Today we’re going to be talking about the top tools I use as an email marketing freelancer.

Over the years, I’ve been exposed to more and more apps or more tools. The freelancer environment has changed over the years, and these are tools I legitimately use every single day to make my life easier.

Whether you are a freelancer in the email marketing space or a freelancer in general – you’ll find a lot of these tools super useful in the projects that you’ll work on.

Assets & Branding

Fonts Ninja

First we have the Fonts Ninja extension. Y’all, this is amazing! Especially if you have clients who aren’t great at getting you a brand kit. This extension is a huge lifesaver.

Using it is super easy. Just click the extension while on any website, hover over the text that you want to inspect the font of, and it populates exactly what the font is. You’ll have a font name, sizing, weight, and sometimes (if it’s one of those standard fonts like a Google or an Adobe font) it will actually have a button you can click to take you to download the font.

I use it for almost every new client that comes on because I don’t get the assets or a clear brand kit right away. This makes the process super easy to see exactly what they’re using on their website and then move forward with designing with their preferred fonts.

Spelling and Grammar Tools

Grammarly

Next up, we have Grammarly. I’m sure you’ve heard of Grammarly or seen it recommended, but if you are not using it in your email designs, you are making your life much harder.

It is just a really good extra set of eyes on all the work that you’re creating before you send it to your clients. So, I highly recommend it. What I really love about it is that it works inside of almost every single email builder. For example, if I’m in Klaviyo and adding a text block to a new email, it will read through what I’ve written for the copy and give suggestions and fix or show any errors that I may have made.

Communication

Loom

If you’re in client management, freelance, or an agency-type environment, Loom is amazing! Imagine you’re having a back-and-forth email with a client and they’re really not understanding the project clearly. You think, “it would be so much easier if we could just hop on a meeting.” But, hopping on a meeting right now is going to be a pain in the rear. That’s where Loom comes in!

You can use the extension or the app, but I usually use the extension. You can quickly record yourself explaining the project, any hiccups, and the next steps in a really concise video that they can go back to and reference. I think that is the biggest selling point. You can say “Hey, don’t you remember? I sent you a Loom and outlined A, B, C, and D as the next steps.” That’s just the icing on the cake for me. It’s just an easy way to communicate visually to your clients when you’re wanting to talk through the next steps of a project.

Another benefit is recording voice memos to yourself. There are many times where I’ll film a Loom talking to my webcam and say “Hey, so we just got off the meeting and we need to make sure we do A, B, C, and D. They did mention this, and I just want to make sure I do this.” I literally film a Loom talking to myself so I can go back later that afternoon when things have calmed down between meetings, reference the Loom when it was fresh in my brain, and then move forward with making the tasks that I need.

I can’t recommend Loom enough. It is a huge part of my freelance communication style and how I keep things in line. I highly highly recommend Loom if you don’t have it.

Task Management

ClickUp

All of you Capricorn, Virgo, A blood types…whatever the most organized personalities out there are, this is for you! This would be my number one recommendation for organizing your to-do list, ClickUp.  It is similar to other apps like Monday and Asana, but 10x more polished and customizable.

Say I want to make a task and automatically remind myself to reach out to the client. Each time I create this new type of task, it will make a subtask where I reach out to the client in two days to catch up with them and make sure I follow-up. I can automate all of that each time I make this new task type. I can set due date reminders, film Loom inside of it, and it will store those. And I can do time tracking inside of it, which is huge.

To me, it is basically the elite of elite task management systems. And if you’re exploring the agency side and you are going to bring on a team, managing your team is essential, and ClickUp is fantastic for that.

Design Inspiration and Trends

ReallyGoodEmails.com and Milled

Specifically for my email marketing group, if you’re looking for inspiration and design trends, I have two recommendations: ReallyGoodEmails.com and Milled.

ReallyGoodEmails.com is my go-to. I check up with them at least once a week to see what new emails have been stored there. Basically, they’re a website where you can look at emails. Say you want to look up inspiration for abandoned cart emails, they’ll have a whole section for abandoned cart emails that you can look at. You can type in anything to get direct inspiration for the email you want to build.

Milled is very similar. They’re not as robust, but they’re more expansive. They’re not highly organized, but when it comes to having every single email that a brand has sent in the past six months, it’s going to have that. But it also is a bit selective on what brands it has. So it’s not going to have every brand out there, but again, if you have a client in a certain space, and you find another brand on Milled in the same space, you can look at all the emails they’ve been sending out and see it all collectively there.

