.
• Email Einstein Ingenious eCommerce Email Marketing by Flowium — a more calm and business-like podcast. Each episode highlights one topic and explains it from every angle, focusing on even the smallest details.
• The Future of Email Marketing — a conversational podcast that touches on email marketing as well as broader marketing and copywriting topics. It’s a video podcast so you’ll be able to get to know the guests better.
• Inboxing — weekly email marketing talks with guests from different companies.
• Email After Hours: The Podcast for Email Senders — a podcast dedicated to helping email marketers give their audiences what they need.
• Easy Email Marketing with Yael Keon — a podcast on email marketing and automation with topical advice and strategies.

Email templates & Inspiration

Get inspired by a wide selection of beautifully designed templates.

• Really Good Emails — one of the best showcases of email design and resources on the web.
• MailCharts — get more inspiration to create more engaging, evidence-based email and SMS campaigns.
• Email Love — a new online resource curating the best email designs and quality newsletters.
• Milled — a search engine for email newsletters. More than 95k+ brands and retailers from different countries and in different languages are represented!
• Rejoiner — hundreds of examples for your eCommerce email marketing inspiration.
• Email Tuna — email design inspiration, current trends, competitive research, & special email offers.
• HTML email designs — a collection of hand-picked email examples.
• Milky Mail’s Email Stash — various brand emails that “taste good” with a commentary on why they do.
• Deal Town — an archive of recent email newsletters from popular brands.
• InboxFlows — a collection of the best email designs organized by user flows (emails to a registered user, cart abandoner, seller, etc.).

Tools & resources to perfect your email design

The list contains design tools that have an intuitive interface, that makes them super easy to use. We’ve also included free photo stocks, sources of icons, and GIF makers.

• Canva — a free-to-use online graphic design tool. You can use it to create email templates and other stuff. There’s also a collection of beautiful ready-made email templates for every occasion.
• Visual Studio Code – a simple and convenient way to edit email code.
• Pixabay — over 2.6 million+ high-quality stock images, videos, and music.
• Flickr — convenient online photo management and sharing application.
• Unsplash — beautiful, free images and photos that you can download and use for any project.
• Pexels — free stock photos, royalty-free images & videos shared by creators.
• Ezgif — an easy-to-use online animated GIF maker and image editor.
• Giphy — find the GIFs, clips, and stickers that make your emails outstanding.
• Tenor — a wide selection of GIFs and stickers for any purpose.
• Tabler Icons — free and open source with SVG icons.
• Iconoir — the simple and definitive hand-crafted SVG icons library.
• Visiwig — a selection of SVG icons with CSS code to paste directly into your email builder.
• BEE — a free, no-registration-needed email design tool. BEE is integrated with many popular email-sending services and has a large template library.
• Parcel — a code editor made especially for email development. Reports errors, shows email preview, allows for collaboration, and more.
• Figma — the ultimate modern design platform that is also convenient for email designers.
• Bounce — a guide to making on-brand emails at Treehouse. An inspiring example of a comprehensive style system.
• Emojipedia — database with emojis on various platforms and thematic collections.
• Icons8 Icons — free icons for every occasion, compiled in groups.
• 3D Bay — free 3D illustrations with no attribution needed.
• unDraw — customizable SVG/PNG illustrations.
• removebg — removes the background from images for free.

Copy

Sharpen your copy and avoid grammar and lexical errors.

• Google Docs — use this tool to create and collaborate on online documents. Perfect for fine-tuning the copy for your emails before putting it in an email marketing service editor.
• Grammarly — make sure everything you type is easy to read, effective, and mistake-free with this service.
• Email Characters — a tool that showcases where the subject line and preheader text will cut off on devices.
• Hemingway Editor — this online editor makes your writing bold and clear.
• Just Not Sorry — the Chrome extension — this extension warns you when you write emails using words that undermine your message.
• Quetext — a plagiarism checker that analyzes your text to identify plagiarism, and resolve other writing issues.
• Buzzsumo — various content insights to generate ideas, and create high-performing pieces of copywriting.
• Just Good Copy — a collection of — you guessed it — good email copies. You can search for examples or use ready-made tags like “welcome”, “nurture”, “apology”, etc.
• Good Sales Emails — various companies’ sales emails in one place. Examples of 1 to 1 sales copies and follow-up messages to customers.
• Cold email templates — a vast collection of cold email copies ready to send to your customers.
• Swipe Folder — a large collection of email swipes grouped into categories.
• Swiped.co — the largest analyzed swipe file collection of profitable marketing and copywriting examples.

Research

A wide range of resources to learn more about your audience and make your campaigns target the right people.

