In the digital marketing world, email communication serves as a key conduit for establishing meaningful connections with your audience. It’s more than just a medium—it’s a platform that lets you narrate your brand story, express your unique value proposition, and propel your prospects toward conversion. At the heart of successful email marketing lies professional, engaging, and aesthetically pleasing email designs. And this is where Email Design Tools make their grand entrance.
Email Design Tools offer marketers an opportunity to move beyond generic, text-heavy emails and cultivate a visually rich digital environment. These tools equip you with a suite of functionalities to effortlessly design emails that resonate with your target audience, while encapsulating your brand’s essence. They offer capabilities ranging from creating responsive email templates, personalizing content, to even A/B testing different designs for optimizing conversions.
Top Email Design Tools
Top
email design tools
2024
Demo or trial: Offering free account
Pricing:
- Creator: $9/month
- Creator Pro: $25/month
For more than a decade, ConvertKit has been empowering creators by making email marketing simple, functional, and engaging. Their email design tool is no exception, focusing on delivering a seamless, intuitive editing experience to its users.
ConvertKit’s email design tool champions simplicity over extravagance. Recognizing that plain-text emails often perform better, the tool is optimized to help you create straightforward, concise emails that land directly in your audience’s inbox. A clutter-free menu bar and the disappearing block formatting bar makes formatting your email a breeze.
Beyond text, ConvertKit provides quick content options like adding lists, headers, buttons, and dividers to give your emails structure. A personal image library and direct integration with Unsplash cater to your image needs, while the addition of clickable CTAs ensures that your email’s purpose is clear and direct.
Customization is a central part of ConvertKit’s offering, allowing users to create unique templates without needing to write a single line of HTML code. The templates are responsive, ensuring your emails look professional across all devices.
A standout feature of ConvertKit’s email design tool is the inclusion of an HTML box. This allows users who wish to add a personal touch to their emails by coding a specific part of their content.
Features:
- Simple email design interface
- Quick content options
- Personal image library and Unsplash integration
- Clickable CTAs
- Customizable email templates
- HTML box for custom code
Demo or trial: Offering free account
Pricing:
- Basic: $15/month
- Medium: $45/month
- Pro: $95/month
Stripo, a powerful yet user-friendly email design tool, offers an amalgamation of drag-n-drop and HTML capabilities to create and customize emails. It is known for its intuitive interface and flexibility, which accelerates the email production process and ensures optimal compatibility with all ESPs.
The Stripo tool offers two distinct design modes: a drag & drop email builder and an HTML & CSS code editor. The former provides pre-built modules and content blocks for swift design, while the latter lets users code emails from scratch or customize existing templates.
The hallmark of Stripo is its hybrid design experience. Users can simultaneously work in the drag-n-drop builder and the HTML editor without having to switch back and forth. This ensures that no matter your level of coding knowledge, Stripo has an email design process to suit your needs.
Stripo also streamlines the design process by providing pre-built modules and content blocks that help construct your email’s body, thereby reducing the time spent on email production.
Features:
- Drag & drop email builder
- HTML & CSS code editor
- Hybrid design experience
- Pre-built modules and content blocks
Demo or trial: Available for free
Pricing:
- Designer: $15/month
- Team: $30/month
Unlayer is a game-changer for those looking to create stunning, responsive emails and web pages with ease. Its platform, which requires no coding or design skills, leverages a drag-and-drop editor to create engaging content quickly and efficiently. Not only does Unlayer save users hours in design and development, but it also ensures that the final product looks exceptional across all devices and email clients.
The beauty of Unlayer is how it blends simplicity and functionality. Its extensive catalog of templates caters to every need, whether it’s a Black Friday Mega Sale email or a more personal New House announcement. Plus, the custom file storage feature and the option to use dynamic content add flexibility to the design process.
More advanced features include the use of custom HTML code for those who want to enhance their emails further. You can save custom blocks for later use, personalize your emails with dynamic information, promote your products directly, and even transfer your emails to your preferred email marketing platforms with a couple of clicks.
Features:
- Drag & drop and dynamic content
- Custom file storage
- Mobile-responsive templates
- Custom HTML code integration
- Personalize emails with merge tags
- Promote products directly
- Integrated with various email marketing platforms
Demo or trial: Free usage for occasional users
Pricing:
- Team: $30/month
- Enterprise: Custom Pricing
Bee’s commitment to fast and easy email design shines through in its innovative platform. The drag-and-drop editor enables the creation of high-performing emails and landing pages, complemented by a rich catalog of ready-to-go templates for every occasion. Bee’s flexibility allows users to start with a blank canvas or a pre-designed template.
The real strength of Bee lies in its integration capabilities. Users can export HTML code to any platform or use Bee’s connectors for one-click export to popular sending platforms like HubSpot, Mailchimp, Salesforce, Klavyio, and many more.
An intriguing feature is Bee’s ability to convert emails to landing pages and vice versa with just one click. The integrated email marketing platform keeps your digital campaign organized and on-brand, and the email design system using workspaces and rows ensures efficient brand management and consistency across campaigns.
