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

100+ Free Helpful Email Marketing Resources Every Marketer Will Find Useful: From Tools to Communities
20 January, 2024 • ... • 7191 views
Valerie Shu
by Valerie Shu

There are hundreds of email marketing resources on the internet. It seems that when you have a question, all you need is to just google and the proper answer won’t take long. But when you open link by link, you see that frequently many of these email websites and blogs are ill-informed and even outdated. Where to look for reliable and relevant information for email geeks? How to find proper marketing tools and other stuff?

To make your journey easier, we have hand-picked more than 100 free resources on all things email. We divided them into several categories: Blogs, Communities, Podcasts, Email templates & inspiration, Design tools, Copy, Research, People, Tools, Newsletters, and Courses. Click on the one you need to jump to the desired section quickly.

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.

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.

 

We’ve separated the wheat from the chaff and made a list of proper email marketing communities where email marketers can find help, support, and fun.

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!

 

Need to catch up with the latest trends in marketing? Here’s the selection of the top-9 email marketing podcasts that focus only on emails.

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.

People

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

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

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.

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.

20 January, 2024
Article by
Valerie Shu
With almost 10 years in the industry, I'm skilled in project and webinar management and have a deep know-how in email and content strategies. Writing is my way of making sense of the world and sharing what I’ve learned with others. When I'm not working, I love learning new languages, catching plays at local theatres, and doing yoga. I'm also really into traveling and exploring different cultures.
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