• Selzy’s Email marketing benchmarks — a directory of research conducted by the Selzy team. Read the latest research on AI and email automation, and more.
• Statista — find statistics, consumer survey results, and industry studies from over 22,500 sources.
• Gartner — research and insights for different industries and areas like strategic planning, AI, etc.
• Content Marketing Institute — practical, how-to guidance, insight, and advice from content marketing experts.
• Pew Research — public opinion polling, demographic research, content analysis, and other data-driven social science research.
• Data.gov — data, tools, and resources to conduct research, develop web and mobile applications, design data visualizations, and more.
• National Retail Federation (NRF) — valuable data insights about US consumer behavior and retail trends.
• Global Web Index — a platform that helps you know your audience better with smart tools that make it simple.
• SimilarWeb — all-in-one website analytics & competitive traffic intelligence platform.
• comScore press releases — a source for reliable measurement of cross-platform audiences.
• European Union Marketing Statistics — business and economic statistics in one place.
• UK National Statistics and consumer trends — UK’s largest independent producer of official statistics and its recognized national statistical institute.
• Email Marketing Benchmarks by GetResponse — the latest email marketing statistics, data, and trends.
• Litmus State of Email — see what’s new in the industry, and what innovations have been shaping email marketing recently.
• The Ultimate List of Email Marketing Stats by Hubspot — check the most important figures: the report contains B2B, B2C, mobile, and general email marketing statistics.
• Campaign Monitor reports — research on trends, consumer personas, and email marketing.
• The ultimate mobile email statistics overview — a regularly updated collection of email statistics on mobile.
• The Ultimate Marketing Automation statistics overview — latest numbers and data about marketing automation including email.

People

Email marketing persons with extensive experience in the industry to follow and take your example.

• Jeanne Jennings — Founder and Chief Strategist for Email Optimization Shop, Programming Chair of the annual Email Innovations Summit, and General Manager of Only Influencers. Follow Jeanne on LinkedIn.
• Chase Dimond — e-commerce email marketer and agency owner. Follow Chase on LinkedIn.
• Jason Rodriguez — a designer, developer, and marketer known for making amazing content and using things like email to get it out into the world. Follow Jason on Twitter.
• Dan Oshinsky — founder of Not a Newsletter — one of the best email marketing newsletters, and Inbox Collective – a website with stories, interviews, and case studies. Follow Dan on Twitter.
• Jaina Mistry — an advocate of responsive email working in all aspects of email marketing, from conceptualizing campaigns to designing & building fully responsive emails, and analyzing email performance. Follow Jaina on Twitter.
• Becs Rivett-Kemm — an indie email marketing consultant. Follow Becs on Twitter.
• Jacques Corby-Tuech — an email geek, who’s into marketing ops and CRM. Follow Jacques on Twitter.
• Kristin Bond – co-founder of the Women of Email community.
• Glenn Smith — email designer, HTML email developer & email marketer. Follow Glenn on Twitter.
• Mike Ragan — an email marketing specialist, with 10+ years of experience on both client and agency sides. Follow Mike on Twitter.
• Whitney Rudeseal Peet — a full-time freelancer and consultant. Follow Whitney on Twitter.
• Sarah Esterman — a marketer, writer, and speaker. Follow Sarah on Twitter.
• Megan Boshuyzen — a graphic designer turned email marketing specialist who loves design and development. Follow Megan on Twitter.
• Yanna-Torry Aspraki — an email deliverability specialist & the CBDO of EmailConsul. Follow Yanna on Twitter.
• Jordie van Rijn — an independent email marketing and eCRM consultant. Follow Jordie on Twitter.
• Jen Capstraw — co-founder of the Women of Email community, speaker, and email evangelist. Follow Jen on Twitter.
• April Mullen — sr. director of brand and content marketing, MBA, co-founder of Women of Email community, email geek. Follow April on Twitter.
• Guilda Hilaire — Salesforce marketing cloud thought leader, speaker, customer & community advocate. Follow Guilda on Twitter.
• Scott Hardigree — founder of Email Industries. Follow Scott on Twitter.
• Anne Tomlin — HTML email developer. Founder of Emails Y’all. Follow Anne on Twitter.
• Samar Owais — an acclaimed email conversion strategist and copywriter for SaaS and eCommerce. Follow Samar on LinkedIn.
• Val Geisler — email marketing strategist and conversions driving copywriter, the creator of The Open Rates Newsletter. Follow Val on Twitter.

Tools

A bunch of handy services to improve your campaigns in all aspects.

List cleaning

• NeverBounce — real-time email verification and email cleaning service.
• Clearout.io — email finder & email validation service.
• Email Checker — a simple tool to check whether an email address exists.
• Pabbly — a slow-speed email verification with fewer false positives and unknown addresses.

