20 Tools to Help You with Your Email Marketing Outreach

Email outreach can be very tricky. There’s a ton of information to manage, from contact information to previous outreach attempts and their results. It sucks to try to cold email someone who you have a previous relationship with, forgetting that you’ve talked to them before. It can even be offensive enough to end a business relationship in some cases.

Managing your outreach requires the right tools, and as you might expect, the industry is flooded with such tools. Which ones are any good? Well, I can’t necessarily vouch for them all, but here’s a reasonable selection you can give a look.

1. Muck Rack

This app is something like a cross between a contact management platform, a search engine, and a journalist database. It’s an outreach platform that allows you to keep abreast of the news, reach out to journalists and bloggers, and step up your outreach game something fierce.

Personally, I like their alerts and their regular emails, which are packed with useful information that can inspire blog posts and guest posts as well as outreach and influencer marketing opportunities. Pricing is hidden from the public, but starts around $99 per month for the social media and outreach tools. I recommend giving it a look, even if it’s a little steep.

2. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is one of the largest and best content-based aggregate search engines out there. It’s a fantastic tool when you want to do content-based research, when you want to find the influential people in a given niche, and when you want to see what kinds of ideas are performing well or not.

The content analyzer is cool, but the tool you’re really looking for is the influencer search. Plug in a topic and it will search for influential accounts in different categories, like bloggers, companies, journalists, and even just regular people who happen to be influential. You can save your results and even export directly to Twitter Lists.

3. MailCharts

This interesting little tool is a sort of industry tracker and competitive analysis platform. Basically, it signs up for as many mailing lists and other assorted subscriptions as possible, then studies and aggregates data from all of the messages it receives.

As a customer, you can use it to analyze how your competitors are using email. What kinds of formats do their newsletters take? How often do newsletters get delivered? What days are the most crowded with messaging – and what days and times are best for getting your message the most attention? The only downside is that pricing is pretty steep for all of the best information. You have to start with at least the $99 per month plan for all the detailed reports, and things like industry benchmarks require the $250 per month plan.

4. Zembula

Alright, so this one is more aimed at newsletter and broad-spectrum outreach emails, but it can be useful in the right situations. Zembula is a system for interactive emails. It’s one thing to send out an offer you want users to claim, but what happens if the offer is plainly stated and your users decide it’s not worthwhile?

You don’t get those clicks. Zembula allows you to hide those offers behind “scratch-off” style boxes and other gimmicks, which encourage the user to interact with the email and click through to your website to see the results of their offer. This, in turn, can encourage further engagement and expose those users to more marketing, which can make them more likely to convert.

5. Yesware

One of the more popular email management platforms, Yesware is a potent tool with a lot of useful features. It helps you build connections by giving you information as you compose, to personalize for your recipient. It lets you sync and schedule tools for productivity and time savings.

It has email tracking, it gives you a range of tested templates, and it has a whole analytics dashboard for your overall outreach performance. It’s well known and well loved, but it’s not free, so you might be interested in some similar free tools instead.

6. BuzzStream

This is another influencer research tool that can help form the basis of your email outreach campaigns. Use it to look into industries to find the people who are most influential in those niches. The tool will provide you as much public and semi-public information as it can, ranging from site metrics to contact information to influence levels.

The platform aspect will then allow you to send your messages to these influencers, saves them, and allows you to build and view a complete communications history at a glance, even across channels. Plus it has reminders so you can make sure to follow up on conversations, to make sure you never accidentally drop an opportunity.

7. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is one of the top-tier email management platforms out there. It has contact management, brand management, email design tools, campaign integration, and analytics all in one.

They even have a free plan that gives you some basic templates, the CRM, and up to seven marketing channels, which is a lot for something that costs nothing to access. They’re one of the best tools in the industry for a reason.

8. AWeber

Another of the top-tier platforms everyone knows already, AWeber is a 20 year old platform with a ton of experience and tools that have been build up the whole time.

It helps you compose everything from personalized emails to newsletters, automates email sequences, helps you tag campaigns, and handles split testing. It’s more aimed at broad-spectrum outreach than individual outreach, but it’s very good at what it does.

9. NinjaOutreach

NinjaOutreach is a really cool tool with customers that include brands like Walmart and Disney, so you know it has to be valuable. It exists to create influencer marketing campaigns. Their massive information database lets you find business profiles, influencers, and contact information.

Then their campaign management platform lets you reach out to those people and manage your projects all in one place. Overall, it’s a really great tool.

