5 Best Email Building Software: How to Choose?

What is Email Building Software?

Email building software provides you with a selection of templates to customize any email newsletter of your choosing.

They are typically arranged in categories and themes, which makes it easy to find the one you’re looking for, which is how you can search for templates using web-based email building software like Publicate.

Once you have your template chosen, Publicate offers drag-and-drop functionality build a an email from scratch or customize any of their templates and then easily export it to send it out using your preferred email provider of choice.

What is an Email Template?

Think of an email template like you do a blueprint. It lays out the plan for your content and has the modules already in place using HyperText Markup Language (HTML) code. Rather than having to code any email newsletter from scratch, you have a library of templates to select from.

Thus, you have the design already ready to go. All you have to do is plug in the content you want. With an email builder like Publicate, it’s straightforward by clicking on an icon to add multimedia, such as GIFs, videos, images, links, and whatever else you wish to include to make your email newsletter more engaging.

You can also add images to the content library, plus crop and resize directly within the tool itself. No coders or designers needed.

What Makes a Great Email Template?

Great email templates are primarily easy to use! Along with their ease of use, a great email template perfectly allows you to blend copy with design elements to provide a balanced reading experience.

Furthermore, when searching through email building software and their templates, look out for:

• Drag-and-drop visual editors
• Integrated tools for sending purposes
• Analytics and metrics
• Online tools for auto-saving and access control
• Collaboration capabilities

Why is Email Building Software Important?

Email building software has completely transformed the ease at which email newsletters and email marketing can be managed and executed.

Rather than having to spend a ton of time creating newsletters from scratch, which oftentimes would mean you’d need to hire a graphic designer and/or coder, email building software democratizes the process for all!

You gain:

1. More Time: Email building software saves you time so that you can focus on high-level tasks and the general responsibilities of your job rather than having to learn a whole new skillset to build out emails.
   
2. Better Branding: Email newsletters are a great way to showcase your brand and even boost brand awareness. With saved styles and brand kits, Publicate allows you to insert your company’s branding in any newsletter with no extra work.
   
3. Scaled Efforts: Email newsletters are great for both internal and external communications. When you wish to share information and updates with your internal team, you can use an internal communications template. For marketing newsletters to external audiences, you can find email templates purposefully built for that, too!
   

Customized Content: Even though you’ll be sending your communications to a long list of people, you can always include customization elements to make your templates feel personalized for your audience. From addings tags for names to adjusting the look and feel of the email newsletter for different segments of your audience, you can get a lot done using the same amount of space and tools.

Who Uses Email Building Software?

Email building software serves an array of different users. They are advantageous for:

• HR Teams: HR teams are constantly having to share internal insights and updates with their staff. Internal communications templates serve this purpose and can streamline the process.
• Marketing Teams: Of course, marketing teams aim to drive sales and promote products. As such, they can use email building software for marketing emails.
• Agencies: Agencies can speed up workflows by starting with templates rather than a blank slate.
• Business Owners: For small businesses that lack communications teams or dedicated people to spearhead communications, email building software can be a huge helper to save time and money.

What are the Types of Email Building Software?

When searching for a fitting email building software for your business, you’ll come across two categories of software, namely:

1. Drag-and-drop email builders:

These are equipped with a WYSIWYG editor, which stands for “What You See Is What You Get.” That means that you don’t need to know any type of coding. You can simply pull and drop the content blocks you wish and add any multimedia with the click of your mouse (Publicate falls into this category).

2. HTML-based email builders:

These builders necessitate the user to have a knowledge of HTML coding, in which you can create templates from scratch by writing code. Naturally, this adds an extra element of complexity, along with the need for more time.

What are the Best Features of Email Building Software?

The top-tier email building software is made up of a list of features that cover all your bases. Here’s a look at some of the most outstanding elements:

1. Built-in email blocks: Built-in email blocks mean that you can use the drag-and-drop editor to place content blocks as you wish, or you can use the template as it’s already set up in its order.
2. Images: An email newsletter with just text can become hard to read and overwhelming for your audience. This is why it’s great to mix up content and visual elements. Email templates offer image features to add logos, GIFs, pictures, and the like.
3. Responsiveness: One of the greatest benefits of using email building software is that they are mobile responsive, which means that they will automatically adjust to the screen size that the email is viewed on.
4. ‍Analytics: Once you send your email, you’ll want to know how it is performing and how readers are engaging with it. Email building software like Publicate provides these insights.