Subject line testing

• SubjectLine — a free rating tool to evaluate your subject line.
• Email Subject Line Grader — an easy and handy service to test your email subject line.
• Headline Analyzer — the tool will score your overall headline quality and rate its ability to result in driving traffic and shares.
• TestSubject — see how your subject lines appear on the most popular mobile devices.

Email previewing

• Litmus PutsMail — test your HTML emails before sending them using this service.
• Email on Acid — email pre-deployment checklist and a configurable part of your email marketing campaign.
• HTML Email Check — check the markup (HTML, XHTML, CSS) of HTML emails and newsletters before you send.
• MailNinja — preview and check your HTML email marketing campaigns and templates. 100% free tool.
• Mailtrap — use email sandbox to inspect and debug emails before sending them to your recipients.

Deliverability

• SendForensics — get out of spam folders, improve deliverability, and increase your sender reputation.
• Email Consul — a tool that takes care of your deliverability needs, improving your email marketing reach.

Sender and spam scores

• Mail-Tester — a free online service that allows you to test your emails for spam.
• SenderScore — identify the quality of your sender reputation and see how mailbox providers view your IP address.
• Postmark — a tool to instantly check the spam score of your email messages.

Accessibility tools and resources

• A Designers Accessibility Checklist — guidelines to ensure that your emails are designed to be understood by as many readers as possible.
• Accessible Email — an extensive database on email accessibility.
• Accessible-email.org — a service that checks the accessibility level of email campaigns and gives advice on how to improve it.

Other tools

• LTV calculator — estimate a customer’s lifetime value.
• CAC calculator — estimate the customer acquisition cost.
• ROI calculator — estimate your marketing ROI.
• SendView — an inbox service to analyze competitors’ sendings. Provides separate email addresses, shows ESP, spam score, and all collected competitor data on a dashboard.
• Email ROI Calculator — a free online tool that estimates your ROI based on your analytics input.
• Mailto Generator — generate mailto links in a few clicks.
• View an EML — shows the email and its code from an EML file.

Newsletters

Latest industry news, tips, and tricks, email insights — these newsletters have all that covered.

• Email marketing digest by Selzy — thorough and in-depth pieces that cover marketing-related topics inside out and sincere thought-provoking ideas. Twice a month. No spam. No ads.
• Not a newsletter by Dan Oshinsky — get advice, strategies, and tips to send better newsletters from Inbox Collective’s Dan Oshinsky
• Really Good Emails — a weekly newsletter about email marketing and design for your inspiration.
• Litmus newsletter — keep your know-how fresh on email marketing, design, and development.
• Growthnotes — weekly marketing insights.
• Chase Dimond’s newsletter — weekly email marketing tactics and guides to help the readers drive more engagement and revenue.
• Mailerlite — the latest updates on the Mailerlite blog with marketing tips and insights.
• Content Marketing Institute — the latest email updates from the Content Marketing Institute on all aspects of content marketing.
• Convince and Convert newsletter — a bi-weekly dose of the email marketing trends and insights you need to know
• MarketingProfs — practical marketing insights, lessons, and know-hows in a single newsletter.
• HubSpot blog — get marketing, sales, and customer service tips right in your inbox.
• Contently — everything you need about content strategy, storytelling, and digital world transformations.
• Total Anarchy — Ann Handley’s bi-weekly newsletter on writing and marketing ideas.

Courses

Enhance your email marketing skills and boost your knowledge with this selection of free courses and training.

• Free Email Deliverability Course by Selzy — learn effective tips on how to make your newsletters land in the inbox and not spam.
• Getting Started with Email Marketing | Learn with Mailchimp — a great course for beginners covering the most important aspects of email marketing.
• Email and Newsletter Marketing Foundations — in this course you can learn how to craft an email marketing campaign that works.
• Email Marketing: Drip Campaigns — learn how to run successful drip campaigns, which are automated email campaigns that help you meet the needs of your prospective customers.
• Email Marketing Course: Get Certified in Email Marketing — master the fundamentals of email marketing and start your career with HubSpot certification.
• Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing series by Mailerlite — this guide ​​clears up all your questions and reveals step-by-step proven techniques to create an effective email marketing campaign.
• Think Outside the Inbox: Email Marketing — explore how to execute a successful email marketing campaign with Google Career, and get certified at the end of the course.
• Wishpond’s Email Marketing Masterclass for Beginners — a simple and comprehensive masterclass for those who have just started their email marketing journey.

To sum it up

The list is regularly updated. We have already published the selection of email marketing books every professional needs to read in and asked experts for tips on how to become an email marketer. 

Hope this guide helps you in crafting a working email marketing campaign.

This article was originally published in 2022 and was updated in January 2024 to make it more relevant and comprehensive.