17 Best Email Tools for Small Businesses in 2022
This article is part of a larger series on Business Email.
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
Email Tools | Free Plan | Starting Cost of Monthly Paid Plans* | Best For | Visit |
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✔ | $11 | Automating marketing and sales email campaigns | ||
✕ | $7.49 | Most affordable email marketing platform as your list grows | ||
✕ | $19 | Sophisticated tools for ecommerce sales and marketing emails | ||
✔ | $45 | All-in-one sales and marketing software solution | ||
✔ | $5 | Managing projects and processes from within Gmail | ||
✔ | $4.98 | Scheduling Gmail emails to go out at specific times, such as sales follow-ups | ||
✔ | $15 | Email campaign performance insights | ||
✔ | $34 | Finding domain-linked email addresses for sales contact lists | ||
✔ | $34 | Discovering email addresses for sales prospecting on LinkedIn | ||
✕ | $10 for 10,000 verifications | Verifying email addresses to avoid waste and potential spam traps | ||
✔ | $10.99 | Task and project management from inside Microsoft Outlook | ||
✔ | $8 | Meeting and appointment booking through email links | ||
✔ | $4.99 | Gathering electronic signatures via email | ||
✔ | $12 | Ensuring your email is typo-free, professional, and well-written before hitting send | ||
✕ | $5.80 | Adding custom email signatures to increase engagement and conversions | ||
✔ | $4.99 | Tracking your emails to ensure they were opened, and when | ||
✕ | $10 | Finding out if your email was forwarded and materials attached were reviewed |
*Billed annually
Best Tools for Automating Sales & Marketing Email Campaigns
1. Mailchimp: Best Email Marketing Automation Tool
What We Like
- Affordable, starting from free
- Basic automations with the free version, advanced automations with paid plans starting from $11 per month
- Create action-based email automations, drip campaigns, and if this, then that conditional email marketing workflows
- User-friendly and easy to navigate
- Add social accounts to campaigns
- Comprehensive data
- 300+ third-party integrations available
What's Missing
- Managing Audiences (i.e., contact lists) isn’t as intuitive as it could be
- The difference between Groups and Segments is confusing
Best For
- Small businesses wanting an all-in-one sales and marketing hub with a basic customer relationship management (CRM) for contact management, email marketing, landing pages, and ad management
- Email marketing beginners
- Startups and small teams needing low-cost or free tools to automate marketing and sales emails
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.
Sample of the Mailchimp workflow (Source: Mailchimp)
Mailchimp Pricing & Key Tier Features
Free | Essentials | Standard | Premium | |
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Price per Month | $0 | $11 | $17 | $299 |
Contact Limit* | 2,000 | 500 | 500 | 10,000 |
Key Features per Tier |
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*Additional contacts over this limit will increase your monthly cost
2. SendX: Most Beginner-friendly & Affordable Email Automation Tools
What We Like
- Very affordable, even as your contact list grows
- All features included—cost only differs by list size
- Smart data optimizes send by location to improve open rates and conversions
- Covers most marketing email automation needs, including autoresponders, drip campaigns, trigger, and condition-based emails
- Landing page builder
- 14-day free trial
- Third-party integrations include Pipedrive CRM and ecommerce tools like Shopify and BigCommerce
What's Missing
- No free plan, unlike Mailchimp and HubSpot
- Only basic A/B testing (subject line and name)
Best For
- Marketing and sales email campaign beginners wanting a clean, simple interface and editors for emails and landing pages
- Startups and small businesses looking for cheap email marketing software, especially for larger list sizes
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
Price per Month up to 1,000 Contacts | $7.49 billed annually or $9.99 monthly |
1,001-2,500 contacts | $14.99 billed annually or $19.99 monthly |
2,501-5,000 contacts | $29.99 billed annually or $39.99 monthly |
5,001-10,000 contacts | $44.99 billed annually or $59.99 monthly |
Key features |
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3. Drip: Most Sophisticated Email Tools for Ecommerce Marketing
What We Like
- Send email, text, and social marketing campaigns
- Integrates with Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce
- Automatic segmentation targeting
- Prebuilt playbooks
- Zero coding skills required
- Unlike Mailchimp, no features are locked behind higher tiers; you only pay more as your contact list grows, just like SendX
What's Missing
- Limited to just 200 SMS text campaigns sends for starting plan (additional sends at a cost)
- Starts at $19 for just 500 contacts; if you have more contacts, it can get expensive quickly
- Costs $1,599 for 140,000 contacts, which can be too expensive for small businesses
Best For
- Small and mid-size ecommerce businesses wanting to increase sales
