Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to generate click-throughs to your website, leads, and sales. However, creating the content for your email marketing newsletters can be time consuming if you write it yourself or expensive if you pay someone to write it for you.
Within the last couple of years, a number of free and affordable tools have launched that make it quick and easy to curate content for your email marketing newsletters. These tools don’t have significant learning curves, and some even integrate directly into email marketing tools.
Five popular tools that you can use to curate content for your email marketing newsletters are listed below. Each offers slightly different capabilities to give you a variety of options to investigate and find the one that best meets your needs.
1. XYDO
XYDO is a curation tool that made it onto this list for a very specific and very useful reason. It integrates directly with MailChimp and Constant Contact. XYDO curates content from blogs, websites, news sites, and popular online publishers and enables you to choose which stories to include in your email newsletter. You can send the curated content as a campaign in your MailChimp or Constant Contact account and benefit from all of the tracking your email marketing service offers. Curated stories include social sharing options and appropriate attribution.
XYDO is marketed as a full curation solution for businesses, so it’s got a higher price tag than some of the other options on this list (a request for specific pricing for inclusion in this article was not returned by XYDO). However, it’s also one of the most feature-rich curation tools on this list. A free trial is available, so you can give it a test drive before you commit to a monthly contract.
2. SmartBrief
SmartBrief enables corporations, professional societies, and organizations to curate relevant content and deliver that content to their email marketing lists using a co-branded email template. The content is curated by SmartBrief editors, so it’s always high quality. You can also monetize your SmartBrief email newsletter with ads and sponsorships, which SmartBrief will get for you.
A request for pricing information and more details about the service for inclusion in this article was not returned by SmartBrief. Take that as you will.
3. CurateHub
CurateHub is a free email newsletter creation tool that’s currently in private beta. You can apply to become a curator, and CurateHub will send you an invitation when you’re accepted into the beta program. This is a very cool tool for smaller publishers that don’t have a budget for web design, an email marketing tool, or a curation tool because it handles everything for you.
First, you create a landing page for your email newsletter where people can enter their email addresses to subscribe to your newsletter. Next, you use the curation tools provided by CurateHub to collect relevant articles from across the web, and arrange them into a newsletter using any of CurateHub’s premade templates. Finally, you send your email newsletter. It’s that easy. Your newsletters are all saved in a special archive, so they’re always accessible online.
4. Intigi
Intigi is a curation tool that enables you to curate content directly into blog posts without leaving your Intigi account. It’s a great time saver, but it does come with a price (monthly plans start at $19, but a free trial is available). You can set up multiple “interests” which are topics that you want to curate content about, and Intigi automatically collects relevant links for you throughout the day. Some accounts enable you to curate content from RSS feeds and Twitter accounts, too. You can get daily email digests of curated content or log into your account at anytime to view all results.
The best part is that you can view titles and snippets of the curated content without having to click through to open each website. You can click a button to share the content through your social media accounts or to turn it into a blog post. For blog posting, you can add your own titles and commentary using a traditional post editor pop-up that opens within your Intigi account, so you don’t have to open your blogging application at all. Intigi automatically appends an attribution link to the blog post.
You cannot directly curate content to email newsletters with Intigi, but you can turn your curated blog posts into email marketing newsletters. It just takes an extra step to use those blog posts to create your email newsletters either via RSS feed subscriptions or through an email marketing service.
5. Paper.li
Paper.li is an online curation tool that makes it incredibly easy for you to create your own online newspaper. The free version of Paper.li gives you all of the features you need to publish your curated online paper, but the Pro version, which starts at $9 per month, also gives you custom branding, the ability to turn the front page of your online paper into email newsletters, advertising, and a custom domain.
You can choose the sources you want to curate from, and you have full editorial control over your emailed paper when you sign up for a Pro account. It’s easy to use and very affordable.
