I knew you’d be interested. Here are the tools we use to create perfect emails, and run our business.
MailNinja Platform – coming soon!
As well as being a super helpful managed service for your email marketing needs, we have also launched a platform, designed to help you plan, discuss, gather assets and analyse your emails. Internally, this platform is our project management tool, giving us a Kanban board to work through the various stages of email campaign deployment.
Canvas
Canvas is another tool we developed in house, as there wasn’t anything we found on the market that fit our needs. To develop emails, we need specialist tools and streamlined workflows, so we built our own tool to do exactly that.
Canvas allows us to code emails, and view the changes in a preview pane, as well as toggle images, apply grid view to highlight code sections, manage image assets and send tests directly to Email on Acid and Mailchimp.
Of course, being Mailchimp experts, it’s a no-brainer, but we want to mention it anyway. Mailchimp is the world’s biggest and best email platform. Even though they’ve made inroads into social, ads and websites, for us Mailchimp at its heart is a super easy-to-use and feature-packed email service provider (ESP). They’re a great company to work with, and are really receptive to collaboration and feedback. Learn hard, change fast.
Among our many tasks when deploying an email, is proofing copy, usually multiple times for each email. One tool that has saved us tonnes of hours of manual work, runs in the background and auto-suggests edits as you go, is Grammarly. There’s so many features packed into Grammarly, and it gives you proofing far beyond MS Word!
We use Email on Acid every single day, and couldn’t live without it. Their toolkit is designed to allow you to send error-free emails, and it’s really easy to use. Email on Acid is the more friendly, small business, version of Litmus. We find their tools really intuitive, cost effective, and the team are really helpful and friendly.
Every designer gets stuck and needs a little inspiration. This is where Really Good Emails comes in really handy. It’s a databank of emails from a huge range of brands, large and small, and recent updates now give you Pinterest-style profiles where you can collect designs, as well as improvements on their search functionality and code viewer.
Like Really Good Emails, but more focused on competitor analysis and insights than really good design, MailCharts is our go-to tool for checking entire automation flows from some of the biggest brands out there. The level of insights given is amazing. Lovely people too, which helps.
Not email-specific, but something we use every day is Google GSuite. We book all meetings in the calendar, use Meet for calls and Gmail for our email, plus we have groups set up for our shared team mailbox. Essential for the running of our company.
Isn’t everyone using Slack these days? We’ve been using Slack since 2015 for internal and external comms. One note: we did use a channel for each client to keep all client comms in one space, but this was unsustainable as we’ve grown, so now we’re using a single channel for work types. Slack, if you’re listening, channels need a rethink for scaling companies.
For our design team, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and XD are the best tools on the market. Creative Cloud gives us a suite of powerful tools and shared assets libraries that our designers use and rely upon every day.
Our team share assets and backup files in a secure Dropbox environment, and have done for many years. It can get a bit messy, so my tip for you; have a structure early on and make sure everyone sticks to it.
Right now we’re using Drift for our chat system, but moving forward we are switching to Intercom. Having has email conversations with Des (Founder and CEO) many moons ago, Intercom has come along leaps and bounds, and we will be taking full advantage of its automation possibilities.
A simple idea (aren’t all the best tools, hey Slack?), Calendly allows us to have sharable links in email and in Intercom for customers to book calls right to our Google Calendar.
Similarly to Slack, isn’t every website built on WordPress? We use the Divi theme from Elegant Themes. The drag and drop visual builder is so easy for non-coders (like me).
Visual Studio, Postman and GitHub
Our platform is the core of our business, and there are a number of tools used in the development of this, namely Visual Studio, Postman and GitHub.
PS- I’ve probably forgotten some, so if i remember I’ll jump back to this post and update it!
