If you've worked with us in the past, you may know that our agency is a Certified Mailchimp Partner. One of the great advantages of this program is the opportunity to connect with other partners, all of whom are true experts in the world of digital and email marketing. In an effort to promote ongoing learning for our followers, a group of us have banded together to provide expert advice every month from our collective decades of experience. This month, we asked the partners to provide their top email marketing tools that everyone should consider.  They provide insight into the software they use, as well as the processes they follow and the tactics that provide the best results for their programs.

At 108 Degrees, the messaging always comes first. Even for very visually oriented campaigns, we always start with the copy first and foremost. The message to our audience drives the creative, and that message is created and refined in a Google Doc. After reviews, analyses, and approvals by our creative team and our clients, we move our emails into production, which includes using Photoshop and/or Canva for graphics, Dreamweaver for coding (or the ESP for an existing template), and then on to Litmus for testing.

Here is some other valuable advice from our fellow Mailchimp Partners...

We use Macs with Adobe Creative Suite along side apps like PageLayers for Mac which is a great tool to convert a web page to a layered PSD (great for templates). BUT, we have our own toolbox, like our own email content planning tool, which is at the heart of our agency operations.

Doug Dennison
CEO & Co-founder
MailNinja 

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For every recurrent email, such as weekly or monthly newsletters, I build a checklist with all the things that I must remember to do: naming rules, tracking codes, recurrent elements, things to test; this clears the mind from the need to remember everything and keeps me focused on the content and the message. And, to spice up my emails, I always keep open a tab with Emojipedia and Giphy.

Alessandra Farabegoli
Digital Strategist, Co-Founder
Digital Update and Freelancecamp Italia

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I’m an Adobe fanatic. With Indesign I design the layout. Dreamweaver to build custom templates. I download visuals from Shutterstock, Adobe Stock and use Photoshop to edit them. Without a custom template or using a custom template, I use the MC Editor to build the final campaign.

Nick Beuzekamp
CEO and Founder
Online Marketing Bonaire 

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A pad and pen. Dreamweaver, TextEdit, Photoshop, Affinity Designer, Mailchimp and Stripo.

Glenn Edley
Director & Email Strategist
Spike

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Mailchimp drag and drop. I don’t ever code emails. I know that Mailchimp is on top of getting emails into the inbox and always updating their code with the newest best practices so I go with them. I use the Mailchimp Canva integration for images and graphics sometimes and GIMP (an open source Photoshop.)

Amy Hall
Email Marketing Strategist and Certified Mailchimp Partner and Consultant
Amy Hall

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Luckily we have created so many email designs over the last 5 years, that we have tons of great templates that we know work well. Why re-invent the wheel if we know a template works? I think it's important to save all work and have a list of campaigns that worked great so you can always reference.

Emily Ryan
Co-Founder and Email Strategist
Westfield Creative

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We mostly design in Photoshop and build in the Mailchimp editor. If the design/layout doesn't work in the editor, we custom code using the Code Your Own option in Mailchimp.

Adam Q. Holden-Bache
Director of Email Marketing
Enventys Partners