5 Best Email Design Tools for 2024
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Email design tools have put an end to the long-winded email creation process businesses have always used. They are a solution that means no more hiring designers or coding emails from scratch.
But which email design platform is best? In this blog, we break down 5 of the best email builders in 2024 and cover the features that take your emails from good to great. Don’t sign up for anything until you read this!
Not every marketer has design or coding expertise, and HTML emails are the modern-day preference over plain-text emails.
That’s why so many businesses turn to email design tools. Here are some of the benefits on offer.
Access hundreds of pre-made templates and customize them down to the finest detail.
The best email builders let you drag and drop a variety of components which you can edit, save, organize and reuse.
Keep all emails on-brand by storing your brand’s colors, logos and typography in the email platform.
Great for collaboration, remote workers and the rest of your team can access the brand assets when they design emails for the business.
Set up access permissions for safe, easy teamwork.
Publicate is one of the best email design tools for collaboration, offering real-time editing and approvals no matter where your team is based. This streamlines the workflow so you can scale the process.
Easily export your HTML emails and send them to Gmail, Outlook or any email platform you like.
You can also install plug-ins that let you send the designs you create, straight from Gmail and Outlook.
Good email design tools, including Publicate, track your emails' performance even when you send them from Gmail or Outlook. Easily monitor metrics like open rate and click through rate, for a data-driven understanding of the content your audience likes most.
All pre-made templates are coded to look great on all devices, browsers and email clients.
All you need to do is customize the templates using reusable content blocks. You can also access a powerful content library containing almost limitless images and videos from your favorite sources.
Some design tools, like Publicate, dynamically scrape web content for you. So, there’s no need to source, save, edit and upload images and descriptions every time you want to add a blog post or web page to your newsletters.
There’s a suitable template for just about every purpose. Filter through hundreds of beautiful, professional templates that have been built to maximize engagement.
Learning to code is time-consuming, and hiring coders is expensive.
A drag-and-drop editor eliminates the need for coding skills, so you can create professional emails in minutes and export the email HTML ready to send to whichever email service provider you want.
Traditionally, an email would take days for a business to create. From sourcing the content and information, then getting a designer to design the email, and then an engineer to code the email, all before sending to management for approval, it was a long-winded process.
With an email design tool, days become minutes - and you can do it all yourself, and be confident in the quality of every email.
Templates have already been professionally designed with engaging layouts. They have multimedia to break up blocks of text and direct the readers’ eyes, small paragraphs and headings for readability, and white space to avoid overwhelming the reader.
Great design is the first step to sending successful emails, and the best email builders take care of it for you.
Email remains one of the best tools to connect with customers and build lasting relationships. In fact, 22% of marketers send two or three marketing emails every single day.
But who are email design tools useful for?
Designers can speed up the process, collaborate in real time with their team and clients, and ensure consistent branding in a click by using an email builder.
Universities (whether that’s whole schools or individual departments) use email builders like Publicate to easily keep in touch with both staff and students.
They can quickly design emails to update their audiences on the latest events, campus news, workshops, training and other opportunities.
Internal comms teams can use an email builder to streamline processes and save time. Email builders are the ideal solution when you need to send internal newsletters via Gmail, Outlook or your own servers, but can’t use sending tools like Mailchimp or just want a better editor.
Tools like Mailchimp don’t let you export emails to other platforms (such as Gmail and Outlook), but email builders like Publicate give you the flexibility to send emails from your preferred platform.
Multi-brand businesses use email builders to scale up the design process, and ensure they can keep up with a high demand for email marketing.
They can control who accesses their account, for safe, simple collaboration. In large businesses where the stakes are high, you can make use of the real-time editing and approvals process, to get sign-off within the email-building platform.
Email builders are powerful tools that are perfect for agencies managing multiple clients.
Brand kits let you maintain the brand identity of any client you’re working on, and the best email builders, like Publicate, integrate with a large number of ESPs. That means you can tailor your service to suit each client’s preferred platforms and processes.
Agencies can also use the powerful analytics built into Publicate. This lets you track the results of every email campaign (from open rates to clicks and visual heat mapping) no matter which ESP you send emails from. Feed back the results to your clients using clear, easy-to-read reports, generated by Publicate.
An email design tool is an online platform that simplifies the email design process.
They come pre-loaded with hundreds of beautiful, professional templates suitable for all purposes - from employee newsletters to promotional campaigns.
