Litmus
There’s no place like the inbox. 41% of marketers say that email is their most effective marketing channel, and it kind of leaves other channels in the dust. The runner-up, social media, got just 16% of votes. Part of the reason marketers love email is the ROI—organizations get an average of $36 back for every $1 invested in email. But what if your email marketing budget is a bit tight this year? We’ll look at the best free email marketing tools to use so you make a big impact without a big invoice. What To Look For in a Free Email Marketing Tool Even if free email marketing tools don’t need a dollar investment, getting them set up (and getting your whole team to use them) is a time investment. Here are the features your free tool should have to make it worth your while. Template library 39% of marketers
As we stand on the threshold of a new year, the ever-evolving landscape of email marketing beckons us with exciting possibilities. Our goals for 2024 are bold, fresh, and vibrant—better campaigns, higher engagement rates, and a seamless brand experience. To accomplish these things, however, we must keep our finger on the pulse of email industry trends and spend some serious time thinking about what those lovely trends mean for us all. Today, we’ll look at the Litmus team’s top 3 recommendations for email teams in the coming year, based on the trends we’ve observed in email. 1. Bring dynamic content & segmentation to the forefront We’ve all heard the news about personalization by now—but how do we personalize pertinently and successfully? At Litmus, we feel that the future of personalization includes advanced segmentation tools—so marketers can categorize their audience based on demographics, behavior, and engagement history—followed closely by dynamic content
For the uninitiated, code is code. It’s a series of incomprehensible symbols that make about as much sense as the pictures carved on the walls of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh’s tomb—and about as useful to your day-to-day life. As you learn more about how to use different coding languages, however, you learn more about the different ways each language can be used, and some of the nuances in each type of use. And for us email folks, coding an email is a very specific use of HTML . That specific use is different than the web-based HTML you may be more familiar with and comes with all its own complexities. Today, we’ll examine all those complexities—and answer the question of why you can’t code emails the same way you do webpages once and for all! Let’s dive in and look at what sets HTML for email design apart. Table of
Every email marketer knows the feeling when an email goes out: one part relief, one part anxiety. When you hit “send,” the hard part is over, and you can sit back and wait for the results to roll in to judge whether the email you sent was successful. Knowing these insights is powerful—they fuel future growth for your email marketing program. But what email metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) should you measure? What does your email service provider (ESP) or marketing automation platform (MAP) and third-party analytics tools offer you? We asked thousands of marketers what metrics they currently track. Here’s what we found. What are email marketing metrics? Email marketing metrics are data points that let you know how your campaigns perform. Metrics can tell you if your emails stand out in the inbox, if they encourage subscribers to engage, and whether they move the needle on goals
And we’re back with the latest installment of This Month in Email, a roundup of all the latest happenings in the world of email marketing. What were the biggest headlines shaping the email industry in December? Read on (or jump ahead!) to find out. News headlines In lighter news Email Client Market Share News headlines Gmail’s ‘unsubscribe’ button gets a makeover. It’s now more prominent (colored blue) and available on the web version of Gmail . Plus, a new feature gets added to Gmail’s package tracking. Now, whenever a delivery estimate changes, the delay will be noted at the top of inboxes . Proton Mail launches encrypted email and calendar desktop app in beta, featuring offline capabilities and encrypted email forwarding . Microsoft Outlook’s new AI-powered dictation tool allows users to draft emails using voice commands and AI-backed voice recognition . Passport expiring? You’ll get an email reminder to renew.
Welcome back to our monthly series where we dive into the best email campaigns that hit our inboxes in December (aka the second busiest month of the year for engagement!). What stood out? Playful animations, clever campaigns, and thoughtful timing were top of our list. Keep reading for our handpicked selection, or skip ahead to discover what caught our eye! Ruggable Pair Eyewear Grammarly Girlfriend Collective Ruggable Subject line: You have a new message Carin Slater (Email and Content Growth Marketing Manager) says : What stood out to me about this Ruggable email? All of it! I love the fun play on the “you have a new message” and the message bubble format. The shifting animated GIF behind showing off the rugs is wonderful, too. Pair Eyewear Subject line: 7 Days of Pair: Day ONE Preview text: Unwrap today’s Top + FREE SHIPPING! Angie Weyman (Product Marketing Manager) says :
Building emails for an email company whose primary audience is email marketers is… tough. Email marketers have incredibly high standards when it comes to the emails that land in their inbox. Sure, email clients don’t make it easy with over 300,000 potential email renderings and email client updates that can happen on average every 1.2 days. But we’re up for that challenge at Litmus. How we stay on top of 120+ emails and email templates How does the Litmus team keep tabs on how their critical emails and email templates display? Every quarter, we test every single email template in our Litmus Design Library using Previews & QA to ensure there are no critical issues. Our focus here is to ensure that every single email and email template still displays (or renders) as expected in every email client and device. While this quarterly task is invaluable in helping us maintain
What’s the one metric your email team obsesses over? Opens. You can’t get a conversion without an open. Here we are, writing the punniest subject lines, using every emoji, experimenting with send times and from names and days of the week, just to get that open. What if… instead of fighting for a single open, you could get subscribers to repeatedly come back to a single email campaign? At Litmus, we’re all about pushing the (virtual) envelope. For our big New Year’s Eve email last year, we wanted to know: could we encourage subscribers to come back to an email to sign up? We created a personalized email swag-drop-themed sweepstakes campaign that updated over multiple days to try and achieve this goal. Surprisingly, a good chunk DID come back and check out the email. Take a peek at our stats: 3.1% click-through rate (CTR) , higher than our average for
Did you know an email can display more than 300,000 different ways depending on the email client, device, and reading environment? In other words…there are 300,000 potential ways an email can break. And that’s before all of your stakeholders decide to poke and prod your code in different ways. With 60% of companies needing at least four stakeholders to review an email before it goes out, you’re going around and around and around testing and tweaking for every campaign. Email geeks know that creating exceptional emails has never been harder. Customer expectations are higher than ever— 86% of customers will leave a brand after only two poor experiences . No pressure, right? We tested five million emails last year. Here are the top five most common email mistakes we see (and how to fix them): 1. Deliverability issues Did your email make it to the inbox in the first place?
With so many conferences to choose from throughout the year, it’s challenging to prioritize which ones to attend and which to sit out on (and feel FOMO ) while patiently waiting for recordings and recaps. If you didn’t get a chance to join one this year—or you attended so many and need a refresher on what you learned—read on! The Litmus Team divided and conquered a fair amount of conferences this year ( including our own ) and did a round-up of our favorite takeaways and how to incorporate them into your 2024 email marketing strategy. 1. AI is extraordinary, but how do we use it for email? A hot topic in 2022, and an even hotter topic in 2023. (We can only assume 2024 will be nuclear!) Although AI isn’t new, the release of DALL-E 2 and ChatGPT began to rise in popularity in 2022 across our personal and