17 Best Email Tools for Small Businesses in 2022

Email tools are software and integrations that maximize deliverability, email campaign performance, team collaboration, and productivity. The best email tools deliver time-saving workflow automations, increased lead generation and conversions, and meaningful insights about the effectiveness of campaigns. Here are 17 must-have tools for small businesses, including a dozen you can use absolutely free.

Best Email Tools at a Glance

*Billed annually

Best Tools for Automating Sales & Marketing Email Campaigns

1. Mailchimp: Best Email Marketing Automation Tool

Mailchimp tops our list of the best email marketing software for small businesses. It allows you to easily create and send email newsletters and promotional and advertising materials to leads and prospects. There is a free forever version you can start with for up to 2,000 contacts to test out the platform, create lead generation web forms for your website, publish landing pages for marketing and sales campaigns, and send email updates to customers and prospects.

With paid plans, you can schedule email campaigns in advance and set up automated email workflows for when someone visits your website, downloads something, or clicks on a link in an email newsletter. You can also create drip campaigns to nurture leads and customer relationships in your sales pipeline over time. This can be invaluable in longer customer buying cycles as well as with upselling, cross-selling, and loyalty marketing efforts.

Mailchimp integrates seamlessly with most all-in-one website builders as well as WordPress websites, making it easy to generate and sync leads to Mailchimp for future marketing and sales email campaigns. It also integrates with Canva, the online graphic design platform. Simply connect your Mailchimp and Canva accounts, and graphics you design on Canva can be easily added to your marketing and sales email campaigns.

Mailchimp Pricing & Key Tier Features

*Additional contacts over this limit will increase your monthly cost

Visit Mailchimp

2. SendX: Most Beginner-friendly & Affordable Email Automation Tools

SendX is one of the easiest email tools you can use for marketing and sales campaigns. From a clean, modern interface to an intuitive email editor (and landing page editor) and premade email templates, beginners with no experience will have no trouble using SendX.

No features are locked behind higher tiers, which is also great if you’re on a budget. Your monthly cost to use SendX depends strictly on the size of your contact list, and prices don’t jump nearly as steeply as they do with other providers for larger contact lists.

It’s very easy to create multilevel marketing and sales-triggered automations to streamline workflows, nurture leads at every stage of your sales funnel, and increase conversions. For more details, see why SendX made our list of the best email marketing services and what makes it so startup- and small business-friendly.

SendX Pricing Tiers & Key Features

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3. Drip: Most Sophisticated Email Tools for Ecommerce Marketing

Drip stands out for offering multichannel marketing campaigns through email, SMS text messaging, social media, and even onsite pop-ups. It has a default playbook for you to follow if you’re new to ecommerce marketing and sales, making it much easier for beginners to launch an ecommerce sales email or text marketing campaign.

Even if you’ve never built an email automation before, Drip is easy to use. There are templates for various workflows, such as a welcome series of emails, reminders for cart abandonment, and relationship nurturing and loyalty automations for special occasions like birthdays and anniversaries.

Drip Pricing Tiers & Key Features

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4. HubSpot: Best Free Email Tools in an All-in-one Sales & Marketing Solution

HubSpot software is not particularly inexpensive; however, it offers free use of marketing and sales email tools and its robust customer relationship manager (CRM). Starting free can be a good way to generate revenue needed to offset paid plans when you’re ready to upgrade, with the first tier coming in at $45 per month, inclusive of both HubSpot’s marketing and sales hubs and two user seats.

There are some pretty impressive lead generation tools included when you opt to use HubSpot’s free email tools for sales and marketing campaigns. Build landing pages to generate leads, automatically assign leads generated to specific sales agents for follow-up, send a welcome email, and launch lead nurturing drip email campaigns to move prospects through the sales funnel.

Connect your Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google ad accounts to see results and ad interactions, tie ad spend to sales, and re-engage contacts. Use HubSpot’s email tools to create messages that look like mass emails or plain text personal messages to send company updates, announce new products and services, extend special offers, and re-ignite cold leads. The email tools are very easy to use, even for beginners.