- Any small business that wants to do multichannel promotion
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
Email | Email + SMS Text | |
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Price per Month for 500 Contacts | $19 | $22 |
501-1,000 Contacts | $29 | $32 |
1,001-2,500 Contacts | $39 | $42 |
2,501-5,000 Contacts | $89 | $92 |
Unlimited Email Sends | ✔ | ✔ |
200 SMS Sends | ✔ | ✔ |
Email Support | ✔ | ✔ |
Key Features |
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4. HubSpot: Best Free Email Tools in an All-in-one Sales & Marketing Solution
What We Like
- Free marketing tools for sales emails
- Free website chatbot to spark site visitor engagement
- Understandable data breakdown
- Easy for teams to share emails and collaborate with each other
- Free and robust customer relationship management (CRM) system built in for contact management
What's Missing
- Plan prices jump steeply, putting them out of reach of many small businesses after the first paid tier
- Not too beginner-friendly
- Forms lack conditional fields
Best For
- Sales-forward startups and small businesses needing free sales and marketing tools
- Companies with large-scale email campaigns for sales and marketing
- Teams that rely heavily on data to improve marketing and sales campaigns
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 interface on mobile and web browsers (Source: HubSpot)
HubSpot Pricing & Key Features
Free | Starter | Professional | Enterprise | |
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Price per Month | Free | $45 | $800 | $3200 |
Contact List Limit* | N/A | 1,000 | 2,000 | 10,000 |
Email Sends/Month | 2,000 | 5x contact tier send limit | 10x contact tier send limit | 20x contact tier send limit |
No HubSpot Branding | N/A | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Shared Inboxes | 1 | 1 | Up to 100 | Up to 100 |
Key Features Added per Tier |
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*Cost of plan increases as your contact list grows
Best Email Management Tools
5. DragApp: Best Gmail Tools for Collaborative Teams
What We Like
- Free-forever plan for up to 3 users and affordable starter plan
- Visual, Kanban boards makes it easy to organize projects and workflows
- Shared inbox for teams working collaboratively
- Low-cost option for customer service helpdesk or sales CRM for startups and small teams
- Mobile apps let your team work from anywhere
- Chat feature for quick conversations
- Chat and email help is readily available, and you can book a video call for custom support
What's Missing
- Reports and analytics are locked behind higher-plan tiers
- Some learning curve required to use the product
- Doesn’t integrate with Outlook or Teams; only for Gmail
Best For
- Team-oriented businesses of any size using Google Workspace and Gmail
- Startup and small customer service teams looking for a Gmail-based system to organize tickets, reduce collisions, and escalate issues
- Sales teams that use cold emailing and sales emails for prospecting and lead nurturing
- Marketing departments wanting to track status of materials requests
- Businesses that coordinate among departments, such as sales onboarding that hands off a new client to an account executive or manager, accounting, order fulfillment, and/or customer service
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
Free | Starter | Plus | Pro | |
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Price per User, per Month* | $0 | $5 | $10 | $15 |
User Limit | 3 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Number of Workspaces | 1 | 1 | 10 | Unlimited |
Assign Tasks, Mention, Team Chat, and Shared Drafts | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Collision Detection | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Email Tracking | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Task Cards, Email Notes, Email Templates, and Email Checklists | ✕ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Board Views, 10 Automations, 10 Email Sequences, Merge Cards, Upload Files, Team Reports | ✕ | ✕ | ✔ | ✔ |
Unlimited Workspaces, Automations, and Email Sequences, Priority and Call-back Support | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✔ |
*Billed annually, or pay a higher fee month to month
6. Boomerang for Gmail: Best Tool for Sales Email Scheduling
What We Like
- Schedule sales emails to go out at the best time
- Pause feature to stop getting emails at unwanted times
- New one-click calendar scheduling
- Easy integration with Gmail and Google Workspace
- In-box organizer takes messages out of view until they need attention or follow-up
- Email writing assistant
- Free version to try, and affordable paid plans from $4.98 per month
What's Missing
- Constant requests to reconnect the calendar
- Free plan isn’t that useful due to its limit to just 10 emails
- Extensions are hard to see on small devices
Best For
- Agents who want to schedule sales follow-up emails in advance
- Sending reminder emails, such as when monthly reports are due
- Time-sensitive company announcements
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).
