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The journey of an email from creation to sending requires hours of work behind the scenes.
Email marketers need to think not only about the creation, design, and development of individual emails, but also about strategy, planning, operations, and deliverability—and of course, they need to coordinate these efforts with the rest of your team.
This is why every email marketing team’s MVP is an integrated marketing tech stack. While we have our own favorite tools here at Litmus (we love you, Slack!), we wanted to know what real email marketers use to get their campaigns out there and into the hands of their subscribers.
To find out, we asked 938 email friends in our annual State of Email survey – thank you if you answered, you're awesome! – and here is what we learned:
Why your email service provider matters most
The core of any email marketing tech stack is your email service provider (ESP).
Our respondents were divided on whether they should rely entirely on one ESP or use several depending on their needs: 46% of respondents chose only one ESP or a marketing automation platform (MAP) for sending emails, while a total of 49 % more than one use ESP.
Of those who used more than one ESP, most respondents used two. This is a common split: promotional emails from one ESP and transactional emails from another; Sometimes it makes more sense for the marketing team to use one ESP and the sales team to use another.
In the past we've asked which code editors developers use to create emails, but this is the first year we've seen “Code Editor in my ESP” take the top spot at 20%, with Adobe Dreamweaver (14%) displaced. and our beloved Litmus Builder (9%).
This shows that more and more ESPs are doing the heavy lifting for email marketers, adding features that consolidate the marketing technology stack.
When it comes to specific ESPs in play, Salesforce Marketing Cloud continues to dominate – it's been one of the most popular marketing automation tools since its launch in 1999 – alongside big names like MailChimp, HubSpot and Marketo.
You could consider all of these complete technology packages for the entire marketing team, with website, sales and social media capabilities in addition to their email marketing roots. Rounding out the top 5 (and rising in the ranking since 2021) is Sendgrid, a transaction-oriented platform from Twilio.
Click here to view full results.
The vast majority of our respondents plan to stick with their ESP choice: 61% had no plans to switch next year.
However, this may not mean that they are completely satisfied with their purchase. Switching email service providers is notoriously costly and difficult, especially when it comes to transferring the goldmine of data between one platform and another.
For systems that communicate better with each other, the cost may be worth it (or for those who invest in the top five platforms, a system that can do literally everything).
A third of our respondents told us that their email marketing was “poorly” or “very poorly” integrated with the rest of their marketing channels, making it difficult to build personalization and segmentation into emails or gain insight into how the email performance contributes to this line.
This is likely why 30% of our respondents said they are investing more in technology integration.
Both consumers and business customers expect a level of personalization that goes beyond “first name.” They look for emails that match their behavior and habits. If you've ever received an email advertising a product you just purchased, you know what we're talking about.
This means access to a lot of data and requiring multiple systems and teams to work together to feed the right information into email marketing campaigns at the right time – no easy task.
Measure your email marketing performance beyond built-in tools
We like to talk about creating beautiful emails that make the hearts of our little email geeks happy. But we all know that the real reason we send emails is to help build relationships that ultimately generate revenue for our brands, directly or indirectly.
So when we asked email marketers what metrics they use to measure performance, we were surprised that ROI wasn't at the top of the list (it wasn't even in the top five). Instead, email marketers have largely focused on open rates – a metric that has become less and less useful with Apple's Mail Privacy Protection.
Click here to view full results.
This may be due to how email marketers measure their efforts. The majority of respondents use their built-in ESP tools to track the performance of their email marketing, often focusing on metrics like opens, clicks, and unsubscribes – things we can control.
Understanding how an email campaign actually impacts sales and revenue can be difficult without another layer of analytics like Google Analytics (#2) or more advanced programs like Tableau. A big, big hug goes out to all the email marketers out there working on custom spreadsheets in Excel and Google – you do it and do the dirty work.
Deliverability remains a black box
The way your email reaches your inbox has a reputation for feeling a little like magic and hope. But the technology exists to understand (and improve) your deliverability. That's why it's a little disappointing that the majority of our respondents tell us that they don't really monitor deliverability or aren't sure how it works.
The most commonly used tools on this list, Google Postmaster and MX Toolbox, are free. However, they don't necessarily help you figure out why your emails are falling into the spam filter or provide actionable advice on how to fix the problem.
As more email clients introduce new rules (think of you, Gmail and Yahoo's one-click unsubscribe), understanding deliverability will be a big differentiator in your email marketing toolbox. Adding this to your existing tech stack can give you greater visibility into your email marketing performance and resolve any outstanding questions about your reach.
DIY design tools are becoming increasingly popular
When it comes to actually creating emails themselves, marketers still spend a lot of time with Adobe Photoshop, the king of OG design. But in recent years, we've noticed more intuitive, DIY-style tools becoming increasingly popular.
In 2023, Adobe ranked #1, #2, #3 for most popular design tools, but this year Figma moved up to #2. Canva took its fourth place, likely because more email marketers need to learn to do more with less, and it's considered the best tool for non-designers.
There's a reason Adobe products are at the top – they're some of the most robust tools you can work with. But for teams that don't have a dedicated designer (or simply want a tool that doesn't require 10,000 hours to master), Canva is a great option.
How marketing teams do everything
The average email takes about two weeks to create, and 46% of email marketers have up to five emails in production at any given time. Compared to 2023, only 23% of respondents said they have up to five emails in production at any given time. Email marketers are being asked to increase significantly.
To move things forward, email marketers use project management tools. The top five is probably no surprise: Sprint-friendly Jira takes the top spot, followed by other project management powerhouses like Asana, Trello, Monday, and Adobe Workfront.
Coordinating copywriters, designers, developers, and reviewers for email campaigns is one of the biggest challenges for email marketers. 41% of email marketers say that creating the emails themselves tends to delay production, followed by design (40%) and testing (39%).
Setting up an email marketing workflow that can send emails without losing quality requires the right technology and team. When we asked who owns or manages the operational part of working with an ESP, more than a third (38%) said the email marketing team.
But we also see larger, more technology-focused teams taking on responsibility, such as the marketing operations team (25%) or a digital marketing team (17%).
This reflects a more integrated approach to organizing a marketing team, as opposed to a channel-based approach. This method can help teams share data more effectively and create consistent marketing campaigns across all channels.
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