Email Dive methodology

With everything that’s already out there, why should you trust Email Dive? That’s honestly a good question, and a necessary one to ask these days.

You don’t know what is “true” anymore. With AI content flooding the SERPs at scale, media sites featuring tools that pay them the highest bid, and vendor sites promoting their own software in every article they publish, how do you know who to trust for advice?

A methodology page, among other things, helps you do that. “Methodology” in this context simply refers to the complete process of explaining how we test software, how we decide what to feature or not feature, how we write articles from start to finish, and so on.

Our goal here is to explain how we do what we do and why you can trust Email Dive with your email marketing software buying decisions.

Email Dive’s review process

We follow a simple yet effective process to write our value-driven software reviews, comparisons, and guides.

1. Selecting the software to review

The email marketing space has an enormous number of tools to choose from, and each one might be a good fit for someone specific. That’s why we try to cover as many tools as possible. One of our main filters for selecting software to review is to confirm (through Similarweb) that it has at least some traffic and users, and to confirm (through Semrush) that people are actively searching for it. We also check out the software rating sites to see if at least a couple of dozen people have left a review.

Occasionally, out of curiosity, we will also test and write about a completely new tool simply because we believe it offers real value for a specific audience. We care a lot about aesthetics and UI. If a tool looks outdated or poorly designed, we deprioritize it without a second thought. We also avoid legacy software and enterprise tools, because that’s not our focus. We go for modern, easy-to-use tools that you’ll actually want to keep using long-term, because you will have to.

2. Testing the software

Testing is the most important element of writing a good article, and Email Dive takes it seriously. The quality of our testing determines the quality of our output. That’s why we spend days and sometimes weeks using tools side by side to get a genuine lived experience, which then enables us to generate useful insights for our readers.

We test every software before writing about it. No tool gets featured without being tested. We don’t rely on specific testing parameters like other sites, and we don’t believe in rating a product out of 5 or 10, because we think that’s completely vague and arbitrary. What we do instead is deep testing of each email service provider, using it the way an ideal user would.

We avoid taking heavy influence from Reddit forums, software landing pages, and rating sites, because those reflect experiences we haven’t had ourselves. If a take is going to be subjective, it should be our own subjective experience first. Due to the nature of our business, we are also ideal customers of email marketing software, which makes us well-positioned to have a genuine opinion, because we already use these tools for our own businesses.

3. Writing the articles

We have a no-AI policy for first drafts. We write everything ourselves and only use AI to polish the writing afterward. We have strong opinions on every software we cover, and we don’t shy away from saying things that might upset founders but are genuinely useful for readers to know. We never accept money from email marketing companies to feature them above others in our listicles. If a software is featured as a paid placement, it appears as a clearly visible sponsored ad that does not influence our best-of rankings in any way. Overall, we write with conviction behind our research and testing so that our readers can confidently go home with the best tool for their needs.

4. Consulting friends in the industry

Occasionally, when we are writing about a tool that someone in our professional circle uses daily, we consult them for their lived experience with it. Our founder, Dhruvir Zala, has a solid network of connections on LinkedIn, mostly from Ahmedabad University, where he majored in Marketing. A good chunk of Dhruvir’s connections work in the email marketing and CRM industry and are well-versed in some of the tools we cover here at Email Dive. Getting their perspective is genuinely valuable because it often comes from years of daily use.

5. Updating the articles regularly

Software companies are known for changing their pricing frequently. We have internal reminders to regularly check for pricing changes and update our articles immediately when they occur. We also update articles whenever a software has gone through significant improvements or important feature additions.

Our love for custom-coded quizzes

We love quizzes, and if you’ve read some of our articles, you may have seen one. We have created an internal quiz maker that lets us build quizzes for any type of article. Each quiz is logic-based and carefully vetted, with every question and answer thoroughly reviewed before we embed it in an article.

The goal of each quiz is to help you answer a few questions and get the most relevant software recommendation for your exact needs. A quiz is, in a sense, a distilled version of the article.

Creating a single quiz is genuinely time-consuming. But we are committed to building custom quizzes for as many articles as possible, because a quiz gives you instant, actionable value.

Our core values

• We never rank the highest bidder on top, because we don’t accept money to influence our rankings.
• The opinions in our articles are our own and are not influenced by outside parties.
• We are completely transparent about how we finance Email Dive, which is primarily through referral commissions earned when you purchase software through our links. This helps fund more useful content at Email Dive and costs you nothing extra. In fact, we regularly partner with companies to get you an exclusive discount. Learn more about about out affiliate disclosure.
• We are equally transparent about the good and the bad of every software we cover.
• We don’t take sides. Every company is equal in the eyes of a software reviewer.
• Every article is written with one goal in mind: to help you make the best and most confident email marketing software buying decision.

A lot more goes into writing a single article than this page can capture, but this gives you a solid overview of our testing process, our core values, and how and why we do what we do.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out at contact@emaildive.com or directly from our contact page.