7 Free Tools Email Marketers Should Know About

You’ve got your email marketing platform and are regularly sending campaigns. But occasionally, you find yourself needing a feature that your platform doesn’t provide. You start searching for a solution, only to realize that many of the best tools come with hefty price tags.

This has been the story of my career, so I’ve learned to be thrifty and frugal when it comes to my marketing stack. I’ve always had to find tools that are free or offer generous free plans to meet my needs. Over the years, I’ve uncovered some real gems that I use regularly. Today, I want to share a few of these tools with you.

1. Mail-tester

Mail-tester.com is a tool for checking the spam score of your emails by analyzing deliverability and content issues. It works by giving you a temporary email address to which you send your email. Mail-tester then analyzes your email or template and provides a score that maxes out at 10. You also get a detailed list of items your email was evaluated against, including spam filters, color contrast, links, and suggestions for improvements.

Image: Mail-tester.com

Mail-tester is completely free and requires no account registration. While it’s not a tool you’ll need for every campaign, it’s great for occasional audits—especially when introducing a new template design.

2. Really Good Emails

Rallygoodemails.com is a free repository of over 15,000 of the best-looking emails across a variety of brands and categories. If you’re stuck on the design of an abandoned cart email, this is the place to go for inspiration.

Image: Realllygoodemails.com

The website offers easy filtering options and insight into the HTML code of each email, so you can see how cool modules have been coded. They also offer a blog with how-to articles and videos to further support your email design efforts.

3. Black List Alert

Blacklistalert.org is a free tool that runs your email IP or domain through a list of common blacklists to see if you’ve been blacklisted. This is valuable information you can use to adjust your sending practices and take action to get your IP off any blacklists.

Image: Blacklistalert.org

4. Testi@

Testi.at is an email screenshot preview tool. You provide the HTML of your email template, and it returns screenshots showing how your email displays across various clients like Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, etc. It’s not as polished as the leading tools in this space: Litmus and Email on Acid – but it has some advantages.

It offers a completely free plan with unlimited previews for a few email clients (not all 100+), a spam filter checker, and a good online editor with options to save code snippets, block images, switch between light and dark modes, and more. It offers more features than some paid editors.

Image: Testi.at

Testi@ also offers a paid plan with unlimited email previews for 100+ clients for just $16 per month. This is significantly lower than its competitors.

5. Wappalyzer

Wappalyzer.com is a tool that lets you discover the technology stack of any website. Simply enter a website URL, and you’ll get a report on what the site is built with, as well as the platforms it uses for email marketing, analytics, advertising, and more.

For me, it’s a great competitor research tool to see how technologically advanced competitors are or to find out what tools they used for interesting use cases.

Image: Wappalyzer.com

Wappalyzer has a generous free plan that allows for 50 technology lookups per month, which is more than enough if you’re not using it for lead generation.

6. MX Toolbox

MXToolbox is a comprehensive diagnostic tool providing a suite of services related to email deliverability and domain health. The platform allows you to perform checks like MX record lookups, blacklist monitoring, and SPF/DKIM/DMARC verification. It’s particularly useful for identifying issues that might prevent your email from reaching inboxes, such as being blacklisted or having improperly configured authentication records.

Image: Mxtoolbox.com

MX Toolbox offers a free tier suitable for small businesses and marketers, while paid plans with real-time monitoring and advanced diagnostics are available for those with more advanced needs.

7. Countdown Timer Tools

You’ve likely seen emails that feature a countdown timer as part of the design.

Unlike most email elements, countdown timers can’t be added through a drag-and-drop builder or standard HTML. You’ll need a dedicated tool to configure the timer and provide an image link. Several tools offer this service, so I’ve listed a few, allowing you to choose which works best for you.

The following tools offer free countdown timers, each with a paid plan that provides more view/open credits and additional customization options:

CoundownMail – Unlimited views, but has a watermark.
Mailtimers – 100,000 views / month, has a watermark.
Email Countdown Timer – 10,000 views / month, no watermark.
Sendtric – 10,000 views / month, no watermark.