10. Traackr

This platform is one of the more individualized influencer relationship management platforms available.

It’s focused on creating specific campaigns for influencer management and outreach, with an emphasis on identifying and working with a few powerful people rather than a wide net of less useful influencers. Everything is easily managed from their platform, and their analytics show you at a glance how you’re doing.

11. Mailshake

This is about as far opposite of something like Mailchimp as you can get and still be a useful tool. It’s very simple and it does everything you want it to for at-scale, broad-spectrum outreach.

It allows you to create cold emails for that first step in outreach, with advice for composing those emails and personalizing them with wildcards. It would be a spam platform if not for how personalized and how useful it is; unlike spam, it actually works.

12. Tomoson

This tool is something like an influencer marketing marketplace. It’s a network where influencers – or their PR firms and managers, anyways – post opportunities. People who are willing to create content and work with other brands post themselves on the network, with pricing attached.

If you’re willing to pay, you can hook up with these influencers and get some guaranteed content linked right to you. Sure, it kind of subverts the organic relationship building aspect of influencer marketing, but hey; if you need some links and some content right now, this is a great way to get it.

13. Pitchbox

This is a platform with a lot of utility for marketers looking to reach out to content creators. It starts with prospecting, finding the applicable influencers and content creators in your target niche.

It then allows you to automate and scale your outreach to contact an entire list at once. It can automate following up with the ones who ignore you, and can monitor your email to aggregate all of your contact and communications in one place. Overall, it’s quite a good contact management platform with some useful outreach tools stapled on top.

14. GroupHigh

This platform does what many of the others on this list do, but it focuses on streamlining the process and getting it done as quickly as possible.

Every phase, from influencer identification to authentication to pitching to monitoring to follow-ups is handled as quickly, efficiently, and powerfully as possible. It might be a little daunting at first, but once you’ve gotten the hang of the platform, it’s easy to use and can have some frankly astonishing effects in a relatively short amount of time.

15. Woodpecker

This is an outreach and lead nurturing tool that focuses specifically on cold email outreach. No need to build up leads before you feed them into the platform; it does the whole initial phase for you.

You feed it a list – possibly one you found through a tool like BuzzSumo – and configure a cold email to send to them. Rather than sending those emails all at once, however, it sends them on a varied natural schedule so they look much more organic and don’t hit you with rate limitations. Then it monitors those emails and follows up automatically based on actions taken, like opening or ignoring the email. It’s not a complex tool, but it’s good at what it does.

16. SmartReach

Much like Woodpecker, this is a cold email outreach tool. It has email automation, with built-in deliverability tests to make sure you’re not likely to trigger spam filters or be ignored.

It monitors your inbox for replies, and your emails for opens. It can intelligently pause campaigns if something outside the usual flow happens. It also has team collaboration options, a nice and clean dashboard, and templates to help you get up and running quickly. It’s also relatively cheap, at $60 per month for their top-tier plan.

17. SendinBlue

This tool is a broad-base platform with a wide range of different tools that include pretty much everything you need for email management. It has a CRM platform, as you might expect, and a range of marketing and outreach automation tools.

It also provides signup forms for your website, a landing page engine, and the option to run Facebook lead ads. On top of all of that, it also includes both SMS and chat-based channels for a more all-around outreach and contact management platform than just email.

18. Omnisend

As the name implies, Omnisend is an all in one platform for email marketing and e-commerce. It does way more than just outreach; it has a full customer experience manager, from the moment a user first encounters your product to the moment they convert.

It’s a bit overkill if all you want to do is outreach, but if you’re looking for a centralized marketing platform, it’s a good choice.

19. Julius

Julius is an influencer marketing platform with a focus on getting those hyper-specific influencers in your niche, rather than the low-hanging – and high-competition – fruit of the popular multi-niche influencers.

The wide range of categories, filters, and influencers in its database makes it easy to find these influencers, and the email management tools help you reach out to them effectively.

20. Press Hunt

Press Hunt is one of many platforms for outreach that focuses specifically on journalists.

When you need to get press coverage, but don’t want to go for one of the boring wide-spectrum press release blasts, this is a great way to get individualized coverage. Find the journalists most relevant to your interests, reach out to them, and build a relationship to get the coverage you desire.

Your Turn

What email outreach tools have you use that you find indispensable? I know I’ve left out a few major platforms and a thousand minor apps, so I’m interested to hear what you all like the most. Let me know below!