What are the Latest Trends of Email Building Software?

There are many email building software options in the market. But, you’ll want to choose one that stays up-to-date with the trends. The trends that are currently taking place when it comes to email marketing and email newsletters include:

• Use of Live Content: Live content refers to elements like count-down clocks, weather widgets that are up-to-date, live scores, and the like.
  
• Animation and GIFs: Animated content adds a fun and engaging twist to otherwise static content. They help to grab your readers’ attention.
  
• Personalization: This one has been a long-standing trend that will continue to stick around because in a saturated landscape of media, people want to feel special and as if they are the only ones in the room. You want to be able to speak to your user’s and customer’s behaviors, actions, and history with your brand.

What are the Best Email Building Software Tools?

With all the good news about email building software, you probably can’t wait to get your hands on one to help your communications efforts!

Let’s take a look at the top 5 tools worth looking into:

1. Publicate

Publicate is a drag-and-drop email editor. It comes stocked with an hundreds of neatly categorized email templates to choose from.

Along with templates, you gain access to a content library of thousands of royalty-free stock images, image scraping capabilities, and an image editor that allows you to customize and crop your image to fit directly within your newsletter as you build it.

Along with its mobile responsiveness, Publicate makes it super easy to send your emails from whatever email provider you’re already using for your plain text/everyday emails. It integrates directly with Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, and any other provider so all you do when you’re ready to send is click export.

Alternatively, if you wish to share your newsletter via communication channels like Slack, you can do that too. Then, you get to work in your comfort zone to send your email on a mass scale.

Once you send your email newsletter, you’ll receive detailed analytics. These analytics help you to optimize your content to boost engagement levels, open rates, and click-through rates as you can see how your campaign performs in real-time. So, you get to save time, money, and maximize your communications efforts.

2. Stripo

Stripo is another drag-and-drop email editor that helps you build out any email of your choice with no code. If you’d rather code from scratch, you can switch between its HTML and CSS code editor and drag-and-drop editor.

3. BEE
BEE offers thousands of templates and a drag-and-drop editor to design and build emails simply. You can create different workspaces to collaborate by team and keep all your files stored in one place so it can be accessed and used anywhere.

4. Topol

Topol is yet another drag-and-drop email building software. Emails are also built responsively. Users have the choice between Topol plugin (that embeds in your platform) or Topol Pro (recommended for teams) which grants access to templates, collaboration tools, and a library of free images to choose from.

5. Chamaileon

Chamaileon allows you to import HTML or build a design system within its design interface. Unlike the other email building software on this list, Chamaileon requires its users to create their own email design systems, but it does also integrate with major email providers.

How to Choose Email Building Software?

That was a lot to digest! But, now that you made it here, we have a useful guide (or checklist, should we say) for when you’re comparing the various email building software options.

1. Template library: A surefire necessity to save time with your email efforts is to have a library of templates readily available for every need.

2. Built-In editing: When you’re adding images to your template, you might have to adjust the sizing or crop images to fit the space. Seek an email building software that allows you to edit your images within the template itself.

3. Ease-of-use: We mentioned this before, but the user interface can make or break your email building software’s impact. It should be simple enough for the least tech savvy to the most tech savvy to use (as the entire point is to prevent the need for designers and coders).
4. ‍Cost: There’s no doubt that cost will play a factor in your ultimate decision, so keep an eye on the price.

No Code Needed!

Email building software takes the pain and hassle out of curating, creating, and customizing content for both internal and external audiences. With email building software like Publicate, you can remove the need for designers and coders while saving your team time.

You never have to worry about putting together an email from a blank page again as you gain access to thousands of templates, royalty-free images, multimedia options, analytics, and integrated tools for sending.

Ready to try it out for yourself? Sign up for a free trial!