Drip is my go-to tool for email marketing automation. Their slogan "email marketing automation that does not suck" perfectly sums up what Drip is about. Drip has those fantastic visual workflows that make it super easy to build automation and send emails exactly at the right time in the customer lifecycle.

When you buy the SaaS Email Marketing Handbook  you get a bunch of these ready-to-use workflow for Drip that will help you set up Signup Abandonment Emails , upgrade emails, annual billing promotions, and so much more.

Intercom is the most prominent in-app messaging and email marketing automation tool on the market. It allows you to send targeted and personalized messages to your users every step along the way from landing on your website to starting the trial to becoming a paying customer.

Mailgun is - in my humble opinion - the best transactional email service provider on the web. It comes with a bunch of free credits, reasonable metered pricing thereafter, and a full feature set right from the start.

I'm using Mailgun myself for the transactional emails sent from LinksSpy. I switched from SendGrid which I had used earlier, because Mailgun gives you the full API right from the start whereas you'd have to pay a good chunk of change for similar features at SendGrid

SendGrid is another transactional email services provider that is super popular with SaaS founders.

I used SendGrid myself for LinksSpy when starting out, but later switched to Mailgun (above). That doesn't mean that they are not a great transactional email tool - they were just not the right fit for me.

SendInBlue allows you to send 9,000 emails/month on the free plan with paid plans starting at $5

SendCheckIt is a must-use when you're serious about email marketing.With SendCheckIt you can test your emails for blunders before your readers write you angry emails, because you addressed them as *|FNAME|* - again.

SendCheckIt also has a nifty little Email Subject Line Analyzer that helps you optimize your subject lines & increases your open rates.

Hunter helps you find valid email addresses for your contacts. Just type in the domain and it gives you a list of valid addresses for that domain.

Bluetick automates the most profitable part of outreach: following up. Sadly, this is also the most often neglected part. So automating it is a bit like owning a money printer. Bluetick is great, because it scans your inbox for replies and does not use a reply address like "saasemailmarketing+1asdnf7h47nv6an@random_domain.com" for reply tracking. That way your follow up emails look natural and don't immediately betray the fact you're having software do the job.

Vyper.io has a range of different tools, but the coolest one is definitely their viral leaderboard giveaway. In my opinion no other giveaway tool has such a built-in focus on virality - which helps you collect even more email addresses.

Google Trends shows you changes in the number of searches for any given keyword. It's very useful to discover trending topics. Great for researching your next blog topic

Airstory helps content teams collaborate on the creation of outstanding content. You can use Airstory for research, outlining, editing, and publishing your content to Wordpress.

Recurpost is my social media management tool of choice. Recurpost allows you to repurpose your existing content across your social media channels. You can set up content libraries and schedules for each library and Recurpost will post your content automatically.

The free plan offers you 100 content pieces across 3 social media accounts.

When you combine Recurpost with Sniply and content curation tools like BuzzSumo you can use other people's content to drive traffic to your website.

Sniply allows you to overlay (almost) any website with a small call-to-action widget. That way you can repurpose other people's content to drive more traffic to your own website. This tool is especially great in combination with the content curation tools above and Recurpost

RaffleCopter offers you unlimited giveaways with unlimited entries for free. On the free plan you only get to award random winners and there are no integrations with email providers on the free plan. Paid plans start at $13/mo, but to get "refer-a-friend" virality you'll have to pay $84/mo. Great option to get your feet wet in running giveaways.

Vyper.io has a range of different tools, but the coolest one is definitely their viral leaderboard giveaway. In my opinion no other giveaway tool has such a built-in focus on virality - which helps you collect even more email addresses. People can increase their chances of winning big by referring friends. You can also reward users with bonus giveaways (e.g. checklists) for sharing the giveaway or following your social profiles.

ViralSweep comes with refer-a-friend virality built-in and starts at a reasonably low price. There are tons of integrations from AWeber, Mailchimp to Wordpress, Shopify, and beyond. It also provides source data, so you know which sources bring in the best traffic.

UpViral makes it easy to engage your existing list in your viral giveaways. You can also reward people for taking certain actions (shares, clicks, etc.), which increases virality.

Pablo is one of those tools that I couldn't work without. Pablo (from the good folks at Buffer) makes it really easy to put some text and a logo on (stock) photos. Pablo comes with 10,000+ copyright-free stock photos that you can easily search & browse.

I often use Pablo to create shareable images for my blog articles or even create whole articles centered on dozens of images - like this collection of the best email marketing quotes

Meme Generator makes it dead-simple to create those memes that are so much in style right now, that young folks believe it's their biggest asset in attracting a mate.

I wouldn't go quite that far, but a well placed meme goes a long way in loosening up the mood of an all to serious topic - like this memeified Series B announcement

Hatchful helps you develop your logo idea in no time. Select from a wide range of templates and get your logo designed pronto.

Before you include your images in your articles or post them to social media, it's a wise idea to shrink them as much as possible. Most pictures can be compressed by 50+% without an apparent loss of display quality (even on a Retina display).

Smaller files improve page load times and give you a (small) advantage to rank in Google. Kraken.io is my favorite image compressor. It has a great web interface, batch processing, and does not rename the processed files, which makes it really easy to replace the original files with the compressed ones.

Kraken.io offers a free (no signup!) plan that limits the file size to 1MB. If you need to shrink bigger files, prices start at a reasonable $5/mo and you also get an API to integrate in your product.

Fun Fact: Hubspot coined the term "Inbound Marketing" and spend serious time & money to promote it. Their Hubspot Marketing product combines everything inbound under one roof: SEO, social media, content creation, A/B testing, drip email campaigns, etc. It's certainly not cheap, but it definitely has all the bells and whistles.