Features:
- AI-powered and synced rows for faster email creation
- Collaboration tools for team projects
- Compatibility with existing email sending platforms
- Conversion of emails to landing pages and vice versa
- On-brand design management across teams
- Efficient brand management with an email design system
Demo or trial: Forever free usage available with no credit card requirement
Pricing:
- PRO Plan: $10/month (billed annually) or $15/month (month-to-month)
- Team Plan: $15/month (billed annually) or $20/month (month-to-month)
TOPOL is renowned for providing a full-featured, intuitive drag-and-drop editor. It focuses on helping users craft beautiful and responsive emails that are compatible across various devices and email clients. It offers two distinct solutions – TOPOL Plugin and TOPOL PRO. The Plugin is meant to be embedded into your platform, saving significant development time and costs, while TOPOL PRO provides a collaborative space for team members to create, save, edit, and organize templates.
TOPOL stands out with its advanced features such as re-usable custom blocks, allowing users to save and reuse specific segments from their templates. It offers the ability to personalize emails with merge tags, incorporating the recipient’s name and other dynamic information. It allows promotion of online store products directly in the emails using a simple drag & drop mechanism. For more advanced users, it also supports custom HTML code insertion for additional customization.
Features:
- Full-featured Drag & Drop Editor
- Responsive Email Design
- Reusable Custom Blocks
- Email Personalization
- Product Promotion in Emails
- Custom HTML Code
Demo or trial: Free trial offering 100 emails/day forever
Pricing:
- Essentials: Starts at $19.95/month
- Pro: Starts at $89.95/month
- Premier: Custom Pricing
SendGrid offers a free builder to create professional, custom email templates without needing the help of a designer or developer. The easy-to-use email template builder comes with editing tools, simplifying the task of crafting branded and responsive email templates.
This tool’s beauty lies in its simplicity. The drag & drop features allow users to design the perfect email by inserting image blocks, text boxes, CTAs, and social icons as per their requirements. All emails designed using SendGrid are fully responsive and can be sent as and when required.
SendGrid caters to a wide range of campaigns, including marketing messages, transactional messages, and more. For those looking for inspiration or a head start, SendGrid offers a library of free responsive templates built using the SendGrid platform.
Features:
- Drag & Drop Design
- Responsive Email Design
- Variety of Campaign Types
- Library of Free Responsive Templates
Demo or trial: Free demo available upon request
Pricing: Custom pricing based on needs
Staffbase sets itself apart as a sophisticated internal email designer tool, specifically tailored for crafting impactful employee communications. The software’s interface is user-friendly, with a drag-and-drop feature to build block layouts, insert elements like images or text, and play with the styling controls to customize each block.
Beyond the aesthetics, Staffbase offers analytical tools with Staffbase Email Measure, offering valuable metrics to assess communication effectiveness and drive improvements. The Staffbase Email Target provides custom distribution lists and segmented reporting to manage email overload and boost engagement. One of Staffbase’s key features is the integration with favorite tools, enabling message scheduling and syncing with employee directories. It offers a multi-channel communication approach to reach employees effectively.
Features:
- Advanced internal email designer
- Impactful employee communications
- Customizable block layouts and elements
- Integrated analytical tools for communication measurement
- Custom distribution lists and segmented reporting
- Integration with various tools for smooth workflow
Demo or trial: Free trial available
Pricing:
- Business: $15/month
- Business Premium: $20/month
- Business ENTERPRISE: $3,282.00 for 10 seats.
Mail Designer 365 provides a creative workflow for crafting attractive newsletters, all without any coding requirements. It boasts a vast array of professional templates and millions of layout combinations, alongside re-usable elements, image editing, and web-font support.
It excels in designing modern, mobile-optimized newsletters with a powerful yet familiar WYSIWYG interface. It offers a live preview of newsletters on multiple devices as you design. A unique addition to its feature set is AI-generated subject lines, using campaign keywords to craft perfect subject lines.
A significant part of Mail Designer 365’s workflow involves discussing and approving designs. A web-based preview of the design can be shared for feedback. Revisions can be uploaded quickly, and the approved design can be sent directly from the app to the selected ESP.
Features:
- Wide variety of professional templates and layout combinations
- Mobile-optimized newsletters
- AI-generated subject lines
- Discussion and approval feature for newsletter designs
- Compatibility across macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android
- Direct email sending from the app to ESPs
Demo or trial: Offering free version
Pricing:
- Tabular Pro: $19.99/month per team editor/admin
Lifetime deals:
- $89 (1 team editor/admin)
- $179 (3 team editors/admins)
- $299 (10 team editors/admins)
- $499 (25 team editors/admins)
Tabular is an innovative email design tool that allows the creation of stunning and efficient emails, minus the complexities of coding. Used by a plethora of companies, including Unipar University, Newsweek, BMW, Mini, and more, Tabular offers flexibility and control at the heart of its service.
