email design
Planning, creating, and testing an email is a huge undertaking, and getting it to your subscribers’ inboxes is the final push until it’s out of your hands. Getting your message to your audience isn’t as simple as hitting ‘send,’ however. Every email is an opportunity to connect with your audience and positively impact your company—but only if it makes it to their inbox. Email deliverability is the final push to ensure your hard work doesn’t end up in spam, and it’s a complex dance. You want to make every send count—especially if your team has to do more with less or is, like many of us, facing ever more attention-competition in the inbox. This guide explores what email deliverability is, and how to improve it, in order to make every send count. What is email deliverability? Email deliverability gauges whether or not your email makes it into your subscribers’ primary
Welcome to Litmus Live Behind the Scenes, where each month leading up to the conference we’ll dig in to some of the work we’re doing to prepare for Litmus Live, and shine some light on how we make the conference happen. In this blog post, you’ll discover how we went about creating our Litmus Live 2023 agenda and selecting our (if I may say so myself) magnificent speaker lineup. It all starts with a spreadsheet As with many projects, creating the agenda started with me staring at a blank spreadsheet and wondering what I was doing. I had sections marked for the days of the conference, and had to decide how to break up the schedule into session-sized chunks, which would then set the limit on how many speakers we could comfortably select. For years we’ve planned for thirty-minute sessions, which strikes us as a nice balance between enough space
Typography can support brand identity and create visually unique emails—but you shouldn’t sacrifice accessibility for the sake of design. To deliver both a beautiful and accessible email design, stop trapping your message in images, and start using live text with web safe fonts and web fonts. Read on to learn exactly how to do it: Web fonts vs. web safe fonts The benefits of web fonts Email client support and licensing Where to find web fonts Coding them into emails Great examples of web fonts in email Web fonts vs. web safe fonts You can do live text in two ways—web safe fonts and web fonts. Although the terms are nearly identical, there are definite differences. Before exploring web fonts vs. web safe fonts, let’s first explore how fonts work in your emails. How fonts work in email Your email code declares font using a CSS property called font-family. This
You know accessibility matters. You probably wouldn’t be on this page if you didn’t already know that it’s important to make sure that everyone reading your email gets to love and appreciate your email’s contents, regardless of how they’re accessing said email. (High-five!) Now, that said, there’s loads of ways you can work to make your emails more accessible. Accessibility, especially in design, is less about flipping a switch—although we do have a switch for that—and more about changing how you think about design in the first place. Designing intelligently with color is the beginning of it, but you can also work to take steps to reduce unnecessary movement, add more free space within an email, and more. Today, we’ll look at one very specific aspect of accessibility in email design: how to design for colorblindness. We’ll cover why making sure your emails are visually accessible matters, what you can
The Community Spotlight—a monthly blog series highlighting some of the amazing members of the email community—is back! Every month, we interview, highlight, and celebrate the splendid members of the email community. We dig into where they got their start, where they are now, and explore their challenges and passions in email. This month, we’re chatting with Val Geisler—conversion and retention strategist, copywriter, CrossFit and slow-flow yoga afficiaonado, and Faith No More fan. Val Geisler (she/her/hers) Director of Retention & Lifecycle Marketing at ByHeart Follow Val on LinkedIn and Twitter What did the beginning of your time in email marketing look like? I feel like I didn’t choose the email life, the email life chose me. I was running a business supporting companies with their customer onboarding (much more on the customer experience side of things) when I was asked to take an in-house role leading marketing at a small
You know what time it is! Welcome back to This Month in Email—our monthly series on the latest and greatest happenings in the world of email marketing. Let’s dive into the biggest headlines shaping the email industry in May 2023. News headlines Beep boop. It’s robot time. Did someone say cheese? Email Client Market Share News headlines Google launches blue checkmarks for brands verified with Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) in Gmail. Now you (and your brand) can be fancy, too. Google will start deleting inactive accounts this December. Email marketers: something to note as you do any year-end list cleaning. Instagram now allows for ads in search results. There is no escape! They are coming. Ads, ads in all the feeds… The Online Marketing Rockstars (OMR) festival brought together some of the best marketing minds in Europe—and they sure got to ideating. Creating an effective multilingual marketing campaign
Welcome back to our monthly round-up of favorite emails! We at Litmus have handpicked a collection of emails that have landed in our inboxes recently—ones that captured our attention and kept us scrolling. From stylized ALT text, bite-sized content, exceptional email design, and captivating storytelling, get ready to be inspired as we unveil the best of our inboxes. Let’s dive in! Quip Who Gives A Crap Fandango Costa DTC Newsletter Quip Subject line: ChatGPT, will robots replace my dentist? Preview text: As an AI language model, I can only speculate… Carin Slater (Email Marketing Specialist, Litmus) says: I was not expecting a newsletter from Quip, but this was filled with fun. From the Spotify playlist to the bite-sized bits, I was delighted with each part of the email. It was fun and educational throughout. First impressions: Quip Did you know that the average time a reader spends with an email
Are your emails optimized for Dark Mode? If not, you might be neglecting a significant portion of your subscribers. Recent statistics show that over 35% of subscribers using Apple email clients open their emails in Dark Mode. This means that if your emails aren’t optimized for Dark Mode, you could be leaving your subscribers in the dark. But fear not! In this blog post, Hannah Tiner (Email Design and Production Specialist, Litmus) shares essential tips and tricks for beginners to create Dark Mode optimized imagery. Hannah Tiner (she/they) Email Design and Production Specialist, Litmus Follow Hannah on LinkedIn and Twitter Read on—or jump ahead: Step 1: Understand the basics of Dark Mode Step 2: Determine styles and variations for design components Step 3: When it comes to animated GIFs, opt for APNGs Step 1: Understand the basics of Dark Mode When it comes to Dark Mode, it’s important to
Today’s a special day: we’re giving you an exclusive look into the mind of Litmus’ very own email developer, Carin Slater! Carin is one of the technological masterminds behind all the Litmus newsletters and pretty much everything we send. As she puts it, she’s an “an email geek who spent the last 9 years fighting with Outlook.” In our recent virtual event, “Ask Me Anything: Coding with Carin,” she shared her best email development tips by answering some of the most common coding questions and troubleshooting emails (as submitted by email geeks) in real time. Read on for her tips on: Common Outlook issues Coding for mobile Getting started with Dark Mode Common Outlook issues Email marketers are well aware: working with Outlook can be quite… complicated. But despite its quirks, knowing how to fix them can really sharpen your email development skills. As Carin reflects, “I got to learn
Welcome to Litmus Live Behind the Scenes, where each month leading up to the conference we’ll dig in to some of the work we’re doing to prepare for Litmus Live, and shine some light on how we make the conference happen. Codes of conduct were never something I gave much thought to—I never had to consider them. Aside from some childhood bullying I’ve lived an immensely privileged life free of harassment. I’m also a 6’2” cisgendered white man who has never really had to fear for my safety at an event or gathering. It’s taken me a chunk of my adult life to unpack and understand why that is, and to listen and try to internalize others’ experiences who have had to live with those very real fears and concerns. In this blog post, we take a look at the importance of a clear code of conduct, why it matters