Image of email writing assistant (Source: Boomerang for Gmail)
Boomerang for Gmail Pricing & Key Tier Features
Basic | Personal | Pro | Premium | |
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Price per Month* | Free | $4.98/mo. | $14.98/mo. | $49.98/mo. |
Message Credits | 10 per month | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
AI Writing Assistant | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Mobile App | N/A | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Key Features Added per Tier |
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*Billed annually
7. Streak: Best Gmail Email Management Tool for Sales Agents
What We Like
- Forever-free version
- Won’t clog up your email view with multiple folders
- Easy-to-learn CRM
- Affordable with paid plans starting at $15 per month
- Tracks viewed emails
What's Missing
- Moving boxes to different categories needs to be manually done
- No keyword inside the box search
- Hard to reach customer service
Best For
- Sales agents who want to keep the most important emails top-of-list in their inboxes
- Multidepartment business pros wanting to organize inbox messages by categories, such as sales, human resources, administrative, accounting, and marketing
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.
Image of Streak’s custom view pipeline (Source: Streak)
Streak Pricing & Key Tier Features
Free | Solo | Pro | Enterprise | |
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Price per Month* | Free | $15 | $49 | $129 |
Mail Merges per Day | 50 | 800+ | 1,500 | 1,500 |
Items Moving Through Your Pipeline | 500 | 5,000 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Google Workspace Integrations | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Email Tracking & Snippets | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Core CRM & Custom Pipelines | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Advanced CRM & Shared Pipelines | ✕
| ✕ | ✔ | ✔ |
Integrations & API** | ✕ | ✕ | ✔ | ✔ |
Data Validation | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✔ |
*Billed annually
**Application programming interfaces
Best Email Tools for Contact List Building
8. Hunter: Best Email Finder to Discover Domain-related Email Addresses
What We Like
- Ability to obtain email addresses for sales prospecting
- 25 free searches per month
- Search individual domains or upload a list to search in bulk
- Free Chrome extension is very easy to set up
- Gives suggested contacts as well
- Can find emails within PDF files
- Excellent customer support
- Cold email templates for sales, recruiting, link-building, guest posting, and more
What's Missing
- Old emails will be included
- Hard to verify all emails
- Hard to find emails with different formats
Best For
- Finding email addresses from websites
- Verifying email addresses of professionals
- Businesses wanting to build a prospecting database
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 search bar to find email addresses (Source, Hunter.io)
Hunter Pricing & Key Tier Features
Free | Starter | Growth | Pro | Business | |
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Price per Month* | $0 | $34 | $69 | $139 | $279 |
Searches per Month | 25 | 500 | 2,500 | 10,000 | 30,000 |
Verifications per Month | 50 | 1,000 | 5,000 | 20,000 | 60,000 |
Access All Emails in Domain | ✕ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Domain Search Full Results | ✕ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Domain Search Downloads | ✕ | ✕ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Recipients per Email Send | 500 | 2,500 | 5,000 | 7,500 | 10,000 |
Images in Emails | ✕ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Attachments | ✕ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Link Tracking | ✕ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
*Billed annually; pay month-to-month at higher rate
9. GetProspect: Best Email Address Finder for LinkedIn
What We Like
- Easy to use
- 98% guarantee of verified emails
- Automatic contact download from LinkedIn
- Affordable for small businesses
- Good for bulk prospecting
What's Missing
- Customer service can take hours to reach
- More for gathering information vs sending information
- Not that useful if you don’t need a lot of contacts
Best For
- Companies looking to expand their prospecting database
- Business-to-business sales teams wanting to target specific positions at certain types of companies
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.
