What Tools Can You Use for Email Marketing Beyond the Obvious Choices

The short version: Mailchimp, Klaviyo and ActiveCampaign send your emails, but they don't fix your deliverability, verify your list, catch a broken template before it lands in 40,000 inboxes, or write a subject line that isn't dull. You need a small stack around your main platform, not a bigger one instead of it. I'll name the exact tools I've used, what they cost, and where they earn their place.

Worth reading next: Black Friday Email Subject Lines for Small Businesses.

Everyone already knows the big three, so let's skip past them

If you've searched for email marketing tools before, you've read the same list a hundred times: Mailchimp for beginners, Klaviyo for ecommerce, ActiveCampaign for automation, ConvertKit for creators. Fine. All true. None of it tells you what to do when your open rate is stuck at 12%, your emails are landing in Gmail's Promotions tab, or half your list has bounced without you noticing.

I've run email campaigns for clients across the UK, US and Israel for well over a decade, and the platform is rarely the problem. The gaps around the platform are. That's what this post is about, the tools that sit either side of your sending tool and catch the things it can't.

Tools that check your deliverability before your client asks why nobody opened the email

I once ran a product launch sequence for a client where every metric inside the platform looked healthy. Emails sent, no error messages, list clean according to the dashboard. Open rate was 9%. That's not a copywriting problem, that's an inbox placement problem, and the sending platform won't tell you that on its own because it doesn't know where the email landed once it left the server.

Two tools sorted it in about a week:

• Mail-tester.com gives you a free score out of 10 based on your email's spam signals, SPF, DKIM and DMARC setup, and blacklist status. Takes two minutes. If you've never run this on your own emails, do it today, not after your next campaign underperforms.
• GlockApps shows you inbox placement across Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo and iCloud specifically, not just a spam score. We found the client's emails were landing in Gmail's spam folder specifically, everywhere else was fine. Turned out it was an authentication record set up wrong two years earlier and never fixed.

We fixed the DKIM record, ran a 14 day warm up sending small, steady volumes to the most engaged segment first, and inbox placement went from roughly 61% to 94% inside three weeks. No copy changed. No new platform. Just fixing what was invisible from inside the sending tool.

Tools that verify your list before you pay to email dead addresses

Most email platforms charge by list size, which means every fake, dead or mistyped address on your list is costing you money and hurting your sender reputation at the same time. NeverBounce and ZeroBounce both let you upload a list and get a report back showing which addresses are valid, which will bounce, and which are catch-all or role based addresses like info@ that rarely open anything.

I run a bounce check before every big send for clients now, not occasionally, every time. Pricing on both sits around $0.004 to $0.008 per email verified, so cleaning a 10,000 name list costs somewhere between $40 and $80. Compare that to the damage a 15% bounce rate does to your sender reputation with Gmail and Outlook, and it's the cheapest insurance in your whole marketing stack.

Tools that catch a broken template before your subscribers do

Here's the uncomfortable one. Most people design an email, check how it looks in their own inbox on their own laptop, and hit send. That tells you nothing about how it renders in Outlook on a work PC, or in dark mode on an iPhone, or in Gmail's app on an older Android phone, which between them still make up a large chunk of most B2B lists. Litmus and Email on Acid both render your email across 40 plus email clients before you send, and both have caught things for me that would have been embarrassing, a call to action button that disappeared entirely in Outlook 2016, images that didn't load and left a wall of alt text, a footer that overlapped the main body on dark mode. Litmus starts around $99 a month, Email on Acid is a bit cheaper. If that feels steep for a small list, Google's own Gmail preview inside most sending platforms plus a free Outlook.com test account will catch the worst of it for nothing.

Tools for building emails when you don't have a designer

BEE (Beefree) and Stripo both let you build clean, responsive email templates with a drag and drop editor, then export the code straight into Mailchimp, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign or almost anything else. I use Beefree for client templates that need to look consistent across a dozen campaigns without briefing a designer every time. Free plans exist on both, paid plans start around $30 a month once you need brand kits and saved blocks.

If you're still deciding which sending platform to build all this around in the first place, this guide to choosing the right email marketing platform is worth reading before you commit to one, because switching later drags your list history and automation history with it.

Tools for cold outreach that aren't your newsletter platform

Newsletter tools and cold outreach tools are built for completely different jobs, and using one for the other is a fast way to get your domain flagged. Instantly and Lemlist are both built specifically for cold email sequences, sending from multiple inboxes at low volume, rotating subject lines, and tracking replies rather than just opens. GMass works inside Gmail itself and is the fastest way to test a small cold campaign without setting up new infrastructure. The rule I give every client: if you're sending fewer than 50 emails a day to people who haven't opted in, use a cold outreach tool. If you're sending to a list that opted in, use your main platform. Mixing the two is how good domains end up on blacklists.

