A mechanic relies on his racket and socket set. An artist relies on her paint brush. An email marketer relies on the best email marketing tools. Here is what you need to be using.

HTML & CSS

• W3Schools offers free HTML and CSS tutorials. You’ll need to know both for designing email templates and editing content.

Email Marketing Creative and Design

• Adobe Photoshop for editing images, creating layouts, and slicing large images.
• HTML editor such as Adobe Dreamweaver for creating and previewing HTML. Just make sure you use the coding view in Dreamweaver to build your html email template.

Email Lists

• Sign Up Forms to help you build a high converting email marketing list.
• TextPad to open different types of text files.
• Microsoft Access to work with large databases.
• Microsoft Excel as a general purpose database tool.

Email Message Delivery

• Email Service Provider because there is no reason for you to manage the complex process of transferring email when there are hundreds of great, and ultimately less expensive, options available.
• Transactional Messages to immediately communicate time-sensitive information to your subscribers.
• Rendering Tests to preview how your email design looks across ISPs, browsers, devices and operating systems.
• Delivery Reports to learn more about potential blocks or delivery issues at certain ISPs.
• Test Accounts with AOL, Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo at the bare minimum. Check rendering and delivery manually.

Tracking

• Open and Click Tracking should be provided by your Email Service Provider, if not, get a new one.
• Conversion Tracking to segment out subscribers who have completed your desired conversion goal.
• Google Analytics to continue tracking subscribers after they leave the email and peruse your website.

These are all great tools and are the bare minimum to get started creating effective email marketing campaigns. What is the best email marketing tool though? What one tool will help your email marketing performance and generate the highest ROI?

In my opinion, the best email marketing tool is a smart, creative, and outgoing team.  No one person is ever going to be the best at strategy, design, analysis AND testing. Sure, they can attack the low hanging fruit of email marketing, but they aren’t going to be able to generate the highest ROI for a big email database by themselves.

By allowing your team members to focus on their one area of expertise, you can build an email program that is strong in every area, not just one or two.