How to get emails from companies (Source: GetProspect)
GetProspect Email Finder Pricing
Free | Starter | Basic | Plus | Pro | |
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Price per Month* | Free | $34 | $69 | $139 | $279 |
Email Discoveries per Month | 100 | 1,000 | 5,000 | 20,000 | 50,000 |
*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.
10. DeBounce: Best for Accurate Email Lead Generation
What We Like
- Validates your email lists so high bounce rates, fake email addresses, and spam trap addresses don’t derail your marketing and sales efforts
- Fast results
- Drop your bounce rate to 1-2% by removing unverified addresses
- Great for bulk verifying
What's Missing
- No option for Excel sheet results
- The uploaded list might lose segments, like names, numbers, or addresses
- Yahoo AOL emails might get past the validator
Best For
- Sales and marketing teams that want to avoid the negative consequences of spam traps emails
- Small teams that want to ensure high deliverability for the best results
- Businesses with a smaller email target—most price-efficient for 50,000 emails and below
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.
How to validate emails with DeBounce (Source: DeBounce)
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.
Cost | $10 | $15 | $30 | $50 | $90 | $140 | $300 |
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Verifications | 5,000 | 10,000 | 25,000 | 50,000 | 100,000 | 200,000 | 500,000 |
Best Email Tools for Productivity & Collaboration
11. Asana: Best Way to Create Tasks From Microsoft Outlook Emails
What We Like
- Easy to use
- Create and assign tasks from Outlook
- Trigger actions on tasks created in Outlook
- Add emails to existing tasks to make sure everyone on the team is in the know, such as changes to client specifications for a project, feedback, or new functionality requests
What's Missing
- Business plan gets expensive for larger teams
- Inability to see all the subtasks included without breaking them into separate tasks
- Inability to copy templates, workflows, and forms across into other projects; creates repetitive work
Best For
- Project-based teams and businesses, such as web developers, architects, interior designers, and so on
- Mid- to large-size marketing and sales teams that need to unify process and project management with email communication
- Businesses looking for process management software, such as for new software or systems implementation
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
Basic | Premium | Business | |
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Price per User, per Month* | $0 | $10.99 | $24.99 |
Number of Teammates to Collaborate With | 15 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Unlimited Tasks, Projects, Messages & Activity Log | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Unlimited File Storage | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
List & Board Views | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Mobile Apps | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Time Tracking Integrations | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Workflow Builder, Unlimited Dashboards, Reporting for Unlimited Projects, Advanced Search, Task Templates, Forms, Rules & Milestones | ✕ | ✔ | ✔ |
Portfolios, Goals, Workload, Custom Rules Builder, Forms Branching & Customization, Approvals, Proofing, Lock Custom Fields, Advanced Integrations (Salesforce, Adobe, Tableau, Power BI) | ✕ | ✕ | ✔ |
*Billed annually, or pay month to month at a higher rate
12. Calendly: Best Email Tools for Setting Up Meetings & Events
What We Like
- Extremely user-friendly
- Mesh multiple calendars together
- Automates scheduling, calls, sending emails, and canceling appointments
- Sends reminders and makes canceling easier
What's Missing
- Collaborations can only be done with users inside the account
- One account can’t be used for multiple companies
- Not mobile-friendly
Best For
- Sales teams that want to allow prospects to book time for sales presentations or demonstrations as part of a sales email campaign
- Cold email campaigns and lead nurturing sales email campaigns
- Scheduling meetings within a team or with clients, prospects, or partners
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 flow for scheduling events (Source: Calendly)
Calendly Pricing & Key Tier Features
Basic | Essentials | Professional | Teams | |
