In 2020 when the Covid pandemic has taken over the World, necessitating people to stay at home, email marketing has become one of the most viable tools for drawing attention to the brand, promoting products, and driving traffic. That why email builders are an important part of our list of tools to build emails.
Read more about trends in design:
Indeed, this year, email marketing sees a rise in popularity. The email newsletter has become the primary mode of communication between the company and the customers. If you want to keep up with the rest of the World and make your brand stay afloat at these uncertain times, you should capitalize on this means of communication. For that, you will need one good free email builder that lets you realize all your marketing ploys and brings any incredible idea to life.
What Makes the Best Email Builder?
There is a sheer diversity of free email builders on the web. Some of them are simple and primitive, while others are complex and sophisticated. While all of them are eager to do all the heavy lifting for you, in reality, not all of them have the capacity to manage this situation efficiently.
Even though depending on your marketing goal, amount of free time, and design and coding skills, you may benefit from one or another. Still, no one wants to lose precious time on a product that won't bring an expected result. To save yourself from disappointment, do bear in mind that the email builder should meet these essential criteria.
- It should comply with all the current specifications. It means that it should provide tools for creating templates that are mobile-friendly, responsive, accessible, lightweight, well-optimized, and fast.
- These templates should look and work consistently across all popular devices, browsers, email readers.
- Last but not least, these templates should meet all international laws and regulations. It should follow the trends in design.
Who wants to treat their loyal customers with some outdated wrapping? There won't be any subscriber's nurture, only disappointment from experiencing an old and tasteless design. This will drag any marketing campaign down. Using modules that look stylish and up-to-date is critical for your brand to fight the tough competition and secure its overall image.
Good-looking design with modern features provides a solid foundation for realizing a successful marketing campaign. It should be flexible in terms of customization. You should have access to such integral elements as color, background, typography, and arrangement. This way, you will adjust your design to your brand, current marketing campaign, and customers, making the newsletter fully customized and personalized.
On top of that, it would be nice to work in a handy environment. It is always a pleasure to enjoy the process of crafting a newsletter instead of fighting your way through. But this is not always the case. Therefore, make sure the surrounding is at least straightforward to handle, and everything – templates, modules, customization - are at your fingertips.
Best Free Email Builders
Consider Postcards that satisfies all these criteria. It is one of those rare solutions that offer five-star functionality for a one-star budget. No wonder it is one of the most popular tools these days. Along with the essentials such as an intuitive drag-and-drop playground where non-tech-savvy people can create anything they want, more than 100 stylish field-tested units that work smoothly across all the devices, and a comprehensive customization panel, it also offers
- Version history;
- Collaborative teammate work;
- Project management;
- External image support;
- Cloud image hosting;
- Unlimited exports;
- Interactive features;
- One-click export to Mailchimp, HubSpot, or HTML/ZIP;
- 24/7 Support team.
In addition, you will find a collection of helpful video tutorials if you need to do something more, for example, upload the newsletter to self-hosted email apps like Acelle or import email to Salesforce.
Let's consider some other email builders that also give you a helping hand in this matter. Some of them have only the essentials, while others provide even more than you can expect from freemium solutions.
Maizzle is a robust framework for rapid email prototyping. It is one of those solutions that require coding skills to be handled properly.
Maizzle provides email marketers with a range of reliable tools to build newsletters of various scales in a traditional coding environment. Tailwind CSS utility classes, PostHTML, JavaScript configurations, Event listeners, email-specific customizations, AMP features, build environments are among its main features. Also, it offers a collection of default templates so that you can have a head start and fully appreciate the potential of the framework.
Unlike Maizzle, a tool for seasoned developers, Cerberus is great even for those who have some basic coding knowledge. At its core, it is a collection of responsive reusable email layout patterns that can be removed, combined, and even nested. It is a safe foundation on which you can build on. It is excellent for creating both informational and promotional newsletters.
The only flaw is that it was not tested across all the devices, though it is said to work great on the most popular ones.
