• by Wacarra Yeomans , July 3, 2012

Over the past several years, the email marketing industry has exploded with innovation -- not only in cross-channel design and capability, but also in the tools available to help us do our jobs better. My team and I have come across several such tools recently and are in varying stages of giving them a whirl. I thought I’d share what we’re excited about right now:

Scoop: http://helloscoop.com/

Just released by Litmus, Scoop compiles all of your email into a daily digest, then gives you one grid with a thumbnail of each message. For those of us who subscribe to tons of email for research purposes, this allows us to survey email creative more quickly. As it becomes adopted by our subscribers, it may create an even stronger imperative to include powerful email hero designs to catch subscribers’ eyes on grids of thumbnails. It might also mean that subscribers who otherwise wouldn’t open our email will catch at least a glimpse of our designs when they open their daily “Scooped” email.

Organizer: http://www.otherinbox.com/

Organizer is a new tool from OtherInbox, owned by Return Path, that organizes daily email in a way similar to Scoop. Organizer creates folders by mail type (shopping, financial, news, travel, etc.) and then sends a daily digest of messages so that Organizer users can focus their attention on the types of messages that interest them. As marketers, this could allow us to sort the wide range of messages we subscribe to and to digest them more easily.

Subjectlin.es: http://subjectlines.wpengine.com/

Also by OtherInbox, Subjectlin.es is designed specifically for marketers, enabling us to track the performance of our subject lines (or our clients’ subject lines) against those of competitors. It also allows us to view deliverability rates and get email alerts with the best performing subject lines in our industries. This could be an invaluable tool for the strategists and copywriters in our industry as well as provide valuable information to SEO teams. By reviewing performance in subject lines, we can learn which phrases resonate with our subscribers and thus could be used as organic search terms.

Movable Ink: http://movableink.com/

Movable Ink apps turn our emails into containers for live content. When an email is opened, Moveable Ink serves live content based on current time, recipients’ locations, social context, and your business rules. This is really changing the email game! By using these apps, we can send more relevant, targeted messages to our subscribers. Check out Movable Ink’s site for examples of how brands have used its tools.

Liveclicker: http://www.liveclicker.com/web/products/platform/

Liveclicker contributes more than just one tool to the tool belt, consistently developing new products and services to help marketers optimize their video and ensure the right format displays no matter the browser, mail client or operating system. If you or your clients are looking for some new ways to use email in your campaigns, check these guys out for some fresh ideas, and consider attending their 2012 Video Commerce Summit in August.

What are we missing?

We’re sure that a wide spectrum of other awesome tools are available that aren’t yet on our radar. If you know of some products and services that deserve a spot on the email marketing tool belt, please share in the comments!