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Price per Seat, per Month* | Free | $8 | $12 | $16 |
Calendars per Person | 1 | 2 | 6 | 6 |
Types of Events | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Connect to Google, Office 365, Outlook & iCloud calendars | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Key Features |
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*Billed annually, or pay more for monthly billing
13. DocHub: Best Tools for Electronic Document Signing via Email
What We Like
- Free plan, and paid option is very affordable, at under $60 per year when billed annually
- Option to fax complete forms
- Ability to create and edit PDFs without having to buy expensive software
- Multisigner and bulk document signing workflows
- Everything is self-explanatory
- Integrates with Gmail and Workspace for faster signing
What's Missing
- Errors pop up occasionally, necessitating users to log out and then log in again to fix
- No customer service
- First-time users might find alignment a bit hard to nail
Best For
- Businesses that deal with contracts with clients or vendors
- Documents that require multiple signers or documents that will be sent out in bulk for signatures from multiple individuals
- Sales teams looking to save time, money, and effort to get physical signatures on contracts, orders, and agreements
- Real estate agents, title companies, and lenders that need to get signatures on documents when meeting in person is not preferred or an option
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
Free | Pro | |
---|---|---|
Price per User, per Month | Free | $4.99* |
Maximum Documents | 2,000 | Unlimited |
Sign Requests per Month | 3 | Unlimited |
Number of Simultaneous Signers | 3 | 50 |
Number of Email Recipients | 3 | 30 |
Saved Signatures | 7 | Unlimited |
Free Fax Pages per Month | 0 | 35 |
Number of Emails per Day | 3 | 250 |
*Billed annually, or pay monthly at a higher rate
14. Grammarly: Best Way to Proofread Emails Before Sending
What We Like
- Free version may be enough for general content proofing
- Checks for spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistakes in real time
- Gives recommendations for better sentence structure and phrasing
- Spots redundancies and extra spaces between words
- Available for desktop and mobile
- Microsoft Outlook extension to ensure important emails are well-written and error-free
What's Missing
- Can be too sensitive for non-formal writing
- Outlook window gets in the way while writing
- AI suggestions aren’t always right, especially when writing on specialized topics
Best For
- Startups and small businesses that don’t have an in-house copyeditor to proof sales and marketing materials
- Businesses using content marketing to generate web traffic and leads
- Businesses and professionals needing high credibility and professionalism (e.g., lawyers, politicians, doctors, dentists, journalists, and C-suite executives)
- Proofing and editing text-dense materials, such as contracts, technical manuals, and handbooks
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
Free | Premium | Business | |
---|---|---|---|
Price per Month | $0 | $12 | $12.50 per user |
Licenses | 1 | 1 | 3+ |
Desktop & Browser Extensions & Mobile Devices | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Grammar, Spelling & Punctuation | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Conciseness & Tone Detection | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Plagiarism Detector | ✕ | ✔ | ✔ |
Clarity-focused Sentence Rewrites, Formatting & Sentence Variety | ✕ | ✔ | ✔ |
Compelling Vocabulary, Confident Writing, Politeness & Formality Level | ✕ | ✔ | ✔ |
Style Guide, Snippets, Analytics, Priority Support, Roles & Permissions | ✕ | ✕ | ✔ |
Best Email Tools for Improving Recipient Experiences
15. WiseStamp: Best Personalized Email Signature Tool
What We Like
- Free email signature generator to try
- Works with Google Workspace and Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Mac Mail, iPhone, and Yahoo! Mail
- Add action-converting links, e.g., appointment booking, visit a website, reply, and so on
- Embed videos or add animations and GIFs for visual interest
- Create multiple signatures for different uses (e.g., prospect vs customer emails)
- Lots of templates for inspiration and fast email signature creation
- Instructions for how to add signatures to Gmail, Outlook, and more
What's Missing
- No free version, and no free trial for individuals (only teams)