Tabular delivers a comprehensive email design platform that allows for the creation of high-performing email campaigns from scratch or using their high-quality templates. The interface offers full control over mobile designs, enabling a unique viewing experience for mobile email users. Personalizing emails with dynamic content is made easy by incorporating your email sending platform’s variables, allowing a level of engagement that is unique to each recipient.
One of Tabular’s stand-out features is its unique ‘building blocks’ approach, where you can create and save reusable email blocks, thereby speeding up the design process. The tool also provides seamless integration with your email sending platform, facilitating the upload and update of emails directly from within Tabular. This feature supports various platforms like Klaviyo, SendGrid, HubSpot, Mailchimp, and more.
Moreover, Tabular boasts a smart algorithm that converts the email design into code, ensuring perfect display across 50+ major email clients, including older versions of Outlook. This eliminates the need for separate email client preview services, saving both time and cost. In addition, you can preview your emails in your inbox or send Tabular email previews to ensure your design is as intended.
Features:
- High-quality templates
- Full control over mobile designs
- Personalized emails with dynamic content
- Reusable ‘building blocks’
- Seamless platform integration
- Smart algorithm for coding
- Email previews
Demo or trial: Offering free trial
Pricing:
- Individual: $150/year
- Team: $490/year
- Business: $999/year
Publicate prides itself on helping users build beautiful emails easily and efficiently with their powerful email builder. Used by global names like Pepsi, Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe, and more, Publicate’s intuitive design caters to businesses of all sizes.
Publicate’s email builder offers cross-platform support, with easy exports to over 50 email services including Gmail, Outlook, Mailchimp, Hubspot, and many others. Emails designed in Publicate are ready for export in HTML and require no coding knowledge, allowing for a simplified, quick, and straightforward design process.
The software stands out for its comprehensive, time-saving features. Users can automatically curate content from their favorite places, including Slack, YouTube, Pocket, and Twitter. This feature is paired with a template editor that creates professional emails with a few clicks, maximizing time spent on content and minimizing time on design and coding.
Publicate also offers full design control, ensuring brand consistency across all communications. It supports integration with a range of multimedia content like videos, GIFs, tweets, webpages, and files, enhancing email engagement.
To aid in performance analysis, Publicate provides clear and detailed analytics on emails. Metrics include open rates, click rates, heat maps, and more, compatible across all email service providers. This functionality gives users actionable insights and visibility into their newsletter reach and content engagement, allowing for constant optimization and improvement.
Features:
- Powerful email builder
- Cross-platform support
- Automatic content curation
- Intuitive template editor
- Full design control
- Multimedia content integration
- Detailed, actionable analytics
What is the role of email design tools?
With the average office worker receiving 126 emails per day, standing out in an overstuffed inbox has become a Herculean task. The impression your emails make in those precious few seconds can greatly influence customer perception and the likelihood of engagement. So effective and professional email designs that inspire action are a cornerstone of any high-performing email marketing strategy.
Crafting such emails is no small feat. It requires a thoughtful blend of creativity, a deep understanding of your audience, and the right set of tools to bring your vision to life. That’s why you need Email Design Tools. Designed to simplify this process, any of the solutions included in our listicle above will provide you with an array of pre-built templates, easy-to-use design interfaces, and the ability to customize every element of your emails—from font styles and images to call-to-action buttons and social media links.
What to look for in an email design tool?
In selecting the appropriate email design tool, you must consider several factors. The ideal solution should not only offer an intuitive interface and expansive design library but should also allow for flexible customization to match your brand identity. It should integrate seamlessly with your existing marketing stack, support automation capabilities, and provide detailed analytics for result tracking and optimization.
Given that a growing number of users check emails on mobile devices, the chosen tool should enable the creation of mobile-responsive emails, ensuring your design looks as impressive on a smartphone screen as it does on a desktop.
Finally, efficient customer support is another crucial aspect. As with any technology, users may occasionally face issues or require assistance with specific functionalities. Prompt, helpful support can mean the difference between a minor hiccup and a lost opportunity.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I use these tools without coding skills?
Absolutely. Email design tools are designed to be user-friendly and don’t require coding skills. They often include drag-and-drop features and pre-built templates, allowing you to create professional-looking emails without any technical knowledge.
Can I personalize my emails using these tools?
Yes, email design tools often offer features that allow you to add personalization elements, such as the recipient’s name or other personalized content. This can increase engagement and improve the effectiveness of your email campaigns.
Can I track the performance of my emails with these tools?
Yes, many email design tools offer built-in analytics features. These allow you to track metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and engagement levels, providing valuable insights that can help you improve your future email campaigns.
Can I create reusable templates with these tools?
Yes, most email design tools allow you to create and save templates. This can significantly speed up the email creation process, particularly if you regularly send similar types of emails.
About the Author
Writer
Dan Atkins is a renowned SEO specialist and digital marketing consultant, recognized for boosting small business visibility online. With expertise in AdWords, ecommerce, and social media optimization, he has collaborated with numerous agencies, enhancing B2B lead generation strategies. His hands-on consulting experience empowers him to impart advanced insights and innovative tactics to his readers.