Movable Ink is all about creating unique cross-channel data-driven visual experiences generated from API, web, CSV, and CRM sources. It offers email marketers all the necessary tools to do this on their own. It has an intuitive, marketer-friendly UI, various modules like hero area or product imagery, automation tools, targeting tools, and some more.
On top of that, it has real-time simulations to preview the final result and polish it before sending it to actual subscribers.
Coming with a thoroughly-tested responsive grid, Foundation for emails 2 is an excellent solution for creating flexible, adaptable, and mobile-friendly layouts where the content occupies the leading position. Whatever design you come up with, it will look and behave great across all the popular devices and all of the major clients.
Although you won't find a handy playground in there, but you can employ one of 12 premade templates applicable for various types of emails. If you do not mind some coding, it can become an excellent solution for you.
Mosaico is an open-source email builder that ships with several powerful features. For instance, it has premade responsive templates that work great on popular platforms, rapid and flexible customization options, automatic resizing for images, and an undo/redo system to move back and forth to find the best result.
Unlike featured above solutions, sadly, Mosaico can't boast of modern design solutions. The templates look relatively modest and outdated. However, this can be enough to create a solid foundation where you can let your imagination run riot.
Mjml is another sterling framework in our collection of the best email builders. This time, it is not as powerful as other contenders; still, it has something to show off.
- First and foremost, the framework is centered on responsive solutions. Therefore, all the templates in its arsenal are mobile-friendly and easily adaptable for large screens.
- Second, it offers reusable and extensible components so that you can build newsletters quickly and efficiently.
- Third, it has an intuitive semantic syntax so that even newbies can handle it.
Again, there is no handy playground where you can drag and drop elements; nevertheless, it is not an obstacle if you are a tech-savvy person.
MailStyler 2 is a professional software where you can create an email template block by block. Much like in the case of Postcards, it also has a collection of responsive and well-tested modules that can be dropped into the scene and easily re-arranged and edited. There are also preset styles explicitly created for those who lack design skills and a handy customization panel. Besides, you can save everything in your library and reuse it once again.
This is another email builder on our list that invites users to enjoy the email creation inside a comfortable environment. Just add the desired module from the list to the scene and adjust it to your needs.
Along with an intuitive playground, there is also a small collection of ready-made email templates in case you do not want to create everything from scratch. Thanks to a well-thought-out customization panel, you can change it down to the last detail.
Finally, there is a professional preview mode where you can see how the template looks and behaves on various popular platforms to ensure everything runs as expected.
It becomes evident from the nameplate that you won't do without some coding skills, especially in React. That's very true. However, you do not need to be a professional in this area, since basic knowledge will be enough.
When all the work with installation is done, you are invited inside a handy drag-and-drop builder where you can create a basic yet still good-looking email template. You can also save drafts and resume the work later or use it as a base for the next email marketing project.
The EDMdesigner team has taken the traditional WYSIWYG editor to the next level by transforming it into a sterling drag-and-drop platform where you can easily assemble any email newsletter.
It offers a collection of basic building blocks like images, links, buttons, and handcrafted templates to give you a head start. Everything is fully responsive and works consistently across more than 90 desktop, mobile, and web email clients.
As a result, regardless of your coding or design skills, you will manage to create a professional newsletter without much hustle.
Unlike all the listed above here, HEML is an open-source markup language. Although it does not have a handy environment that is a lifesaver for all non-tech-savvy people, nevertheless, it is quite powerful in what it can do. For instance, it comes with helpful utility classes, intuitive layout systems, and some unique elements. You can build digital newsletters and reusable components that may save you lots of time in the future.
Therefore, if you have some coding skills, you can easily benefit from this solution and make something outstanding for your next email marketing campaign.
Conclusion
Much like email newsletters that delight us with diversity, free email builders come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them have a handy playground, while others offer classic coding environments. Some follow the trends and regularly update the collection with stylish designs, whereas others stick to never-dying classics and neutral solutions that provide a solid foundation to show your creativity.
There is just one thing in common; each one is eager to provide you with instruments to build email newsletters of every scale and difficulty.