- Lack of customer support
- Less room for personal creative input since almost everything has to be picked
Best For
- Sales agents and executives who want to customize their emails
- Small business owners looking to stand out in marketing and sales emails
- Real estate agents who want to impress prospective clients
- Any business that wants to create an organization-wide consistent, unified email signature
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
Pro | Teams | |
---|---|---|
Price per Month* | $5.80 | $2 per user |
Pro Templates & Apps | ✔ | ✔ |
Signature Banner Gallery | ✔ | ✔ |
Customize Style & Design | ✔ | ✔ |
Create Multiple Signatures | ✔ | ✔ |
Add Animations & GIFs | ✔ | ✔ |
G Workspace & Office 365 Support | ✕ | ✔ |
Central Management | ✕ | ✔ |
Departments & Groups | ✕ | ✔ |
Autosync New Employees | ✕ | ✔ |
*Billed annually
16. MailTrack: Best for Tools for Tracking Email Opens
What We Like
- Email tracking tool to see if, when, and how many times your emails are opened
- Real-time notifications for time-sensitive emails
- Allows you to handle bulk emails
- Gives notifications when someone forwards your email
- Snooze functions
- Gives a summary of all emails sent
- Free plan with unlimited tracking, real-time notifications, alerts, and daily reports
- Paid plans are very affordable
What's Missing
- Only 2 options for the snooze function: 24 or 48 hours
- Sometimes problematic on mobile
- Default alerts can be annoying
Best For
- Marketing and sales teams that want to understand how and when emails are being opened
- Companies that want to use data to improve email sales and marketing campaigns
- Legal teams or pros who want to ensure or track when emails are opened
- Professionals and companies that need read receipts for emails, such as sending legal updates or information
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-Gmail integration showing when an email was opened (Source: MailTrack)
MailTrack Pricing & Key Tier Features
Free | Pro | Advanced | |
---|---|---|---|
Price per User, per Month* | $0 | $4.99 | $9.99 |
Unlimited Tracking | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Real-time Notifications, Email Alerts & Daily Reports | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Tracking Pixel Detector | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Works With iPhone & Android | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
72-hour No-reply Alerts | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Ad-free | ✕ | ✔ | ✔ |
Email Tracking & Activity Dashboard | First open | Full metrics | Full metrics |
Link Tracking | ✕ | ✔ | ✔ |
PDF Tracking Certificate | ✕ | ✕ | ✔ |
Export Data to CSV | ✕ | ✕ | ✔ |
Campaigns & Reports | ✕ | ✕ | ✔ |
*Billed annually, or pay quarterly or monthly at a higher rate
17. Attach.io: Best for Email Forwards & Attachments Tracking
What We Like
- Find out what happens to your email and its content after you hit send
- Get detailed data to improve sales and marketing campaigns
- Create an asset library of sales and marketing materials for inside and outside sales agents
- Password protect file attachments, even after an email is sent
- Swap wrong sent files
What's Missing
- No free version or trial period
- Hard to use on smaller screens
- Outlook for Mac is hard to read
- Sometimes experiences minor bugs
Best For
- Sales agents looking for insights as to buying signals or whether a lead is going cold
- Data-driven marketing teams looking to optimize campaign performance
- Businesses looking for a central library for sales and marketing materials for outside sales agents
- Companies that send important or sensitive information and attachments
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 interface showing email data (Source: Attach.io)
Attach.io Pricing & Key Tier Features
Salesforce Sync | Pro | Expert | |
---|---|---|---|
Price per User, per Month* | $10 | $21 | $29 |
Emails, Calendar & Events Data | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Inbox, Sidebar, Scheduling & Book Meetings | ✕ | ✔ | ✔ |
Email Templates, CC & List Send, Email & Link Tracking, Web Visitor Tracking, Scheduling API | ✕ | ✕ | ✔ |
*Billed annually
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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- If you need to see if your marketing and sales emails are driving traffic to your website, here are some free, easy ways to check website traffic you can use.