HubSpot’s Professional and Enterprise plans provide tools needed by data-driven sales and marketing teams. It allows you to read the analytics and apply changes to pick a more calculated approach to target customers. Plus, you can use the HubSpot email app to work on the go, from anywhere.

HubSpot Pricing & Key Features

*Cost of plan increases as your contact list grows

Visit HubSpot

Best Email Management Tools

5. DragApp: Best Gmail Tools for Collaborative Teams

You can manage nearly any type of project or process in your small business right from Gmail with DragApp. DragApp is one of the best email tools for collaboration and project management via Gmail. Teams that use Google Workspace and use Gmail to correspond with one another on status updates or with prospects, customers, or vendors can all benefit from incorporating DragApp into the mix. This includes teams like sales, marketing, customer service, account management, and order fulfillment.

For example, startups and budget-conscious small businesses in need of super-low-cost help desk software can turn Gmail into a help desk platform using DragApp’s boards and cards. Kanban-style views make it easy for customer service agents to see assignments, move cards to the next stage, or tag colleagues when an issue needs to be escalated. Find out more about using DragApp for customer care and help desk support in our expert DragApp review.

Sales teams can use DragApp to manage pipeline activities and multistage customer journeys, and even set up autoresponders and automatically move cards based on conditions. When a prospect converts to a client, cards make it easy to bring in an account manager or onboarding agent. Cards can also be dragged to new boards, such as moving a prospect from the sales pipeline board to an onboarding and account management board.

Marketing teams can use DragApp boards and cards to create and manage the status of requests and projects, such as a website refresh, that occurs in multiple phases over time. It can also be used to manage website content projects for businesses that have multiple authors creating and publishing blog articles as part of a search engine optimization (SEO) content marketing strategy.

DragApp Pricing & Key Tier Features

*Billed annually, or pay a higher fee month to month

Visit DragApp

6. Boomerang for Gmail: Best Tool for Sales Email Scheduling

Unlike other email tools, Boomerang for Gmail is extremely easy to use since it can be added to your Gmail quickly. The main purpose of Boomerang for Gmail is more than just for sales and marketing—it is perfect for small business owners who need to schedule emails, monitor from their phones, and help to construct new emails.

In addition, Boomerang for Gmail now has scheduling tools that make it easy to set up meetings in and outside of your company. Create an email and your prospect can schedule a sales presentation or demo at the time most convenient for them.

Boomerang’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered writing assistant has your back when it comes to composing winning sales emails. It will let you know if your message is too long, lacks questions to spark engagement, or contains complex terminology a recipient might not understand. It scores these, along with sentiment, to determine when your email has the right stuff to produce a conversion (e.g., scheduling a demo, signing up for a free trial, or buying something).

Boomerang for Gmail Pricing & Key Tier Features

*Billed annually

Try Boomerang for Gmail

7. Streak: Best Gmail Email Management Tool for Sales Agents

Streak is a Chrome web browser extension that can be linked to your Gmail in order to keep track of sales, projects, hiring, or in custom ways that fit your needs. It is an efficient way to organize your inbox and keep the most important messages at hand for easy follow-up. Streak also has a scheduling tool that allows you to plan out your day or week in one go and let the extension do the work for you.

This is a great email tool for sales agents. Not only can they keep track of important messages for follow-up, they can even view prospect data like notes and company information right from their inbox, and create custom pipelines to track any type of project or process. Collaborative sales teams can see which activities were performed in shared pipelines, who performed them to eliminate duplication of work, and make sure prospects are being nurtured.

Using Streak, Sales agents can instantly see whether a prospect opened their email or see a list of all tracked emails. Agents can even send personalized emails to multiple prospects simultaneously and monitor them in the mobile app.

