Litmus
What makes a good email, great? A good email may get subscribers to click. But a great email creates a memorable subscriber experience—even after they close out of their inbox. In September, we put out a call for your most prize-worthy campaigns as part of Litmus’ Email Excellence Awards—and there was no shortage of great emails. After two rounds of voting for the Litmus Choice categories, and internal and external judging rounds for the remaining categories, the winners were selected. So what makes a winning email? Read on to learn what we looked for and why. Best Email Design categories Designing emails takes incredible talent. With the thousands of ways an email can render, accessibility requirements, and changing trends, an email designer has to tap into a vast skill set for success in the inbox. The Best Email Design winners (Lev for B2C and Ally Financial for B2B) were selected
We learned so many new insights and interesting perspectives on pressing email marketing topics from Litmus Live 2022 (and we hope you did, too!) In the spirit of keeping the flow of knowledge-sharing alive, we asked our Litmus Live presenters to share what they predict is in store for email marketing in 2023 and beyond. Want to learn more predictions—from both the Litmus team and the email community? Make sure to register for our December Litmus Talks webinar where we’ll be discussing ALL the things we at Litmus think will be top of mind in email throughout 2023. 1. Data privacy will demand that social media and email cross-pollinate “Many marketers are relying on social media to grow an audience that they do not own. When you acquire an email address and other data, you own the records and it is portable. By collecting first-party data, marketers will be able
Back in September, we announced a call for submissions to our 2022 Email Excellence Awards. We received 116 responses from our very talented email community—and the creativity, strategy, skill, and effort that went into the work they nominated did not disappoint! After a nearly one month long judging process conducted by a panel of email experts, the winners of four categories have been chosen for: Most Innovative Personalization (B2B) Most Innovative Personalization (B2C) Best Data-Informed Email Transformation Best Onboarding Email Series And thanks to votes cast by our Litmus Weekly newsletter subscribers using live poll functionality powered by Litmus Personalize, the “Litmus Choice” winners for Best Email Design (B2B) and Best Email Design (B2C) were selected, too! Without further ado, please join us in congratulating our 2022 Litmus Email Excellence Award winners. We hope you’ll be as inspired by their work (and the stories behind their winning emails) as we
Potentially unpopular opinion: we don’t like using publicly available email frameworks at Litmus. Yes, there are upsides to leveraging pre-existing email components that someone else is in charge of updating. Many email developers, like Nicole Hickman, a Direct Marketing Developer at Fishawack Health, use and enjoy publicly available email frameworks daily. They’re an excellent option for plenty of teams. But we at Litmus don’t think they’re the right option for every email team–and we’ve got reasons to back it up! Here are some of the benefits and drawbacks we think every email team should consider when it comes to the pros and cons associated with email frameworks–so you can make the best decision for your organization. What is an email framework? An email framework is a collection of pre-made HTML and CSS components that email developers use to build emails. Two kinds of email frameworks: Publically available frameworks that use
November is one of the busiest months when it comes to the inbox. With lots of retailers sending lots of emails about their Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, you can easily get bogged down by the noise! This is why it’s important for marketers to pull out all the stops to ensure that their emails cut through the noise. Here are the emails that stood out to us during this busy month: Hunter &pizza ILIA Porter Road Converse Kate Spade Lumens Hunter Subject Line: Personalization is here! Here at Litmus, we love all things personalized, so this email caught our attention from the subject line alone. This email allowed customers to add personalization to their Hunter boots. Each email was personalized to the recipient using CRM data and displayed their name on the header image of the boots. We loved this element of simple, yet very effective personalization. &pizza
When it comes to working smarter, certain tools are like the holy grail—and once you find them, you’re never going to let them go. From tools that help automate meetings, to ones that help create design elements and even animated GIF apps, there are so many to not only make you work more efficiently, but also with a smile on your face! We asked the Litmus team to share their favorite tools, which are essential to helping them work smarter. Here is what they said: CloudApp Meeter Followup Grafana Giphy Slack MyMind Figma Charlie Cook, Senior QA Engineer CloudApp What is CloudApp? CloudApp is an all-in-one screen recording software to capture and embed HD video, screen recordings, GIFs, screencasts, screenshots, and marked up images throughout business workflows. Why is this tool your favorite? I’m sure there are lots of tools out there that do something similar and I can’t say
In-person or virtual events revolve around getting to know other people and learning from one another. Because email is such a personal channel, it’s the ideal medium to build excitement for events and send reminders. To ensure that guests actually show up, it can be useful to include an “Add to Calendar” link in your event emails. With that, subscribers can add the events to their own calendars, making it easier to avoid calendar conflicts and allowing them to set up their own reminders. Traditionally, this is done with an ICS file—also known as iCalendar. This is a common calendar format that typically uses the .ics file extension and is widely accepted by most calendars. Not to be confused with Apple’s iCal, which shares a similar name, although iCalendar files do work there as well. For clarity, we’ll refer to this as an ICS or calendar file throughout this blog
An issue with using dynamic content on Apple clients is that Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) caches images—and only displays the cached image. This is a big problem, as dynamic content is usually time sensitive. Therefore when Apple caches images when an email is sent, by the time the recipient has opened the email, the content is no longer relevant. We ran into this problem for recent email campaign—and Carin Slater (our Email Marketing Specialist) found a workaround. She figured out a different way to swap the image out, so the content wouldn’t be irrelevant for subscribers opening on Apple clients. Read on to find out how we did this for an email sent to promote Litmus Live 2022. At Litmus Live 2021, Jay Oram spoke about using an external CSS to change an image in an email by having the image be a background image, then updating the external CSS
Are you’re trying to figure out how to do more email marketing with fewer staff and resources, less of a budget–and higher expectations for performance? Perhaps you just want to see more results from the time you commit to your email marketing campaigns. That’s the reality for many email marketers this year, and one we’ll likely see continue. While it’s encouraging that 37% of email teams increased their budgets in 2022, 61% stuck with the same amount of spend this year. Meanwhile, 70% of brands have increased email marketing workloads. Enter, the key to doing more with less: email automation. Email automation comes in all shapes and sizes, but no matter the strategy, it results in time saved and results lifted. In fact, 59% of respondents to our State of Email survey say expanding how they use email automation is a top priority. Let’s take a closer look at what
We learned so many new insights and interesting perspectives on pressing email marketing topics from Litmus Live 2022 (and we hope you did, too!) In the spirit of keeping the flow of knowledge-sharing alive, we asked our Litmus Live presenters to share what they predict is in store for email marketing in 2023 and beyond. Want to learn more predictions—from both the Litmus team and the email community? Make sure to register for our December Litmus Talks webinar where we’ll be discussing ALL the things we at Litmus think will be top of mind in email throughout 2023. 1. Data privacy will demand that social media and email cross-pollinate “Many marketers are relying on social media to grow an audience that they do not own. When you acquire an email address and other data, you own the records and it is portable. By collecting first-party data, marketers will be able