3 Great Email Newsletter Tools for Small Businesses

Email newsletter tools for small businesses seem to be a dime a dozen these days. Everywhere you look there’s a new one. If you’re a small business owner or work at a small business, you might be considering sending newsletters out to your current or potential customers and clients, but how do you get started? You may have even checked out our previous blog post that discussed how MailChimp’s services could help you with your email marketing efforts.

To help you get going with your email marketing efforts, below we review 3 email newsletter tools for small businesses: MailChimp, Venngage, and Litmus.

Email Newsletter Tool #1: MailChimp

Since we talked about MailChimp’s email marketing in the previous blog post mentioned above, we’ll start with them as our first example tool. MailChimp is great because it has a lot of pre-made templates built right in that allow you to pick the look and feel of your newsletter before designing it or writing any content. Whether you’re looking to simply make an announcement or create an informative email series, they’ve got a template for that to help you get started. After selecting the kind of newsletter you want to send, you’re then able to customize the layout of your newsletter in additional ways: do you want it to be 1 column, 2 columns, the full width of the page? With a simple click, you can design it just the way you want.

Email Newsletter Tool #2: Venngage

Our second tool is Venngage, a platform that allows you to create cool infographics, among other visuals. If you’re thinking about branching out a bit from the basic templates services like MailChimp provide and are looking for a more visually-stimulating approach, Venngage may be the tool you’re looking for.

Above is an example visual newsletter template from Venngage. Since the call to action (CTA) of a newsletter is often an important component of the newsletter itself, you want to make sure that it stands out and is easily visible for your customers. Venngage allows you to make use of colorful templates like these to ensure that even if you have multiple CTA’s in the same newsletter, all of them stand out.

Or maybe you want to create an infographic to feature in your newsletter? Venngage can also help you create high-quality infographics like the one pictured above. These are great to feature in more information-heavy newsletters.

No matter what kind of newsletter design you are going for, Venngage can be a great tool to start with. They have 45 different newsletter templates to choose from, all of which can be exported to other tools like MailChimp.

Email Newsletter Tool #3: Litmus

Our third tool is Litmus, a free email template service with a lot of customizable email templates for you to use. Litmus also allows direct integration with email services like MailChimp, but they also provide their own service. The Litmus custom newsletter template builder is similar to  MailChimp’s newsletter creator. You can start by choosing a specific type of newsletter and then can customize from there.

Also like MailChimp, once you select the kind of message you want to send to your subscribers, such as “I want to launch a product” or “I want to market a product,” you will be able to see templates that are built specifically for your small business’s needs. If we chose “I want to launch a product” for example, we would be given 6 template options that would help us build the appropriate newsletter for our subscribers.

The screenshot on the left shows the visualization of the template before you’ve customized it, with filler text throughout. Once you’ve selected a template that you like, such as this “announcement” template on Litmus, you can edit the text with your own content. Litmus templates also allow for easy inclusion of call-to-action buttons.

Although these aren’t the only email newsletter tools for small businesses on the market, they are three of our favorites that we regularly recommend to our clients. If you’re looking for an easy tool to get you started on email marketing, you can do much worse than to choose one of these.

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