Streak Pricing & Key Tier Features

*Billed annually
**Application programming interfaces

Visit Streak

Best Email Tools for Contact List Building

8. Hunter: Best Email Finder to Discover Domain-related Email Addresses

Hunter is one of the best email finders for discovering email addresses related to website domains. Since a list of domain names can be uploaded in bulk, it’s an efficient prospecting tool for sales teams that want to generate a list of email addresses for cold emailing or market research.

Use Hunter to find the business email addresses behind domains in order to connect with potential customers and use premade cold email templates to successfully engage them. Starting from free, Hunter can help you grow your email list of potential clients and customers.

Hunter Pricing & Key Tier Features

*Billed annually; pay month-to-month at higher rate

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9. GetProspect: Best Email Address Finder for LinkedIn

GetProspect is the perfect email tool for a business-to-business (B2B) sales team that wants to get leads straight from LinkedIn. Starting without enough contacts is a problem most businesses go through during the early stages. GetProspect helps your business grow your contact list by collecting valid emails from LinkedIn in bulk.

You can further enhance your contact list-building efforts with GetProspect’s Chrome extension. Simply add the extension to your browser, save profiles from LinkedIn search, and extract data including email addresses without triggering LinkedIn’s profile view limits.

The quality of email addresses is also ensured through a 12-step email verification process, ensuring 97% deliverability. Upload your emailing list to GetProspect to get results in minutes regarding the quality of your contact data. This is a big deal as sending emails to junk addresses is a waste of time and can even land your email campaigns in junk mail instead of inboxes.

GetProspect Email Finder Pricing

*Billed annually; save by paying annually at a 30% discount from regular pricing or pay more month to month

In addition to pricing for GetProspect’s email finder services, you can also verify your emails.

The cost to verify 10,000 emails is $40, to verify 50,000 emails is $125, and verifying a database of 100,000 contacts will cost $200.

Visit GetProspect

10. DeBounce: Best for Accurate Email Lead Generation

DeBounce is an email tool for bulk email address verification. Using verified email addresses allows you to eliminate all of the useless leads and focus on the ones that are legitimate. It helps you effectively launch sales email prospecting campaigns by providing the right list of validated email addresses.

Use DeBounce on a one-time or occasional basis, or subscribe to Email List Monitoring to continually test and clean up your contact list database. This reduces the chance that your cold emailing campaign will include obsolete email addresses, resulting in high bounce rates, lower deliverability, and less cost-effective email campaigns.

Add the DeBounce JavaScript widget to your web forms to validate emails in real time and weed out fake email addresses. Use data enrichment tools to gather more information from 10 different sources to discover more about the individual who belongs to each email address on your list, such as their name and even photos.

DeBounce integrations with more than 100 third-party apps, including leading email marketing platforms like Mailchimp and Drip. Likewise, it integrates with WordPress form plugins like Gravity Forms, Ninja Forms, and others, and you can create “Zaps” to connect it to other business software you use through Zapier.

DeBounce Pricing for Email Verification

DeBounce’s pricing is also very straightforward, allowing businesses to only pay for what they use. Should you only need to verify 5,000 contacts, you’ll pay just $10.

Visit DeBounce

Best Email Tools for Productivity & Collaboration

11. Asana: Best Way to Create Tasks From Microsoft Outlook Emails

Asana is such a versatile software product, we even named it as a top alternative to traditional CRM software. In fact, its shortcoming as a customer relationship management (CRM) tool lies in the fact that it doesn’t have native email or phone capabilities. However, when integrated with Microsoft Office 365 in Outlook, it becomes a project management powerhouse.

Create new tasks right from Outlook, add due dates for follow-up, and assign them to teammates. View tasks in list and board views, trigger actions for tasks created in Outlook, and add new emails to existing tasks to update your team.

For example, an architectural or design firm working with a client could add client feedback emails or requests for changes sent via email to the task. Design firms working with clients can even invite clients to collaborate on projects with the Premium plan. It could be a great option for a custom home builder looking to align trades and vendors in managing the building timeline and ensuring the homebuyer’s input is conveyed to all parties involved.