If you’re just getting started in the email space, I feel like ReallyGoodEmails.com is a good judge of the status quo of email marketing. So, if you’re looking to hone in on your design skills, the best thing you can do is grab one of those really good emails on there and then try to replicate it with a dummy or real brand, and create another version of it. Of course, don’t copy other people’s emails and present that. Don’t do that. I’m talking about refining your skills and understanding, “Oh, someone built this design inside this email this way, and now I understand that you have to do these steps in Photoshop to get this look.” You can hone your skills by viewing what is being sent out into the world for other brands.

Industry News

The Daily Carnage and DTC

Now let’s talk industry news. I absolutely love The Daily Carnage and the DTC Newsletter. The Daily Carnage is really awesome because they have a marketing Facebook group. Out of all of the Facebook marketing groups I’ve been in, The Daily Carnage’s is the best. The people there are so funny. You get to share in the commissaire of what marketing sometimes is in this world. It’s a really awesome playground to talk to other marketers and see what’s happening out there. Group members post job opportunities all the time looking for new marketers. So, if you’re looking for opportunities, there’s a lot that gets posted in that group.

DTC is another really good one. Again, just really good information. They have a lot of strategy pieces that get sent out, which I really appreciate.

Overall, just two really awesome newsletters that you can get in your inbox each morning. Check in on it. Read some of the new strategies, see new things being released, stay up to date with Facebook features, and more! It will fuel you to be a better marketer and keep you in-the-know.

Design

Canva

Let’s talk everyone’s favorite, Canva. I personally do most of my design work inside of Photoshop and Illustrator, but Canva is a great catch-all if you have smaller projects or need a one-off thing. For example, if I need a .png of a “thumbs up” icon. I could go through the process of drawing that and doing the line art myself, or just pull it off of Canva.

As a freelancer, if you’re looking to get into personal marketing, Canva’s a great way to push out social media graphics easily. Honestly, Canva’s just a good thing to have in your back pocket. Several times, I’ll come across clients who prefer that I work inside their own brand’s Canva. So if you don’t have a Canva account, it’s best you go in and get one because you may run into a client in the future who has a brand project inside of Canva that they want you to look into.

Screenshot Extension

Go Full Page

This is another extension called Go Full Page. It’s a super silly extension and you might wonder, “do you really use this every day?” I use this every day, no joke! It’s basically an extension that takes a full screenshot of your entire browser screen. Say you built a landing page or you built an email and you want to capture the entire scroll of the entire email or page, you can do that with this extension!

So if you want to take screenshots of your emails to put inside of a portfolio, this is exactly what I use to take full-length screenshots so I can store them. Or, let’s say you run into another email or landing page that you like for inspiration, you can take a long screenshot of it. You want to share with a dynamic email that pulls dynamic information so it has to be sent to an inbox, but you don’t want to forward the email to the client? You can take a full screenshot of it so you can showcase to them that this is what it will look like in someone’s inbox.

There are so many use cases for this silly little extension, and I absolutely love it.

HTML Email Design

BEEPro

The last one is BEEPro. This is more for my email marketers out there, but if you run into a client who only uses something like Intercom (an HTML-only acceptable builder where you have to paste your code in), don’t let that freak you out. Building an email from scratch from HTML is not really expected nowadays. This is the tool I use when I need to build an email that needs to be exportable as dynamic HTML (like mobile-responsive), and have it work in a new platform.

BEEPro is like any email builder in a lot of ways. It’s drag and drop like a normal email builder, but when you need to export it and get the HTML over into a clunkier program that only takes code, you have that capability.

Another cool feature is that you can actually build landing pages as well. It’s a little bit rare for me because my clients don’t need me for landing pages. But, it’s a cool feature to have. I’ve used it for my own personal brand.

It’s a super handy extra builder to have that isn’t reliant on specific access to a specific program. This is a one-size-fits-all. You can build here and then put it in the program that you want later.

That completes my short list of top tools that I use every day as an email marketing freelancer! Check them out for yourself and integrate them into your daily routine as a marketing pro! If you need help with your email marketing, my marketing audit and free roadmap are a great place to start! Schedule your call with me below.