Tools that connect email to everything else you're doing

The tool that made the biggest difference to one client's lead flow wasn't an email tool at all, it was Zapier, connecting a Facebook lead ad form directly into their email platform so new leads landed in the right automation within minutes instead of sitting in a spreadsheet someone forgot to check on a Friday. If you're running paid lead ads and your email follow up has any lag in it at all, read this piece on connecting your email marketing to Facebook lead ads without losing half your leads, because the leak is almost always in that handoff, not in the ad itself.

Make.com does the same job as Zapier with more flexibility for complicated, multi step workflows, and it's often cheaper once you're running more than a handful of automations. Both are worth having in your stack even if email is the only thing you're automating right now.

Tools for writing subject lines and copy faster

I'll say this plainly because most people writing about email tools won't: AI writing tools are useful for the boring, repetitive parts of email marketing, and pretending otherwise is a bit precious. I use Claude and ChatGPT to draft ten subject line variations in thirty seconds, then pick and edit one, never all ten unedited. Tools like Copy.ai have templates built specifically for email subject lines and preview text, which is a useful shortcut when you're staring at a blank line at 4pm on a Thursday. What AI doesn't do is know your audience, your tone, or the joke that lands with your specific list and nobody else's. Every AI draft I've ever sent out the door unedited has performed worse than the version I rewrote myself. Use it for speed, not for judgment.

The bit nobody wants to say out loud

Here's the truth that gets skipped in most posts like this: no tool on this list will fix a boring email. Deliverability tools get your email into the inbox. Design tools make it look tidy. List verification tools stop you wasting money on dead addresses. None of that matters if the email itself gives someone no reason to open the next one. I've seen clients spend hundreds a month on a bigger, shinier tech stack while sending the same generic "just checking in" email they were sending two years ago, and wondering why the open rate hasn't moved. Fix the content first. Then let the tools do the job they're built for.

A quick five step audit you can do this week

• Run your last campaign's sender domain through mail-tester.com and note the score out of 10
• Upload your list to NeverBounce or ZeroBounce and check your bounce and invalid rate
• Send a test email to a free Gmail and free Outlook.com account and check how it renders on both
• Check whether your cold outreach and your newsletter sends are going through the same domain or different ones
• Pick your worst performing subject line from the last three months and rewrite it by hand, no AI, then compare open rates on the next send

None of that costs more than about $50 in tool fees for a mid sized list, and most of it is free. If your whole marketing spend is starting to feel bloated rather than just your email tools, it's worth reading whether your marketing tech stack is costing more than it should before you add anything else to it.

Where this fits with the rest of your day

Email tools are only part of the picture. If you're the one person running all of this alongside content, social and everything else, the tools that save time day to day matter just as much as the ones inside your email stack specifically, and I've tested a fair few of both over five years of running my own business through some hard patches. And if you want the longer version of how I think about tech, marketing and building things without a big team behind you, I talked through a lot of it on The OneShot Podcast episode on marketing, tech and being an accidental entrepreneur.

If you write on this topic, see guest post guidelines for email marketers.

Frequently asked questions

What's the single most useful email tool that isn't Mailchimp or Klaviyo?

For most people it's a deliverability checker like GlockApps or mail-tester.com. It tells you whether your emails are landing in the inbox or spam, which is a bigger factor in your results than almost anything else, and one your sending platform won't show you clearly on its own.

Do I really need a separate list verification tool?

Yes, if your list is more than a year old or built from multiple sources. NeverBounce or ZeroBounce cost roughly $0.004 to $0.008 per email checked, and cleaning a stale list before a big send protects both your budget and your sender reputation with Gmail and Outlook.

Are AI writing tools worth using for email marketing?

Yes for speed, not for the final version. AI tools like Claude or ChatGPT are good for generating several subject line options fast, but the drafts that go out unedited almost always underperform the ones a person rewrites for their specific list and tone.

Should I use the same platform for cold outreach and my newsletter?

No. Cold outreach tools like Instantly or GMass are built for low volume, unverified sending, while newsletter platforms are built for opted-in lists. Mixing the two on one domain is one of the fastest ways to damage your deliverability for both.

Useful references

• the UK Information Commissioner's guidance on direct marketing