Marketing and sales teams relying heavily on email for cold introductions and lead nurturing can also benefit from implementing Asana alongside Microsoft Outlook. Likewise, it’s a great tool to use when implementing long-timeline changes, such as a new software system or company-wide hardware update.

There’s even a forever-free version that includes generous allocations, from unlimited tasks and projects to the ability to collaborate with up to 15 team members. You can even integrate time tracking with the free version to keep track of time spent on projects and see everything in either list or board views for easy project management.

Asana Pricing & Key Tier Features

*Billed annually, or pay month to month at a higher rate

Visit Asana

12. Calendly: Best Email Tools for Setting Up Meetings & Events

Calendly is a great tool for sales email campaigns. It allows easy scheduling of meetings without having to go back and forth with emails. It’s ideal for sales teams that want to make it easy for prospects to schedule meetings for sales presentation and demos, including when multiple team members are involved, as calendars can be meshed and synced.

Once an appointment is made, it’s synced to the calendars of all attendees. You can set up reminders to decrease no-shows, and if a meeting needs to be canceled or rescheduled, that’s easy with Calendly too.

Instead of having to manage calendars and appointment scheduling manually, you’ll be able to set schedules in one interface. Calendly helps you arrange meetings with clients, staff, partners, and prospects, and it’s all integrated with your business email.

Calendly Pricing & Key Tier Features

*Billed annually, or pay more for monthly billing

Visit Calendly

13. DocHub: Best Tools for Electronic Document Signing via Email

From real estate transactions to client agreements and sales of all kinds, being able to sign documents digitally is the standard in today’s business world. Digital document signing, sometimes referred to as eSignature or eSign, is exactly what DocHub allows you to do.

Instead of faxing back and forth with clients (or worse, having to mail documents or set up an in-person signing), you and your clients can sign contracts, agreements, orders, and other digital documents and send them through a safe and secure extension with DocHub. While email tools like Mailchimp focus on reaching prospects, DocHub helps seal the deal without having to meet in person.

If your document requires multiple signatures, DocHub has a workflow for that. Likewise, when sending the same document to many different individuals, like an acknowledgement of receipt for an updated employee handbook or terms of service, DocHub has a bulk signature process. You can also create templates for documents that you send out frequently to save time, and when returned, they will be organized under your templates so you can find them easily.

Nor do all documents have to be sent by email. You can also publish your templates publicly and share them through a URL or via Facebook or Twitter. When someone completes the form, a copy is automatically send to you.

DocHub Pricing & Key Plan Features

*Billed annually, or pay monthly at a higher rate

Visit DocHub

14. Grammarly: Best Way to Proofread Emails Before Sending

With a Microsoft Outlook extension and free Chrome extension for browser-based email platforms like Gmail, Grammarly is the best email tool for eliminating typos before sending emails. Even if you proofread an email several times, a typo could remain, making it off-putting to the reader. We found some interesting statistics about typos and how they can affect professionals and small businesses. For example:

• In a 10-year study, professionals who didn’t end up in director-level roles made 2.5 more writing mistakes than those who did (Harvard Business Review).
• Pros who earned fewer promotions (from one to four) made 45% more mistakes than their counterparts who were promoted six to nine times during a 10-year period (HBR).
• 42.5% of web users say they are likely to be put off by spelling and grammar mistakes (CXL blog).

Grammarly helps prevent these kinds of mistakes and even has a tool that helps you improve your writing through suggestions. The free version could be all a small business or freelancer needs to ensure they don’t put embarrassing mistakes through on email or in other written content, including sales presentations, website and landing pages, and webinars.

