Did you know that a recent study in the UK found that 54% of marketers are using 50 platforms or more in their martech tech stack?
The study went on to unearth a fact that might come as no surprise: the majority of marketers are looking to simplify their tech stack in the next 12 months.
There are a few reasons why this is the case:
First: it’s incredibly overwhelming—and time consuming—to have to manage multiple platforms. Information is often duplicated across systems, making it important to manage each tool carefully.
Second: with every new tech tool, there’s a greater risk for siloed data that even tools like Tableau or Qlik can’t fix.
But there’s a third reason that brings additional angst to marketers with an overloaded tech stack:
“Despite investment in tooling and processes, marketers aren’t operationally equipped to build customer experiences at scale—and they’re punching in hours of manual work to make up the difference.” (Source)
Since tech tools aren’t going away, this seemed like a good time to take a look at the best martech tools for email marketers, highlighting platforms that help you automate workflows, create personalized experiences, and track performance.
These tools are designed to work together with your other marketing systems, helping you build a smarter, more efficient process.
Whether you’re aiming to boost conversions, fine-tune your analytics, or simplify your workflow, this list will help you make informed decisions to elevate your email marketing strategy.
What makes a great martech tool? Here are some of the criteria we considered when curating this list:
As you work through the list, you’ll probably note that some of the tools could technically belong in multiple categories. However, we ultimately settled on four primary categories, based on the general workflow of content creation, production, and success metrics for the typical marketing team:
Depending on who makes the decisions on your team, you might find that you’re sitting on one of two extremes: the “we use this tool because we’ve always used this tool” versus “we readily sign up for new tools, but seldom stick with them (or use them to their full potential)”.
Here are some top level questions to keep in mind when considering a new product…always keeping in mind that there should be some strong case for measurable ROI, whether that comes in the form of time saved, happier users, better data tracking, etc.
Take time to review these questions with your team, to ensure every new addition to your martech toolbox is fully warranted and able to help your team grow and scale your current operations.
With these considerations in mind, here is our curated list of the top martech tools that can help you grow and scale your operations.
First up, we have tools for content creation and distribution: the first stage in attracting new leads. From automatic content curation for email marketers to visual calendars and distribution tools, here are some tools that your content team might want to consider.
When ChatGPT took the world by storm with its inception in November 2022, Jasper.ai had already been on the market for nearly 2 years.
Unlike many of the other AI chat tools vying for market share, Jasper stands out for its easy-to-use settings that allow you to train it to align with your brand voice. Train it with your style guide, teach it company facts, and reinforce your brand identity for high-quality outputs every time you work with it.
With Jasper, you can quickly repurpose blogs to social posts, or take advantage of its image generation for high-quality content drafts that save hours for your team.
FeedOtter helps busy teams save hours of content curation and email building time with every newsletter. Simply integrate it with your top content sources (blog feed? YouTube channel? Instagram?) and FeedOtter will automatically curate your content and pre-format it so that it can be added to your newsletter with a single click…image and all. It’s a great option for teams working with a large number of emails and multiple editors.
Also, since FeedOtter can send the email directly through an integrated ESP, you don’t have to do any manual record-keeping for email sends or tracking analytics.
It’s one of the publishing industry’s best-kept secrets, used by top publishing companies like Bonnier and Ziff Media to streamline the email curation and sending process.
StoryChief simplifies content marketing by providing a single platform where you can create, collaborate, and distribute your content. (Cue the sound of a chopping block for your word processing software, social media scheduler, tasks for social image requirements, and more…StoryChief takes care of it all.)
Marketers can draft blogs, social media posts, and newsletters, then publish them across relevant channels, with support for image and copy optimization included.
Project management apps like Asana or ClickUp are great options for managing team workloads and staying on top of company goals, but they aren’t always conducive to the specific needs of content marketing teams.
That’s where CoSchedule comes in: an “all-in-one content marketing calendar” that gives a visual calendar view for all types of content distribution, from blog articles to social media posts. Organize by output or campaign type, use advanced filter options, and take advantage of Mia, the AI collaborative editor, for a more streamlined content creation and distribution pipeline.
Bannerflow is a creative ad management platform that helps marketers design, scale, and manage digital ad campaigns.
With Bannerflow, your team can quickly stunning, visual ads—with a great interface to help you resize and optimize for each platform—track performance, and optimize for better results.
It’s ideal for managing high-quality, consistent ad campaigns, eliminating the headache of having to jump in and out of Adobe files, ad management dashboards, and ad spec docs.
How do you keep users engaged with your content once you’ve caught their initial interest? Great question…here are a few tools that help you address this question.
ManyChat is a leading chatbot platform for marketing automation, and one that you’ve probably run across on social media.
With ManyChat, you can build out conversational marketing campaigns on Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and SMS. With its easy-to-use interface, marketers can automate customer interactions, nurture leads, and drive engagement without manual follow-up.
The suite of integrations (which includes Zapier and Integromat), allow you to automatically update contacts in your CRM to ensure you’re working with the latest information for segmentation and targeting.
VWO is a well-known platform for marketers looking to increase engagement on their website. While some of its more popular features include split testing capabilities and behavior analytics, it now offers web push notifications (thanks to a recent acquisition of PushCrew).