Email design tools include a drag-and-drop editor so you can intuitively customize every part of an email, as well as pre-built content blocks so you can quickly build an engaging layout.
Since these tools are created primarily for design (and don’t offer sending capabilities), the email editors tend to be the best on the market. Editors on other platforms, that offer both design and sending, aren’t as good. They’ll usually be trickier to use and the design process takes a lot longer.
Users can design emails with zero coding or design experience. All templates are optimized for email and tested to ensure they work well on every platform and device. That means you can export the emails you create to send them anywhere, including Gmail and Outlook.
Since other tools, such as Mailchimp, don’t enable exports to Gmail, Outlook or your own servers, they often impose many limitations that email builders remove.
Not every email design tool is created equal. The following key features are signs of the best email template builder you can use.
Publicate integrates with platforms like Slack, Feedly and Pocket to make it easier for you to collect content in the library. You can save content as you naturally find it, so it’s available in one place and ready for you when you design emails.
Saving and organizing content to use in emails saves lots of time and means you no longer have to frantically comb the web, your computer folders and your team’s Slack channel for content when designing emails.
Plus, a team workspace makes collaboration a breeze. The whole team can contribute to and access the content library, which is a speedier process than emailing and downloading files!
You can also access over 2 million royalty-free images and GIFs without having to leave the editor.
Some email builders dynamically scrape web content.
Simply upload the URL of a target web page and the tool automatically populates images, descriptions and calls to action. So, you don’t have to find and manually upload an image, write a description, or hyperlink the CTA - the tool does it all for you.
This is an especially helpful feature if you’re sharing multiple blogs in your newsletter.
No-code editors are easy for everyone to use, but look for additional time-saving features that also contribute to beautiful emails.
For example, Publicate lets you crop and align images directly in the editor. Gone are the days of saving images, using another tool to edit them, and trying to fit them into your design to get the alignment right (and then repeating the process until it’s right!)
Get clear insights into the performance of every email so you can continue to make them better.
A strong email game comes from analytics. Make sure your email builder tracks the important metrics, whether you send emails from Outlook, Gmail or another service provider, but as you’ll see below, this is unfortunately a functionality that very few offer.
Store your brand’s assets within an email builder, so every team member can easily design on-brand emails.
Consistency is extremely valuable if you want to create recognizable, trusted content.
Spend your marketing budget wisely by making sure you’re using the email builder that’s perfect for your business.
We’ve rounded up the best email design tools for 2024, to save you the hassle.
Publicate is designed for collaboration, user-friendliness and time-saving capabilities. It is especially popular for internal communications, and is the email builder of choice for some of the world’s biggest brands, agencies and universities.
Users love Publicate because it offers a number of features that other email builders just don’t. Features like its content library, which lets you save and organize content from various integrations like Slack, so anyone on your team can access it and drop it straight into future emails.
Publicate also offers dynamic web scraping and inline image editing, saving you hours of frustration in the editing process compared to the competition.
The platform really stands out for its powerful analytics. Get detailed insights for every email you send, regardless of which platform you send it from, discover which content is performing and optimize your email marketing based on actual data.
Publicate also works great with teams, offering collaborative workspaces, a content library and real-time co-editing.
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Built by Designmodo, Postcards is an email-building tool for business owners without HTML knowledge. Its drag-and-drop editor lets you customize templates for both desktop and mobile.
Postcards has a free plan, but the vast majority of its templates are behind a paywall.
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Stripo is an email template design tool that lets you create emails and export them to your chosen ESP (email service provider).
It offers a drag-and-drop editor as well as the option to add custom HTML elements.
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Unlayer is another drag-and-drop HTML email builder that offers a selection of free templates to its users. However, users need to sign up for a paid plan to access the more advanced features and better range of templates.
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As with all email builders, users don’t need any coding experience to create professional HTML emails on Beefree. It is another drag-and-drop email design tool suitable for small teams through to enterprises.
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Whatever email design software you choose, it pays to know (and follow) best practices so you can nail every design and boost engagement with every email.
Here are some of our top tips for beautiful email design:
The best email design software comes down to your needs and preferences. However, there are some non-negotiable features and benefits, if you want to get the most out of your email template design platform:
Hopefully this guide has given you more clarity on the world of email design tools, so you know what features to look out for and can choose the best tool for you.
Email builders like Publicate are packed with features that make design and collaboration easier, faster and more affordable. Publicate has all the features listed in this blog, and stands out for its powerful analytics, image editing tools and content library.
Try it on for size with a 14-day free trial.