Grammarly Pricing & Key Tier Features

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Best Email Tools for Improving Recipient Experiences

15. WiseStamp: Best Personalized Email Signature Tool

WiseStamp makes sure your emails stand out from the rest with a personalized professional email signature. Add elements like headers, footers, fonts, images, videos, and action-inspiring buttons and build different email signatures for different uses.

The email signature generator is the place to start, and you can use it completely free to design an email signature from scratch or a template. This will help you begin to see the possibilities of what WiseStamp can do for your marketing and sales emails. Design an individual email or use WiseStamp to create a unified, branded professional email signature template for use across your whole organization

WiseStamp transforms boring cold emails into impactful advertising or marketing campaigns. Instead of sending plain and spammy all-text emails, WiseStamp lets you create your own email signature design or start with one of hundreds of professionally designed email signature templates that fit your industry or style.

WiseStamp Pricing & Key Plan Features

*Billed annually

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16. MailTrack: Best for Tools for Tracking Email Opens

MailTrack is a useful tool for businesses sending important documents or messages to clients or coworkers. Knowing an email has been read is a critical feature since this would allow you to know the best times to send emails and whether your email was effective (based on responses or actions taken). It can also be the basis for follow-up email scheduling, such as scheduling a follow-up sales email 48 hours after an offer email has been read.

You can use MailTrack to track emails individually or in bulk. The free-forever version displays branding, but allows for unlimited tracking, real-time notifications and email alerts, 72-hour reminders if you didn’t receive a response, and even the ability to see whether emails sent to you are being tracked.

MailTrack Pricing & Key Tier Features

*Billed annually, or pay quarterly or monthly at a higher rate

Visit MailTrack

17. Attach.io: Best for Email Forwards & Attachments Tracking

Beyond whether your email was read, Attach.io gives you data regarding what happens after, such as whether your email was forwarded, attachments were viewed, and how your email’s content was engaged with. In turn, you can make more informed decisions about how best to reach prospects and others using a data-driven approach. Understanding the best way to reach your potential customers helps you choose the right practices and eliminate the ineffective ones.

If you’ve ever had a moment of regret after sending an email, Attach.io can help with that too. You can make changes to files or swap them out after sending a campaign. You can even update document security by adding a password or revoke access entirely to ensure sensitive documents are protected.

With Attach.io, you can also create a central library of assets, such as current contracts and marketing materials. This way, all of your agents will send the marketing and sales materials you want to represent your business. This is especially useful for companies that employ outside sales agents, such as homebuilders with outside real estate listing agents or companies that have franchise locations, like insurance agencies and financial advisers.

Attach.io Pricing & Key Tier Features

*Billed annually

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

If I have email marketing software, do I need other email tools?

Email marketing software, like Mailchimp, SendinBlue, and SendX, allows you to scale sales and marketing efforts by sending campaigns in bulk instead of one at a time. The best email tools help your bulk and individual emails stand out, provide rich insights, and improve your ability to reach and convert prospects. Check out our ultimate email marketing guide to learn everything you need to know about converting prospects into clients.

How are marketing & sales emails different?

Generally, marketing emails are conducted on software like Mailchimp or SendX, or platforms like HubSpot, in bulk. Meaning, they are sent to contact lists or segments including multiple email addresses, simultaneously, with the same content.

Sales emails, on the other hand, are typically personalized emails sent to individual prospects at various stages of the sales funnel, such as cold emails to create brand awareness and lead nurturing emails to move leads through the pipeline toward conversion. These emails are usually sent through email clients such as Microsoft Outlook or Gmail.

How much should you spend on email tools?

Many of the email tools above have free versions to try. Depending on the size of your organization or contact list, or the features you want, you may need to upgrade to a paid plan. The good news in either case is that these tools should improve your campaigns, in turn producing increased conversions and revenue to more than offset the cost of subscription.

Bottom Line

Using the right combination of email tools will help you scale, manage, and understand your audience and their needs much better. From tools you can integrate on your small business website to standalone apps and software to acquire and convert leads, these email tools can take your marketing and sales campaigns from good to great.

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