VWO Engage (the official new name of what used to be PushCrew) offers a strong entry point to the web push notification game. It’s an ideal tool for driving repeat visits, re-engaging visitors, increasing the ROI of ad campaigns through retargeting, and offering highly personalized cart abandonment flows for e-commerce businesses.
If you’re a content marketer, you can leverage VWO Engage for lead gen opportunities and stay top of mind with your website visitors for stronger, more successful campaigns.
Converting website traffic into leads and signups is no easy task…especially when your success hinges on a single form full of input fields. Conversion rate averages fluctuate widely depending on which type of form you’re looking at, ranging from 5% for a contact form to just under 3% for a checkout form.
That’s a lot of valuable traffic that slips through your fingers and simply never converts…which is why tools like HeyFlow are so incredibly valuable.
With HeyFlow, you can create engaging, highly customized form flows that are visual, intriguing, and just plain fun to click through.
Use images, conditional logic, and a bevvy of integrations to make sure you’re maximizing every interaction with your website visitors and leveraging it to create a better experience.
HeyFlow is perfect for high-performing teams who want to increase conversion rate on their forms while ensuring that every piece of information is properly transferred to your CRM of choice.
When it comes to improving the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, having the right optimization tools can make a big difference. These platforms help you fine-tune everything from website performance to content and ads, ensuring you get the best results from your campaigns.
Litmus is an email optimization tool that helps marketers create, test, and improve email campaigns before they’re sent out to your list.
Start with building your email design using the Litmus email builder, then sync it to your ESP of choice so that all team members are up to date on the latest version. When you’re ready to send, you can take advantage of Litmus’ email preview, ensuring that your email displays properly across devices.
For serious email marketers, Litmus serves an important function to ensure that every email you send is accessible and free from embarrassing errors.
Unbounce empowers marketers to create highly targeted, high-converting landing pages for ads and other campaigns. With easy drag-and-drop page design, it’s perfect for quickly launching campaigns and running A/B tests to improve conversion rates.
It’s a great tool for marketers who need flexibility and quick edits to optimize campaign flows, but don’t want to affect the SEO or more complex page design of the main website.
You might have noticed that some of the other tools on this list offer A/B testing (VWO and Unbounce, specifically). However, Crazy Egg continues to stand out as one of the best solutions for website analytics that give you a real look at how website visitors are engaging with your website.
With heatmaps, recordings, scroll maps, and A/B testing features, Crazy Egg allows marketers to see what’s working and where visitors drop off, giving you a starting point to improve user experience and boost conversions.
Marketers who want specific information on segments like visitors from ad campaigns, for example, will automatically gravitate towards this tool.
How do you know what’s working? How do you scale your processes so that you’re able to increase the quantity or quality of your output, without burning out your team or having to continually increase your employee headcount?
Here are some tools that may help.
One of the most frustrating challenges of working in marketing is the difficulty of obtaining clean, easy-to-read data for presenting reports, measuring KPIs, and strategizing ways to amplify what’s working.
Historically, data analytics required a somewhat dedicated dev ops team member to build and maintain a data dashboard suitable for content marketing. But with tools like Databox, marketers can now take analytics and dashboard creation into their own hands, with a user-friendly interface that allows you to quickly link up your data sources (no code required!), and track the metrics from scannable dropdown lists. (No more guessing about which events are available—Databaox lists them out for you.)
From ad performance to video views on Facebook and YouTube, Databox is an incredible tool that helps you monitor the metrics that are most important to you…with setup taking a matter of minutes with just a few clicks.
It’s a great tool for teams who are serious about data, and want to retain autonomy when it comes to building and maintaining the dashboards.
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve reviewed market research notes…only to find that they were written years ago and are likely obsolete. (Cue an endless cycle of market research, analysis, pitch decks, ad nauseam.)
With Bardeen, you can put your competitor monitoring, market research, and social media on autopilot, ensuring that every piece of information is always up to date and available for your team to review and rely on when making decisions.
With just a few clicks, Bardeen scrapes data from various sources and compiles it into actionable insights, saving hours of manual work.
In addition to market research, you can use Bardeen as an assistant to automate routine, repetitive tasks and create custom follow-ups for your sales and marketing funnels.
Years ago, when I first discovered Airtable, I thought it was an aesthetically appealing alternative to Google Sheets. Since I like aesthetic things, I was sold. The more I use the tool, the more I realize how valuable it is within any martech toolbox, with its ability to integrate with other apps (Slack, Instagram, AI, and so much more), for a one-stop-shop for management, data, and process workflows.
Setting up a new project is as easy as clicking a few buttons, with a flexible interface where you can track OKRs, store your digital assets, and create automations that send reminders or updates to ensure your projects run on schedule.
Airtable is a great tool for marketing teams who are looking for a project management tool that’s highly customizable for each campaign or project that you run, especially if you find that you struggle with the inflexible layouts and workflows of other task management apps.
It bears pointing out that this is not a one-size-fits-all list. Use it as a starting point to learn how other competitive marketing and publishing teams are growing and scaling their operations.
A quick Google search will likely bring up more curated lists for ideation, but if you’re looking for something comprehensive, I would recommend taking a look at the annual Martech Landscape Supergraphic, created by Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma. You can also use their interactive map, which is overwhelming yet wildly enjoyable to peruse.
